Dipped in controversy

Baptists in America: A History. By Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins. Oxford University Press; 352 pages; $29.95.

IN 1995, a century and a half after it was founded by supporters of slavery, the Southern Baptist Convention apologised to African-Americans. “We genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty,” wrote the group, which had by then become America’s largest Protestant denomination.

It was a landmark moment, reflective of a complex and chequered history. American Baptists’ roots lie in the noble struggle for religious liberty. In colonial times they were a tormented minority, their preachers sometimes clapped into prison. Baptists held that only declared believers should be baptised, which offended other Protestants, who thought that infants should get a dipping. Some also complained that the Baptist rituals were too ostentatious. One 18th-century Anglican clergyman wrote that the Baptists gave the rite to “lascivious persons of both sexes” who wore “very thin linen drawers…which when wet, so closely adheres to the limbs, as exposes the nudities equally as if none at all.” As independence came, Baptists joined Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in an ultimately successful push for the separation of church and state. (Many colonies had had official churches, to which tax dollars flowed.) It was a vital and enduring victory for America.

But as the Baptist movement spread, racism became virtually inextricable from the church’s existence, particularly in the South. The Southern Baptists broke from their northern brethren in 1845, as war between the states loomed. English Baptists urged their American counterparts to ditch slavery, but to no avail. After the war, white Southern Baptists enthusiastically endorsed segregation, and some Ku Klux Klan leaders came from their ranks. At the same time, black Baptists’ numbers ballooned—Martin Luther King grew up a member of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

“Baptists in America” is an illuminating book, if at times dense. The authors, Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins, both history professors at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Texas, wrestle capably with the oddly difficult question of what defines Baptists. Yet they sometimes skip too quickly over fascinating details. Why were white preachers often installed at black Baptist churches before the civil war? Why did urban black Baptist churches initially resist gospel music, with its rural overtones? How did black Baptists’ missionary efforts fare in Africa? The authors also miss chances to compare Baptists’ stances with those of their counterparts in other denominations on issues such as the biblical justification for holding slaves.

What is clear is that Southern Baptists, for all their heritage of separation of church and state, have built themselves into a powerful juggernaut. They underpin opposition to abortion and gay marriage, a throwback, Mr Kidd and Mr Hankins argue, to their roots as outsiders resisting the mainstream. But white Southern Baptists will forever labour in the shadow of having been badly wrong on civil rights. As recently as this year, Southern Baptist leaders were publicly calling for the integration of churches. Plenty of work clearly remains to be done.