Baptists in the United States
As of 2014, about 15.3% of Americans identified as Baptist, making Baptists the second-largest religious group in the United States, after Roman Catholics. By 2020, Baptists had become the third-largest religious group in the United States, with the rise of nondenominational Protestantism. Most modern Baptists generally adhere to a congregational church polity, so local congregations are independent and ultimately autonomous, meaning that their broadly Christian religious beliefs can—and do—vary. Baptists account for about one-third of all Protestants in the United States: some mainline, many evangelical. Divisions have resulted in numerous Baptist bodies, some with historical lineage and others more modernly organized. Many Baptists operate independently or practice their faith in entirely independent congregations.
English Baptists migrated to the American colonies during the seventeenth century. Baptist theological reflection informed how the colonists understood their presence in the New World, especially in Rhode Island through the preaching of Roger Williams, John Clarke, and others. During the 18th century, the Great Awakening resulted in the conversion of many slaves to Baptist churches, although they were often segregated and relegated to lower status within Baptist churches. Although Baptists opposed slavery during this period, many later Baptists in the South remained slave holders and still others considered it a political decision and not a moral issue.
The Philadelphia Baptist Association established the first national body, the Triennial Convention, on May 18, 1814. In 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention—today's largest U.S.-based Baptist denomination—split from the Triennial Convention, who refused to ordain missionaries that had slaves. After abolition, large black Baptist churches were formed due to the continued practices of segregation of Blacks. Today, the largest denominations among African Americans are the National Baptist Convention and the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
History
17th century
Baptists appeared in the American Colonies in the early 17th century among settlers from England and Wales. Theologically all Baptists insisted that the sacrament of Baptism was the key rite to enter the visible Church and could not be administered to infants. However some followed the Arminian doctrine that says God's saving Grace is available to everyone, and others followed the Calvinist doctrine that says Grace was available only to the predestined "elect".Rhode Island and Providence Plantations
and John Clarke are credited with bringing the Baptist tradition to America. In 1638, Williams established the First Baptist Church of Providence in the city of Providence, Rhode Island and Clarke was the local cleric at Newport, Rhode Island when he established the First Baptist Church of Newport before 1644. The earlier origins of the Providence church was undisputed until 1847 when a minister of the Newport church claimed that the church was the older one. According to a Baptist historian who has researched the matter extensively, "There is much debate over the centuries as to whether the Providence or Newport church deserved the place of 'first' Baptist congregation in America. Exact records for both congregations are lacking." Today, almost without exception Baptist historians agree that the Providence church came first. In 1764, the leading Baptist ministers in colonial America Rev. James Manning, Rev. Isaac Backus, Rev. Samuel Stillman, Rev. Morgan Edwards and Rev. John Gano founded The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, nowadays known as Brown University, the seventh institution of higher education in the original Thirteen Colonies, with the specific goal of serving as a Baptist university and sanctuary for all religious groups, specially Baptists that were not widely welcomed at other institutions which were closely associated with the Congregationalist churches and the Church of England.Early controversies
Beginning in Providence in 1636–1637, Roger Williams and John Clarke founded a colony in which religious affiliation and citizenship were separated. This same principle was continued in the first charter of 1644 and affirmed by the newly created colonial government in 1647. This principle was explicitly affirmed in the Charter of 1663 which John Clarke wrote and secured. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was regarded by the neighboring colonies with undisguised horror, and Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut spent the next 100 years trying to dismember the "heretic" colony. The other colonies passed laws to outlaw Baptists and Quakers, leading to the hanging of four Quakers in Massachusetts. When Harvard's first president Henry Dunster abandoned Congregationalist ideas in favor of Baptist tenets in 1653, he provoked a controversy that highlighted two distinct approaches to dealing with dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's Puritan leaders, whose own religion was born of dissent from mainstream Church of England, generally worked for reconciliation with members who questioned matters of Congregationalist theology but responded much more harshly to outright rejection of Congregationalism. Dunster's conflict with the colony's magistrates began when he failed to have his infant son baptized, believing, as a newly converted Baptist, that only believers should be baptized. Efforts to restore Dunster to the former ideas failed, and his "apostasy" proved untenable to colony leaders who had entrusted him, in his job as Harvard's president, to uphold the colony's religious mission. Thus, he represented a threat to the stability of theocratic society. Dunster exiled himself in 1654 and moved to nearby Plymouth Colony, where he died in 1658.18th century
The First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia was founded in 1774.Before the American Revolution about 494 Baptist congregations existed in the United States. That number had risen to 1152 U.S. Baptist congregations by 1795.
