Tinkers and poormen: Baptists and grassroots religion, 1609-2009.

Holcomb, Carol Crawford

In 1931, Bernard Shaw hailed John Bunyan, arguably the most famous seventeenth-century English Baptist, as "England's greatest prose writer."

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Nevertheless, in his own day, Bunyan was considered little more than a "Tinker and a Poor Man." (1) Baptists have not often been accused of being elitists. The earliest Baptist preachers were derided by their enemies as uneducated commoners. They were maligned as "mechanicks, taking upon them to preach and baptize." (2) They were dismissed as "smiths, taylors, shoomakers, pedlars, weavers, etc." (3) More educated Englishmen complained that the Baptists "utter old broken notes taken from other men's sermons." (4) Even more recent observers have commented on the humble origins of our Baptist founders. J. F. McGregor observed that during the English Reformation Baptists "were too ignorant to understand scripture and incapable of logical discourse." (5) He gave this summary of seventeenth-century Baptists leadership:

   The Baptists' fundamental weakness was their inability to attract
   leaders of the quality necessary to resolve the ambiguities in
   their relationship both with the world and their fellow
   radicals.... The early congregations of the middling sort
   established solid mediocrity as the primary criterion for
   leadership.... Imaginative talent, lay or clerical, was usually
   either suppressed or alienated by the sect's narrow legalism and
   claustrophobic discipline. (6)

These statements represent the propensity among some academics to preference intellectual history over social history and to dismiss popular religious movements regardless of how pervasive or influential they might have been. Yet, seventeenth-century Baptists may accuse us of missing the forest for the trees. Our denomination was little visited by the cultural elite--particularly in the first two centuries-because they intended to liberate the church from the stranglehold of elitist clergymen and to place it in the hands of ordinary folk. Baptists believed the church had been nearly smothered by unbiblical ecclesiastical systems. You do not have to read far in seventeenth-century literature to find the established church referred to as "the whore of Babylon." As our friend Doug Weaver has demonstrated so capably, the Baptist odyssey was a search for the New Testament church. When Baptists chose a regenerate church over an establishment and a democratic church order over an ecclesiastical hierarchy, they deliberately, inexorably cast their lot with the common people. (Baptists were democratic before democracy was cool.) The Baptist story mirrors the decidedly uninspiring tale of the masses because Baptists believed that the church belonged to "tinkers and poor men."

Four examples are offered here-one from each of the four centuries of Baptist witness--to illustrate how Baptists have appealed to the grassroots: (1) the battle for religious liberty in the seventeenth century; (2) the eighteenth-century global missions campaign; (3) the story of Ann Judson and the women's ecumenical missionary movement; and (4) the puzzling Baptist growth in the twentieth century.

Baptists and the Popular Campaign for Religious Liberty (1609)

We begin this sprint through Baptist history with the campaign for religious liberty. The war Baptists waged for religious liberty is oft cited as one of the denomination's greatest accomplishments. The fact that Baptists were of the common sort makes their role in the fight for religious liberty all the more remarkable. Leon McBeth suggested that Thomas Helwys's little pamphlet, The Mistery of Iniquity, was "perhaps the first plea for religious liberty for all people in the English language." (7) All of these qualifiers must be present to make the statement true--religious liberty, for all people, in English. So where do Baptists fit in this narrative of religious liberty? The Western intellectual tradition of religious liberty and freedom of conscience has a long and illustrious history with origins traceable to early antiquity. Amanda Porterfield made this argument in her book, The Transformation of American Religion: "The idea that the conscience has priority over external authority has antecedents in Abelard's Ethics, the Islamic Qur'an, Augustine's Confessions, Paul's letters, Plato's dialogues, and stories about Hebrew prophets who called people to task for not obeying God's will." (8) However, Porterfield asserted that these sources pale in comparison to the influence of the Protestant Reformation on the issue of conscience. John Witte, Jr., in Reformation of Rights, also viewed the Protestant Reformation as the font of religious liberty--although he preferenced Calvin's reforms over all others. Witte argued that intellectual historians should look to Geneva for the fights of conscience rather than to Locke's enlightenment. (9)

