Baptists in the British colonies were a scattered, tiny, and counterculture people. Even in Baptist Rhode Island, the refuge of Roger Williams, the two early congregations of Roger Williams and John Clarke attracted few. Ministers drew support from farming or doctoring and Baptists left formal theological education to the Congregationalists and Anglicans. Early Baptists, mostly immigrants from England or Wales, clustered in New England, Virginia, and the Philadelphia area—including nearby New Jersey. Willing to suffer the jailings, whippings, and fines levied by Massachusetts and Virginia authorities in order to hold their own services, Baptists earned a reputation as fanatics and agitators, a people critical of the dominant culture.
Baptist numbers grew rapidly in the 1740s, when the first Great Awakening, a series of evangelistic revivals, followed traveling preachers across New England and in the 1750s spread south through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. In each region hundreds of converts joined the older Baptist churches and some organized new congregations. The ministry of Shubal Stearns illustrates how the geographic mobility of Baptists helped spread the movement. A Connecticut New Light Baptist, Stearns in 1754 moved to the North Carolina backcountry, where his preaching resulted in mass conversions and new Baptist churches. By 1758 he had baptized nine hundred converts. Stearns's brother-in-law, Daniel Marshall, also a powerful preacher, assisted in these revivals before moving south to Georgia, where in 1771 he organized the first Baptist church in that colony.
Another Connecticut convert, Isaac Backus, was also a leading preacher and organizer of Baptists. He awakened to God's grace during a 1741 revival and joined his town's Congregational church—but not for long. Convinced that the Bible mandated a stricter, separate church, Backus moved through two strict Congregational churches and then, in 1756, founded a Baptist church, where adult conversion and believer's (not infant) baptism were prerequisites for membership. Like Roger Williams and John Clarke, Backus and his generation of awakened Baptists agreed on the need for adult conversion and baptism and emphasized each believer's duty to study and discern God's revelations in the Bible. This early emphasis on individual "soul liberty" made Baptists natural democrats. It also made lay preaching common—even, on occasion, by slaves and women.
Revivals continued in waves, each feeding converts into old and new churches. Between 1740 and 1804, the number of congregations in the formal network of Baptist associations in New England had grown from 25 to 312. In Virginia, Baptists enjoyed similar growth, aided greatly by a visitor from Massachusetts, John Leland. During his years in Virginia (1773–1791), Leland preached over three thousand sermons, baptized more than seven hundred, and strengthened and founded several churches. Despite this growth, Baptists remained a marginal people; most Baptists came from the lower ranks of society—African American slaves, women, or poor farmers—and as such lacked direct influence on community institutions. Despised as uneducated loud-mouths by elites in Congregationalist Massachusetts and Anglican Virginia, the ease with which Baptists pulled newcomers into worship, membership, and church leadership was disturbingly democratic. In fact Baptists allowed women and men, regardless of social standing, to speak and vote in church. And their popular style of singing and baptism by immersion were particularly attractive to Africans and African Americans.
Many credit Baptists for the provision in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Baptists exerted this influence on the emerging American culture through their rising numbers and through two leaders, Isaac Backus and John Leland, the New England ministers best known for their preaching tours, many converts, and assistance in reviving or organizing congregations. As political leaders for a minority group, Backus and Leland were fearless. Asserting that their authority and direction came from God, these preachers ignored laws requiring them to obtain a preaching license in each town they visited.
It was John Leland who during the Revolutionary period urged Baptists to sign petitions for religious liberty. These documents flooded the Virginia legislature in the 1770s and 1780s as Baptists (joined by Presbyterians) protested against laws providing tax support for the Anglican Church. Decades earlier, however, Massachusetts and Connecticut Baptists had protested similar laws in support of the Congregationalist state church. And Baptists in Virginia were also long accustomed to petitioning local and state authorities for religious liberty. This experience of protesting the church tax and appealing for religious liberty, historian Harry S. Stout has argued, prepared Baptists and other New Light revivalists for the campaign against British control that led up to the American War for Independence.
Much of this lobbying for religious liberty was organized in the regional annual meetings of Baptist associations, the first of which took place in Philadelphia during 1707. With support from the Philadelphia Baptist Association, an earlier generation of New England Baptists had petitioned the Massachusetts government and the British Crown for religious liberty. Virginia Baptists also turned to Philadelphia for counsel and financial aid when suffering the jailing and fining of church leaders. By the 1770s, many Baptists considered freedom from British rule their best chance for religious liberty. Working through the association network, Baptists sent Isaac Backus to the first Continental Congress in 1774 so he could press the case for protecting religious as well as political liberty. In Philadelphia and New England, earlier generations of Baptists had allied with Quakers in support of religious liberty. In turn Philadelphia Baptists supported Baptists in other colonies, including in Virginia, where Baptists worked with Presbyterians to lobby for religious liberty. One result was the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, passed in 1786 and later a model for the first amendment that made up the Bill of Rights. Sharing the Baptist interest in liberty, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were receptive to pleas from Leland, whose conversations with Madison emphasized the need for constitutional protections of freedom of religious belief and practice.
In the early Republic, Baptists continued to oppose the dominant view, now represented by the Federalists, on the issue of church-state separation. In the presidential contest of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Adams and other Federalists represented the view that a tax-supported church in each state of the Union would provide needed stability. The Baptists opposed this position as they voted overwhelmingly for the alleged atheist, Jefferson. Rejoicing in Jefferson's triumph, several Baptist associations sent formal congratulations to the new president, and Baptists from Cheshire, Massachusetts, sent the most notable present, a giant cheese, delivered by John Leland.