Revolutionary Virginia
Isaac analyzes the rise of the Baptist Church in Virginia, with emphasis on evangelicalism and social life. There was a sharp contrast between the austerity of the plain-living Baptists and the opulence of the Anglican planters, who controlled local government. Baptist church discipline, mistaken by the gentry for radicalism, served to ameliorate disorder. The struggle for religious toleration erupted and played out during the American Revolution, as the Baptists worked to disestablish the Anglican church. Beeman explores the conflict in one Virginia locality, showing that as population became more dense, the county court and the Anglican Church increased their authority. The Baptists protested vigorously; the resulting social disorder resulted chiefly from the ruling gentry's disregard of public need. The vitality of the religious opposition made the conflict between 'evangelical' and 'gentry' styles a bitter one. Kroll-Smith suggests the strength of the evangelical movement's organization determined its ability to mobilize power outside the conventional authority structure.In 1793, the Virginia Baptist General Committee, composed of representatives from Baptist institutions from across Virginia, passed a resolution that slavery was not a moral or religious issue and thus decisions surrounding slavery should be left up to politicians.
Slavery in Baptist churches
In the 1770s, White Baptists went on conversion missions in the Southern United States as a part of the period known as a Great Awakening. The concept of equality in the eyes of God caused many slaves to convert to the Baptist faith, however, slaves were still urged by white clergy to remain obedient to their masters. Out of fear that Black churches would lead to rebellion, white slave owners required converted slaves to attend white churches. The result of this was the creation of "hush harbors" where slaves would secretly blend Christianity with their African religions and practices, creating their own communities. Some of these spaces were also used to plot against slaveowners, such as the 1831 rebellion in Virginia led by Nat Turner, a Baptist preacher in his community.19th century
Missionary organizations
The International Ministries was founded in 1814 as the Baptist Board for Foreign Missions by the Triennial Convention. The first mission of the organization took place in Burma with the missionaries Adoniram Judson and Ann Hasseltine Judson in 1814. Other missions that followed took place in Siam in 1833, India in 1840, China in 1842, Japan in 1872 and Philippines in 1900.Slavery and "racial" segregation
In 19th century Virginia, slaves applying for membership in Baptist churches were required to get written approval from their master to join a congregation. Once they were a part of the congregation Black members would have separate Black deacons who oversaw them.The Baptist churches in America, like the country, split in two over the issue of slavery in the United States.
In 1840, the Board of Managers of the Baptist General Convention for Foreign Missions repeated that the slavery question, which it never mentions by name, is not relevant to their work. It already speaks of the question of "the continuance of Christian fellowship between northern and southern churches."
In 1841, at the annual meeting in Baltimore, "leading ministers and members of the Denomination had signed a document repudiating the course of anti-slavery Baptists, and pronouncing the disfellowship of slaveholders an innovation unsanctioned by the usages of the denomination." There was set up an American Baptist Free Mission Society in 1842, whose founding President was Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor.
Struggling to gain a foothold in the South, after the American Revolution, the next generation of Southern Baptist preachers accommodated themselves to the leadership of Southern society. Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery and urging manumission, they began to interpret the Bible as supporting the practice of slavery and encouraged good paternalistic practices by slaveholders. They preached to slaves to accept their places and obey their masters. In the two decades after the Revolution during the Second Great Awakening, Baptist preachers abandoned their pleas that slaves be manumitted.
When the Alabama State Convention called on the Foreign Mission Board to explicitly allow slaveholders as missionaries, the board responded:
In Baptist churches in both free and slaveholding states during this period, people of color were required to sit in a segregated "negro pew" regardless of whether they were members of the church, were licensed ministers, or even were invited into the pews of other white churchgoers.