As the religious wars of the late sixteenth-century ravaged Europe, dissenters increasingly called for religious toleration and the sentiments made their way across the English Channel. A. G. Dickens argued that "a good many Elizabethan writers and parliamentary speakers" had "advocated religious toleration." (10) The queen and her advisors likely took their cue from Sir Thomas More, who advocated religious toleration in Utopia. King Utopus, wrote More, "ascribed by law that everyone may cultivate the religion of his choice, and strenuously proselytize for it too, provided he does so quietly, modestly, rationally, and without insulting others." Furthermore, Utopus was "quite sure that it was arrogant folly for anyone to force conformity with his own beliefs on everyone else by threats or violence." (11) These statements were decidedly radical for his day, yet More still understood freedom of conscience as a privilege to be granted at the discretion of the state. He felt it was in the state's best interest to foster religious toleration, but did not deny that the state had the fight to grant or revoke that privilege as it saw fit.

One of Queen Elizabeth's advisors, Johannes Althusius, openly endorsed "religious toleration and absolute liberty of conscience for all as a natural corollary and consequence of the Calvinist teaching of absolute sovereignty of God whose relationship with his creatures could not be trespassed." (12) This did not mean that he supported unrestricted religious expression. He believed liberty of conscience to be a separate issue from the exercise of that liberty. Persecuted minorities responded to this line of reasoning by drawing clear connections between the internal conscience and the outward expression of religious conviction. "How is it possible to grant freedom of conscience without exercising religion?" queried a Dutch reformed pamphlet in 1584: "For what are the consequences for people who wish to enjoy this freedom? If they have no ceremonies at all and do not invoke God to testify to the piety and reverence they bear him, they are in fact left without any religion and without fear of God." (13) In other words, freedom of conscience is meaningless unless people are able to act upon their convictions. The question of the extent to which the religious activities of citizens should be regulated divided the advocates for religious toleration well into the seventeenth century.

The Whitehall Debates of 1648-1649 illustrate the spectrum of opinion regarding the implementation of religious toleration. In her 1975 article on the Whitehall Debates, Carolyn Polizzotto argued that the Puritans could be divided into three groups based on their views of toleration. She pointed out that "no one disputed ... that civil censures were powerless against the inward man: that is, the conscience." (14) They disagreed on the rights of the government to censure the outward man: that is, the exercise of conscience. The most conservative party believed it was the government's right to compel dissenters to worship according to the patterns of the established church. The middle party, the independents, did not believe dissenters should be "compelled" to worship, but that they should be "restrained" from worshipping apart from the established churches. Baptists fit into the third category with those who believed that the government had no authority to "compel" or "restrain" the religious exercises of its citizens. Polizzotto listed Thomas Collier as a representative of this position in those debates. She failed to note, however, that Baptists had been making this argument for nearly forty years before the Whitehall Debates.

Baptist writers represented the earliest wave of popular calls for religious liberty in English. Thomas Helwys published The Mistery of Iniquity in 1611. In this treatise, Helwys made the argument that the king has no jurisdiction over the conscience whatsoever. Leonard Busher articulated a similar argument in 1614, and a year later, Baptist pastor John Murton added his plea for religious liberty to the growing body of Baptist literature--reputedly smuggled in a milk bottle from a prison cell. Each of these documents challenged the idea that earthly governments have the power to make laws concerning matters of conscience. This theme was echoed in the writings of Roger Williams and John Clarke in Colonial America. Baptists were among the most radical, the loudest, and the most consistent voices for religious liberty throughout the seventeenth century.

These facts are not new information, but it is critical to remember that Baptists were commoners who dispersed these ideas beyond the halls of Oxford and Cambridge. Baptist rhetoric, debates, and publications were expressed in plain, informal styles accessible to ordinary English men and women. Helwys' Mistery of Iniquity is a clear example of "grass roots" communication. Richard Groves noted that "Historians have not been favorably impressed with Helwys's literary abilities or the quality of the book as a whole." (15) Various critics have lamented the deficiencies in Helwys's education and style--including H. Wheeler Robinson. However, Robinson made this important observation: The Mistery of Iniquity "is a layman's book, both in authorship and style. It has the passion, and to some extent, the method of the prophet Amos." (16) This was a book for the masses. Even J. F. McGregor, whom you might recall had few kind words for the Baptists, acknowledged that "Nevertheless, they were the first radical popular movement to take advantage of the freedom and relative cheapness of the printing press ... to appeal to an increasingly literate population." (17) However galling it may have been to their enemies, Baptist presses continued to "vomit forth" pamphlets faster than they could be confiscated by the establishment. We are right to taut our heritage of religious liberty. But we would do well to remember that even when Baptists addressed their writings to kings, they wrote the words for peasants. Baptist battles have always been waged in the press and the pulpit. Before the end of the seventeenth century, the English people had become thoroughly Protestant and the English Parliament had passed the Act of Toleration. Perhaps we should give some credit for the wide public support for toleration to the Baptists' pedantic pamphlets on religious liberty.

Baptists and the Popular Campaign for World Missions (1700s)

By the eighteenth century, Baptists had begun to attract more adherents from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; nevertheless, Baptists continued to make their mark by preparing religious ideas for popular consumption. In 1784, a young Particular Baptist pastor in Northampton, England, John Ryland, Jr., opened a parcel of books sent to him by a friend. In the parcel, he discovered a little pamphlet by the New England theologian, Jonathan Edwards. Ryland found hope for revival in the words of the American pastor. Edwards balanced his Calvinism with a warm evangelical spirit--a spirit sadly lacking among the Baptists churches around London at that time. Ryland shared the ideas he found with his circle of friends in Northamptonshire, including John Sutcliff and Andrew Fuller. The enthusiasm of these young ministers soon began to shape their Baptist association as they called the churches of the Midlands to pray for a "revival of religion." (18) Thus, Edwards inspired and informed the writings of Andrew Fuller.

In Fuller's well-reasoned rebuttal of hyper-Calvinism that appeared in 1785, he dealt the system a "mortal blow" within Baptist life. Fuller went after hyper-Calvinism, claimed one historian, with a "terrier-like tenacity." He sank his teeth into his opponent's argument and "shook it to death." (19) Fuller's treatise, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, presented a twofold argument. First, he explained that sinners are capable of responding to the gospel:

   No one in his senses would think of calling the blind to look, the
   deaf to hear, or the dead to rise up and walk; and of threatening
   them with punishment in case of their refusal. But if the blindness
   arise from the love of darkness rather than light; if the deafness
   resemble that of the adder which stoppeth the ear ... and if the
   death consist in alienation of heart from God and the absence of
   all desire after him, there is no absurdity or cruelty in such
   addresses. (20)

Second, Fuller castigated his fellow ministers for having "lost the spirit of the primitive preachers" and warned them that they neglected preaching the gospel to their own peril. (21) By refocusing the Particular Baptists on their obligation to call sinners to repent, Fuller helped Baptists restore the balance between God's sovereignty and human responsibility. Arguably, Fuller's Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation is a popular treatment of Edward's Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will. One of my students, Adam King, wrote his senior thesis comparing the two documents last year. He was convinced that Fuller found in Edwards the theological and philosophical tools to dismantle hyper-Calvinism. Subsequently, Fuller's treatise tilled the soil for the missionary zeal of his dear friend, William Carey.

On October 5, 1783, Ryland wrote in his journal: "baptized today poor journeyman shoe cobbler." (22) The poor cobbler was William Carey. After the baptism, John Sutcliff recommended Carey for his first pastorate, and Fuller became Carey's life-long supporter. (23) In 1788, Carey met with his friends Fuller, Sutcliff, and Ryland at the latter's home in Northampton. Carey urged his more established colleagues to publish pamphlets asserting that "something should be done for the heathen." The older three agreed that Carey should write instead. So he poured his heart into a little book called An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. In this work, he detailed his conviction that Christians were commanded to take the gospel to all the nations. Furthermore, the failure of believers to act upon this command rested not in their impotence but in their disobedience--a willful act of negligence. After tracing the history of missions and sketching a portrait of the world's geography and population, Carey enjoined Christians to join him in "fervent and united prayer. .... We must not be contented however with praying," he concluded, "without exerting ourselves in the use of means for the obtaining of those things we pray for." (24) For any who lacked the imagination to enumerate the means, Carey outlined how Christians might establish a society to send missionaries around the world.

When the ministers of the Northamptonshire Baptist Association gathered again in 1791, Carey urged them to form a society. By this time, most of the ministers present were "sympathetic in principle" to his proposal. (25) But the enormity of what he was suggesting gave them pause. Sutcliff, in particular, counseled them to proceed with caution. Another year passed. Finally, in 1792, Carey persuaded the association to establish the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS). The BMS chose Fuller to serve as the society's first secretary (a post he held until his death) and appointed Carey as a missionary to India. James Leo Garrett has noted that Fuller's job as secretary did not involve a desk or cushy chair. Instead, he crisscrossed England on horseback, tirelessly promoting the society's work. (26)

Carey soon relocated to India, set up the Serampore Mission, and began publicizing the missionary cause. The arrival of William Ward in 1798 and Joshua Marshman the following year brought new resources and talents to the mission. Marshman's training as an educator would bear fruit in the development of an extensive educational program from primary schools to a missionary training institution called Serampore College. Ward, a printer by profession, helped Carey place his translations of the scriptures into the hands of the people. In a 2005 article on Carey in Mission Studies, Donald Alban, Jr., Robert H. Woods, Jr., and Marsha Daigle-Williamson argued:

   The Enquiry, most obviously, was Carey's theological and moral
   justification for his missionary work to the "heathen." Yet in many
   ways it would awaken him to the power of the pen to both justify
   and edify the masses. In fact, it was through this work that Carey
   both shut down detractors to his cause and encouraged others to
   join his missionary ranks. His work with the Serampore Press was
   a natural extension of this early effort. (27)

In his forty years in India, Carey translated the scriptures into Bengali and provided linguistic aids for the Mahratta, Sanskrit, Telinga, Punjab, and the Bhotanta languges. Bill Brackney asserted that Carey translated the scriptures for "one third of the world's population." (28)

Without detracting from the tremendous accomplishments of Carey, we must ask why he has been cited as the "father of modern Protestant missions." Kenneth B. Mullholland argued that Carey "did not invent the Protestant missionary movement out of nothing. He constructed the platform from which the modern Protestant missionary movement was launched out of a series of planks hewed during the centuries between Luther and himself." (29) We know that the Moravians established the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel in 1741, over half a century before the BMS was organized. Moravian missionaries arrived in Serampore nearly two decades before Carey stepped ashore in India, and apparently, his first convert had heard the gospel first from a Moravian missionary. Carey knew about the work of the Moravians and pointed to them as examples in his Enquiry: "Have not the missionaries of the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brethren, encountered the scorching heat of Abyssinia, and the frozen dimes of Greenland, and Labrador, their difficult languages, and savage manners?" (30)

So have we overstated Carey's influence since he was not the first? I do not believe so. Stephen Neill, distinguished historian of Christian missions, suggested that Carey's work "marks the entry of the English speaking world on a large scale into the missionary enterprise." (31) The Enquiry, combined with a flood of letters and articles from India, stimulated the growth of a host of new missionary societies. For example, Congregationalist leaders formed their own mission organization in 1795. Anglican clergy organized the Church Missionary Society in 1799. These were followed by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, the mission boards of the Church of Scotland, and many others. Ruth Tucker asserted that Carey's "daring example outweighed all of his accomplishments in India." (32) Although he did not invent Protestant missions, his work helped fan the flames of a small endeavor into a great missionary fire. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Protestant missionary movement transmitted the Christian religion to a "greater area of the world's surface than had taken place in all the preceding Christian centuries put together." (33)

Protestant Women's Missionary Movement (1800s)

In the seventeenth century, Baptists popularized religious liberty; in the eighteenth century, they popularized foreign missions. In the nineteenth century, Baptist women helped launch the Protestant women's foreign missionary crusade. This gender-based mass movement "eclipsed the Student Volunteer Movement and the Laymen's Missionary movement in size," and mobilized more women for service than any other woman's movement in the nineteenth century. (34) Women, including Ann Hasseltine Judson, Lottie Moon, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Helen Barrett Montgomery, and Annie Armstrong, called upon American women to join forces and "win the world for Christ." Each of their stories illustrates how Baptists promoted their faith to common people with pen and press. Perhaps none does so better than Ann Judson whose life epitomized the work of women in foreign missions.

One of the earliest women's missionary societies in America was formed on October 9, 1800 at the behest of a Baptist woman named Mary Webb. (35) Though crippled by a "severe sickness" at age five and bound to a wheel chair, Webb encouraged fourteen Baptist and Congregationalist women to join together in the Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes. These women prayed and raised support for missions. Their annual dues were two dollars. The Boston society's example influenced women throughout the country. Within a year Congregationalist women had formed a female society as an auxiliary to the Massachusetts Missionary Society, and women in dozens of towns throughout New England followed suit. In 1812, Webb published an advertisement in the Massachusetts Missionary Magazine, inviting other women's societies to correspond with her. Over the next two years forty societies responded. (36)

The winsome, colorful letters of Ann Judson fired Protestant women's enthusiasm for foreign missions. She was the first American woman to serve as a missionary on a foreign field. Her story begins one June evening in 1810, when a young seminarian, Adoniram Judson, dined in the home of a prominent deacon named John Hasseltine. Judson's biographer insists that Adoniram was "struck dumb" by the sight of the deacon's youngest daughter, a "beautiful creature" with "jet-black curls, clear olive complexion and dark, lustrous eyes." The young man apparently recovered his voice well enough to woo her, because the two were married on February 5, 1812. A few days later, Adoniram Judson, Luther Rice and three other men were ordained as foreign missionaries. As they knelt to be commissioned, Ann slipped from her pew and knelt not far from them, publicly demonstrating that she, too, felt called to the service of foreign missions.

Because of the conflicts of the War of 1812 and the potential natural hazards of sea travel, the missionaries set sail on separate ships for India where they planned to meet Carey. Knowing that they would be interacting with Baptists, the Judsons used the many idle hours aboard ship to study baptism in their Greek New Testaments. To their dismay, they found no record in the Bible of the form of baptism they had been taught from infancy in the Congregational Church. Within a few days after arriving at the Serampore mission, Adoniram was convinced that the Baptists had it right. Ann struggled a bit longer, but finally agreed with him. They crafted a letter to Serampore insisting that "the immersion of a professing believer is the only Christian baptism" and requested baptism by immersion from the British Baptist missionaries. (37) About a month after the Judsons were baptized, Rice confessed that he too had become convinced that the Baptists were correct in the matter. On November 1, 1812, he was immersed, giving American Baptists three missionaries on a foreign field before the first mission board was ever formed.

The first challenge these three fledgling Baptists faced was procuring financial support. Honor prohibited them from continuing to seek aid from their Congregationalist investors. The three decided that Adoniram and Ann would press on to establish a mission while Rice headed back to America to rally the Baptists to their cause. Rice returned by the first possible ship to America and quickly began to make contacts with existing missionary societies and persuaded still others to organize. In a day before railroads, with few steamboats, when stagecoaches were expensive, Rice "generally traveled in his own one-horse light conveyance and he often astonished his brethren with the rapidity of his movements and the suddenness of his transitions from one place to another." (38) By 1813, he identified seventeen local and regional societies willing to "hold the ropes" for the Judsons. But Rice had greater plans for the Baptists than loosely organized societies. On May 18, 1814, his vision came to fruition with the establishment of the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions, commonly referred to as the Triennial Convention.

After numerous conflicts with the East India Company, the Judsons finally chose to settle in Burma. On the last leg of the journey to this dangerous new land, Ann gave birth to a stillborn child--without a nurse, or doctor, or even another woman to aid her. The child was buried at sea. Ann's first sight of Burma was from a stretcher as she was carried ashore, still exhausted from her labor and grief. In spite of her suffering, she continued to send letters home that were circulated in women's magazines across the country. American women were thrilled by her vivid descriptions of Burma. Her piety and passion challenged readers to greater faith. They empathized with her loneliness in a foreign land and shared her grief after the death of her first child, but also following the death of her second, Roger, who died when he was six months old. When Ann returned to the United States for furlough in 1822, she was greeted as a celebrity in churches and women's gatherings across the Eastern seaboard. Baptists welcomed her as a dignitary and vigorously promoted her work in Burma.

After two years abroad, Ann returned to Burma to find that even greater dangers awaited her. Adoniram was imprisoned during the British Burmese War along with other Americans suspected by the Burmese of collaborating with the British. Though nursing a newborn baby, Ann struggled to take food and supplies to the prisoners. Tragically, the effort mined her health, and she died in 1826. Her death was soon followed by that of her child. News of Ann's death sent shock waves of grief throughout Protestant circles, and her name soon became a synonym for sacrificial missionary service. (39)

Why did this particular woman become such a prominent American heroine? She died half a world away from her home, in a foreign land, and left no children either to mourn her or celebrate her work. One possible answer is that Ann Judson had mass appeal. Her life, her journals, and letters resonated with ordinary American women and at the same time offered them a tantalizing glimpse of a world beyond their own. Furthermore, her name became a household word among Protestants in the nineteenth century because of the grassroots networks of women that emerged to promote the work of Christian missions. In the decades after the Civil War, the women of every Protestant denomination in America would join together to establish independent women's boards. Their missionary journals celebrated her life and those of other female missionaries, bringing news of women around the world into the homes of ordinary women. Baptist women can be found at the vanguard of missionary service and organization as they blazed new trails for the women who would follow. Baptist women also brought up the rear of female missionary organizations in the South--yet Southern Baptist women continued the tradition of promoting missions at the grass roots well into the twentieth century.

Denominational Resilience and Postwar Revivals (1900s)

Finally, we turn to the twentieth century to a time when Baptist outsiders became the insiders, and Baptist ideas seeped into the ground water. Martin Marty has called this the "Baptistification" of American culture. (40) Baptists not only influenced the religious landscape; they also moved up the socio-economic ladder and became major players in national politics. A host of events coalesced to create an environment so suited for Baptist growth. While we should be wary of triumphalism, the story of Baptist success needs to be explored. Baptist historians should speak with a louder voice to the issues that other religious historians have been asking for over twenty years. Many of us here are southerners and our context has, understandably, shaped our historical agenda.

We Baptists have an interesting pattern in our historiography. We have exceptional works that address Baptist life and culture in the early part of the century, including the scholarship of John Lee Eighmy, Rufus Spain, Wayne Flynt, Mike Williams, and Karen Bullock. We also have rich resources that treat Baptists in the last part of the century, including Nancy Ammerman's Baptist Battles and Bill Leonard's God's Last and Only Hope. All these scholars concentrate on the century's beginning and its end. The long list of Baptist historical commentary at the end of the century tends to be clustered around the Baptist conflicts. Almost without exception, our histories of twentieth- century Southern Baptists leave an impression of fragmentation and decline even though Baptists throughout the country grew from roughly 3 million in 1900 to nearly 35 million by the end of the century. Despite this increase, most Baptist historians have been preoccupied with the fundamentalist storms that fragmented Southern Baptist life at the end of the century. For example, the best sociological analysis of Southern Baptists, Baptist Battles, by Ammerman, addresses the dissolution of the southern evangelical hegemony. She argued that after 1980, "Southern evangelicalism--while still pervasive--had been disestablished." (41) Ammerman's sober analysis foreshadowed the numerical plateau of the 1990s. This is the end of the twentieth century story--the decline.

Still the larger picture of numerical growth needs more attention. I do not believe statistical gains measure the "success" or "failure" of a denomination, and we should certainly avoid interpreting rising church membership as a singular sign of God's favor. That said, can numbers tell us anything? What does it mean when the Baptists not only appealed to the masses, but succeeded in reaching them? How should we interpret the tremendous socio-economic gains in the twentieth century? For the first time it became common place for Baptists to hold the highest offices in national government. At one point in the 1980s, the president, vice president, the speaker of the house and Senate majority leader were all Baptists--from different political parties. What does this say about the denomination founded by tinkers and poor men?

To complicate matters, while denominational historians have been writing a history of declension, many historians of American evangelicalism have been writing histories of massive evangelical expansion. In fact, I would say that the growth of evangelicalism has been "the story" in American religious history for nearly thirty years--although, I am not completely convinced that the historians of evangelicalism have painted the clearest picture of Baptists. The full story of the grassroots appeal of Baptists in the twentieth century has slipped through the cracks. There are still many questions that need to be answered, and I would like to propose a few of them.