Seeing the need for schools where ministerial students would learn to emphasize the importance of religious liberty, evangelical preaching, and believer's baptism, leaders in the Philadelphia Baptist Association worked with New England Baptists to organize Rhode Island College (later Brown University) in 1764. After the Revolution other regional associations of Baptists created colleges in Hamilton, New York (1819), Waterville, Maine (1820), Washington, D.C. (1822), Georgetown, Kentucky (1829), and Newton, Massachusetts (1825). Presidents of these colleges, including Francis Wayland of Brown, stressed the importance of mission organizations, and none more so than the foreign mission society organized by Luther Rice.
While the colleges trained a new generation of leaders, it was the energy and zeal of Luther Rice that created a national denomination—something he urged Baptists to create if they wished to support the evangelical mission of Adoniram and Ann Judson in Burma. In 1812 a group of Congregationalists had commissioned the Judsons and Rice as missionaries to British India. But en route they concluded that the Bible taught adult baptism by full immersion—not the pedobaptism or sprinkling of infants practiced by most other churches. Accepting support from Congregationalists no longer seemed possible, so Rice returned to America to organize a Baptist mission society. Adapting the format of revival (and political) meetings, Luther Rice spoke in several states before calling Baptists in 1814 to Philadelphia to form the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions. Usually dubbed the Triennial Convention because it was held every three years, the new denomination formed a board of volunteers, the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, to handle business between conventions.
Rice found his work easier where he could build on preexisting regional organizations of Baptist associations. The "mother" association for American Baptists was formed in 1707, not surprisingly in Philadelphia, the home of the Society of Friends and freedom of religion. Founded by only five congregations from the region—three of them in New Jersey—the Philadelphia association by 1750 had grown so that its member churches included congregations as far south as Virginia and north to Massachusetts. Distances and the growing number of Baptists in each region made it advisable for the mother association to dismiss its farthest-flung churches to form their own associations. In 1766 Philadelphia leaders assisted in the forming of the Ketockton Association in Virginia. Also important in the building up of Baptist networks was the Warren (Rhode Island) Association, founded in 1767 for churches in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Leaders encouraged subscribing to the Baptist Missionary Magazine, the Massachusetts publication through which readers learned about overseas missions and regional revivals. The dramatic stories of mission work in Burma attracted many supporters, including some not Baptist, and increased the number of churches and local mission societies sending funds to the Judsons and other missionaries. But resistance to this new movement was also stiff: anti-mission Baptists, very strong in Kentucky and Illinois, resisted any national or outside leadership. These local and regional leaders denounced the new Baptist organizations and their traveling ministers like Luther Rice for tricking less-educated people into giving funds to national rather than local church organizations.
The rise of an overseas mission movement also provided an opening for Baptists to revisit the issue of slavery. When in the 1760s hundreds of African and African American slaves began converting to the Baptist faith, white Baptists faced a dilemma. Some accepted the need to teach their slaves to read—after all, many were fellow Christians. That such education could create new difficulties is clear in the case of Lott Cary, an ordained preacher and member of the First Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. While the extraordinary Cary managed to buy his own freedom, he found his choices limited. For that reason, Cary reasoned, it was better to move to another kind of society. Commissioned and supported by both whites and blacks, Lott Cary left for Liberia, a missionary of the Richmond African Missionary Society, the American Colonization Society, and the Baptist Board of the Triennial Convention.
For most African Americans, freedom or missionary service overseas was not an option. Yet the Baptist faith continued to attract slaves and free blacks in large numbers. Initially, the interracial relationships that resulted raised concerns about the awkwardness, and perhaps even immorality, of Christians holding other Christians in slavery. In most places Baptists, white and black, met together for worship, although in the 1770s, separate "African" Baptist churches began meeting in slave districts like Williamsburg and Petersburg, Virginia (1776); Silver Bluff, South Carolina (1773); and Savannah, Georgia (1778). Not until 1808 did black Baptists further north form a separate congregation, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City.
These separations, usually occurring with the assistance of sympathetic whites, suggest how quickly antislavery sentiment dissipated among white Baptists after the American Revolution. Earlier concern about the ethics of Christians holding other Christians in slavery were undercut by the economic profitability of slavery and by the desire among the white Baptists to move into a place of influence in their communities. Queries about slavery disappeared from the minutes of association meetings, with Baptists channeling any reservations about slavery into support for colonization of free blacks outside the country. In this regard white Baptists moved into the mainstream of American Protestantism, agreeing to view slavery as an evil and a burden, but one less pressing than the evil of disunity, which would distract from the broader missionary enterprise.
Increasingly organized, American Baptists by the 1820s had added to their foreign mission operation a tract and publication society, more newspapers and schools, and new leaders. Among the most prominent was John Mason Peck, appointed in 1817 a missionary to the West, headquartered in St. Louis. Traveling to dozens of frontier communities, Peck assisted local leaders in forming Sunday schools, churches, and mission and Bible societies. In 1828 he founded a newspaper that merged his religious and political interests, the Pioneer of the Valley of the Mississippi, and in 1832 Peck organized the American Baptist Home Mission Society so that there would be a national organization focused on missions in the West. Sectarian Baptists continued their criticisms of Peck and other mainstream Baptists. But growing interest in the mission enterprise had a unifying impact on American Baptists in general. By the 1820s Baptist churches and mission workers enjoyed support from a network of local, regional, and national voluntary associations. No longer forming a sectarian counterculture, Baptists continued to evangelize faster than the population grew, by 1820 boasting a membership that in denominational rankings was second only to Methodists.
See also African Americans: African American Religion; Disestablishment; Frontier Religion; Missionary and Bible Tract Societies; Professions: Clergy; Religion; Revivals and Revivalism; Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
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Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven