The Preacher and Missionary War: The Political Role of Race and Christianity in the 1831 Baptist War (original) (raw)
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Baptist Emancipationists and Abolitionists: The American Story
Paper read at the Evangelical Theological Society 2020, held digitally.
While many Baptists of the late 18th and 19th century were complicit in the use of chattel slavery, there were some who vigorously opposed this brutality, often to their own detriment.
The Effects of the Civil War on Southern Baptist Beliefs
The American Civil War was fought to settle, once and for all time, the question of freedom for all people in the United States. The Southern Baptist Convention came into existence because Baptists in the South wanted to have the ability to serve as missionaries and, at the same time, own slaves at the same time. When war finally came, the Southern Baptist Convention became an enthusiastic supporter of the Confederate nation and the institution of slavery. At the start of the war, Southern Baptists were adamant in their beliefs. But the war was a crisis that tested them. America was a different nation at the end of the war than it was at the beginning. This study determines how Southern Baptist beliefs were changed by the war. The method used was to establish what Southern Baptists believed at the beginning of the Civil War. Afterwards, the beliefs before the War will be compared with Southern Baptist beliefs at the end of the war. This was done by examining sermons, speeches, Baptist newspapers and other sources to see what Southern Baptists were saying and how they were applying their beliefs to the issues of their day. The study shows that, while Southern Baptist confessional beliefs did not change, the application of those beliefs to the issues facing Southern Baptists as the United States experienced schism, and in the ending and aftermath of the war, changed dramatically. The study demonstrates that religion is belief lived out in a material world. It concludes that, even though confessional beliefs may remain steadfast, the application and articulation of those beliefs can be forced to evolve by traumatic historical events.
Isaac Nelson's response to the civil war represented the fruit of twenty years' reflection on the issues of slavery and emancipation. Perhaps surprisingly, he did not support the Federal government's efforts to restore the Union, even after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Nelson's analysis of the struggle helpfully illuminates the complexity of radical abolitionist responses to the civil war, while it also serves to correct hasty generalizations concerning British and Irish evangelical support for the Federal government. Thus, by means of a biographical case study of Ulster Presbyterianism's most zealous abolitionist, a wide number of thematic issues can be freshly examined.
Baptist Southerners’ Accommodation with Slavery: A Study in Economics and Southern Notions of Honor
The Baptist faith tradition is a separatist movement originating in the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church. While the Baptist faith tradition was not a significant religious entity in the southern colonies in the 1600’s, today it is the largest Protestant faith tradition with the majority of adherents in the southern United States. Due to heavy emigration from England and the events surrounding the series of revivals and their aftermath known as The First Great Awakening Baptist assemblies grew significantly in numbers in the southern colonies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Scattered voices among white, southern Baptists came out strongly against the institution of slavery in the 1700’s and yet, by the middle of the first half of the 1800’s became part of the cacophony of words in defense of slavery in the Antebellum South. What caused this ‘sea change’ in theological viewpoint regarding slavery among white Baptists is a significant question in the history of the buildup to the American Civil War. This paper will show that a combination of the basic facts of economics plus the union of evangelical piety and notions of Southern honor caused the Baptists in the South to accept slavery as not only normal but a beneficial institution and gave them the justification to fight in defense of a nation founded upon it.
This article gives a description of the religious experience of the ordinary Methodist soldier during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The “holy war” rhetoric that issued from home pulpits, along with the model of the pious Christian warrior provided through Christian officers and generals, enabled him to retain a distinctively Christian character in the midst of the stresses and moral dilemmas of war. From his chaplains he heard preaching that was simple, direct, focused squarely on spiritual concerns, and called for urgent decision. His expression of religious devotion, even given the differences along this line which existed between Northern and Southern revivals, was of a less emotional type than that in evidence in earlier frontier revivals. His devotion was marked by prayerful dependence upon God and a reliance on the bonds of Christian fellowship, as brothers fought side by side against a common enemy. The battlefield tended to reduce the theological conflicts that arose out of the relative luxury of a peace-time situation. The survivors of the war would go on to face an increasingly more religiously and ethnically diverse America, in which the relative monopoly of Methodist revivalism would crumble in the religiously diverse world of the “gilded age.”
Competing 'Isms' among Post-War Southern Baptists
2009
As European empires lost political control of their colonies in the wake of World War II, evangelical Christians in the United States saw an aggressively expanding Communism become a new archenemy, and they countered by redoubling their missionary efforts. To bolster those efforts, Southern Baptists embarked on a sustained effort of missionary education dedicated to a view of Christian Universalism which promoted the "sameness" and "oneness" of all peoples around the world. That mission education, however, competed with the denomination's concurrent tendency to conflate "Christian" and "American" as they strove to inculcate in their youth a clear understanding of how and why the United States was both different from, and better than, the Communist nations of the world. Southern Baptists missionary efforts in Africa cast these competing ideas in stark relief. The staunchly anti-communist South of the Southern Baptists was also the segregated South. There, Christian nationalism and Christian universalism collided.