The Twentieth Century--The Middle Years

First, what accounts for the Baptist growth in the middle of the century? In the twenty years leading up to 1960, Baptists added 20 million adherents, likely the result of post-wax revivals. Baptists grew in numbers as did other Protestant denominations in the years following World War II. Sydney Ahlstrom explained that the sources of the revival reach back to the New Deal when a return of national confidence fostered a renewed interest in religion. The "collapse of the European order" and the crisis of World War II further stimulated the religious sensibilities of the American people. After the war Americans sought solace in the bosom of traditional values as unprecedented industrial expansion yielded an "age of affluence." (42) William McGloughlin commented that in the 1950s "we Americans desperately sought to reaffirm our old values, to get 'back to God,' to rid ourselves of subversives who were conspiring to destroy our way of life." (43) As a result, Americans flocked to the churches. Ahlstrom noted that church affiliation in 1910 represented 43 percent of the population, and by 1970, that percentage had grown to 62.4 percent.

Nearly everyone agrees that Billy Graham was the key figure in the mid-century revivals. In the tradition of Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, and Charles Finney, Graham resurrected the urban revival. "By 1956," Ahlstrom reported, "the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was using almost all available mass media--advertising, television, radio, paperback books, and cinema-and had an annual budget of two million dollars." (44) Like earlier revivals, Baptist churches were among the greatest beneficiaries--adding 20 million to their membership in the years from 1940 to 1960. You have only to glance at Gaustad's Atlas to see that every Protestant denomination experienced growth in those years.

After 1960, Disciples, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists began to plateau. Lutheran membership peaked in 1970, and Methodists in 1980. Mainline Protestant churches entered a period of decline. Religious observers began to sound the death knell for Protestant Christianity. Leonard Sweet observed that "as theological dry rot worked its way through the edifice of old-line religion, people began to go elsewhere for edification." (45) Their search led them from "old-line" religion to "old-time" religion, and in the 1970s "evangelicalism emerged as a dominant religious force." (46)

Baptist membership statistics, however, did not mirror those of the mainline churches. Baptist numbers were strong before the burst of evangelicalism, and Baptist growth became nearly vertical between 1960 and 1970, a pattern that continued unabated into the 1990s. How do we account for this? Apparently, Baptists benefited not only from the urban revivals of Billy Graham, but also the evangelical resurgence of the 1970s. Southern Baptists made a seamless transition in the 1960s from the Graham revivals to the neo-evangelical resurgence. To make the story even more interesting, the growth trajectory of Black Baptist denominations is nearly identical to that of Southern Baptists. Black and white Baptists in the South experienced uninterrupted growth from 1940 until the last decade of the century--even through the turbulent racial conflicts of the 1960s.

Again, how do we explain the Baptist growth of the 1960s? Some would say the answer lies with demographics. Ammerman has demonstrated that demographic shifts contributed to Southern Baptist growth. Her studies indicate that Southern Baptism gained an average of I million adherents every five years from 1936 to 1986 and that most of this expansion took place in the South. She attributed this primarily to the birth of the "Sun Belt" around 1960, when non-southerners began to move to the South in large numbers. "By 1980," she concluded, "over 10 percent of the South's population was born outside the region, with that number considerably higher in urban areas." (47) Thus, the success of Baptist churches in the South may possibly be explained as a corollary to the expansion of the southern population.

A hundred more explanations can be offered that lead to still more questions. Can we simply explain Baptist growth as momentum from post-War revivals? How did Baptist churches serve as both the source of the civil rights movement and a major center of opposition? What role does the denominational structure play in this growth? Answering all these questions in this article is not possible, but we must continue to explore what Martin Marty called "the Baptistification of American religion." What will we say about a revolutionary religion when the revolution is over? What will be the Baptist contribution in the next century now that the tinker has become a president and the poor man a millionaire?

(1.) Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628-1688 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988), 3.

(2.) Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London: printed by T. R. and E. M. for Ralph Smith, 1645), see http://www.archive.org/stream/gangraenaland200dupeuoft/gangraenaland200 dupeuoft_djvu.txt.

(3.) Daniel Featley, The Dippers dipt. Or, The AnaBaptists duck'd and plung'd Over Head and Eares, at a Disputation in Southwark, 4th ed. (London: printed for Nicholas Bourn and Richard Royston, 1646).

(4.) T. Thacke, The Gainsayer Convinced (1649), 64, quoted in J. E McGregor, "The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy," in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, ed. Radical Religion in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 30.

(5.) McGregor, "The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy," 30.

(6.) Ibid., 63.

(7.) Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1987), 103.

(8.) Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth Century Awakening (New York: Oxford, 2001), 18.

(9.) John Witte, Jr., Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

(10.) A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation 2d ed. (University Park: Penn State Press, 1989), 379. Dickens named Jacobus Acontius, Alberico Gentilis, and Edwin Sandys as examples. Their writings can be found in W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (London: Alien and Unwin, 1936), 57ff, 66ff, 74ff.

(11.) Thomas More, Utopia, rev. ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94, 95.

(12.) Witte, Reformation of Rights, 9-10.

(13.) Marnix of St. Aldegonde, Discourse of a Nobleman (1584), quoted in Witte, Reformation of Rights, 149.

(14.) Carolyn Polizzotto, "Liberty of Conscience and the Whitehall Debates of 1648-49," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26, no 1 (January 1975): 71.

(15.) Richard Groves, ed. Short History of the Mystery of Iniquity by Thomas Helwys (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), xxxii.

(16.) H. Wheeler Robinson, The Mistery of Iniquity by Thomas Helwys of Gray's Inn and Boxtowe Hail, Nottingham (London: Kingsgate Press, 1935), v, quoted in Ibid., xxxiii.

(17.) McGregor, "The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy," 31.

(18.) Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792-1992 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), 3-4.

(19.) A. C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London: The Carey Kingsgate Press, 1947), 166.

(20.) Andrew Fuller, "The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation," in Baptist Roots: A Reader in the Theology of a Christian People, Curtis W. Freeman, James Wm. McClendon, Jr., and C. Rosalee Velloso da Silva, ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1999), 146.

(21.) Ibid., 147.

(22.) McBeth, Baptist Heritage, 184.

(23.) Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 7-8.

(24.) William Carey, An Enquiry, 1792, in A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage, ed. Leon McBeth (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1990), 137.

(25.) Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 10.

(26.) James Leo Garrett, "Distinctive Theological Points that Have Defined and Divided Baptists," Lecture, B. H. Carroll Theological Institute Summer Colloquy, Arlington, TX, June 1, 2009.

(27.) Donald Alban, Jr., Robert H. Woods, Jr., and Marsha Daigle-Williamson, "The Writings of William Carey: Journalism as Mission in the Modern Age," Mission Studies 22, no.1 (2005): 94.

(28.) W H. Brackney, The Baptists (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988), 141.

(29.) Kenneth R Mulholland, "Moravians, Puritans, and the Modern Missionary Movement," Bibliotheca Sacra 156 (April-June 1999): 221.

(30.) Carey, quoted in David A. Schattschneider, "William Carey, Modern Missions, and the Moravian Influence," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 22, no. 1 (January 1998): 10.

(31.) Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 222.

(32.) Ruth Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), 130.

(33.) A. Dakin, William Carey: Shoemaker, Linguist, Missionary (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1942), 9.

(34.) Patricia Hill, The Worm Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870 1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 3,5.

(35.) Juliette Mather, Light Three Candles: History of' Virginia Woman's Missionary Union, 1874-1973 (Richmond, VA: WMU of Virginia, 1973), 3. For studies of American women's foreign mission societies see Hill, The Worm Their Household.

(36.) R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling: American Protestant Women in World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968), 14-19. By 1829, the Boston Female Society had become purely Baptist, donating its gifts to Baptist causes.

(37.) Adoniram Judson, "Letter to English Missionaries Requesting Immersion," in McBeth, Sourcebook, 206.

(38.) David Benedict, Fifty Years among the Baptists (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1860), 116.

(39.) For more on the life of Ann Judson see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1980), and Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1987).

(40.) Martin E. Marty, "Baptistification Takes Over," Christianity Today (September 2, 1983): 33-36.

(41.) Nancy Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 55.

(42.) Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT Yale University, 1972), 950.

(43.) William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 179.

(44.) Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 957.

(45.) Leonard Sweet, "The 1960s: The Crisis of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism," in Evangelicalism and Modern America, ed. George Marsden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 32.

(46.) Ibid., 43.

(47.) Ammerman, Baptist Battles, 58-59.

Carol Crawford Holcomb is associate professor of church history and Baptist studies at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Belton, Texas.