The Rise of the Baptists

The Baptists experienced a meteoric rise after 1740, propelled by revivalism, revolution, and geographic expansion from a tiny and obscure sect to the fore-front of American religious life.

As radical products of the Protestant Reformation, Baptists, like English Puritans, embraced congregational autonomy, exclusive church membership, and (usually) Calvinist theology. But they differed from Puritans in restricting baptism to consenting believers and in opposing state religious regulations. They were themselves divided—“Particular” (or “Regular”) Baptists, holding to Calvinist predestination, and “General” Baptists, embracing free will, formed separate regional associations—but their common convictions unified them against English and colonial religious establishments.

Calvinist Baptists arrived in New England with the Puritan migration but were unwelcome there from the start. They gravitated to Rhode Island, where founder Roger Williams embraced their position for a time after his banishment from Massachusetts and established a Baptist church at Providence (1639). Baptists opened a second church in Newport shortly thereafter. But internal theological differences and Puritan strength in the rest of the region stifled their growth, and by 1660 there were only four Baptist churches in Rhode Island. Growth was similarly sluggish elsewhere in New England. A Baptist church founded in Boston (1665) was joined by only scattered others in Massachusetts, while in Connecticut no Baptist church appeared until 1706, and a second not until two decades later.

In the middle colonies, toleration and the absence of religious establishments attracted Baptists from Rhode Island, Ireland, and Wales beginning in the 1680s, especially to the Philadelphia area.

The Great Awakening was a turning point, for its antiauthoritarian message and call for regenerate churches meshed well with Baptist belief and practice. Baptists made dramatic gains in rural and backcountry New England, where more than a hundred revival-fired Congregational churches bolted the establishment to become “Separate Congregationalists” and then, in many cases, Baptists. These new Baptist congregations formed the Warren (Rhode Island) Baptist Association in 1767. Shubal Stearns (1706–71) and other newly converted Baptists went from New England to the Southern backcountry, where, aided by the Philadelphia Association and rising anti-Anglican sentiment, they founded several new Baptist congregations and, in 1758, the Sandy Creek (North Carolina) Association.

There were nearly 500 Baptist churches by the time of the American Revolution, and growth accelerated thereafter because Baptist advocacy of church-state separation and disestablishment became intertwined with the revolutionary cause. Emphasizing local autonomy and individual freedom, and accustomed to attracting voluntary support by sparking religious enthusiasm, the denomination proved particularly well suited to the democratic ethos and westward expansion of the new nation. Its growth to more than 1,100 churches by 1797 anticipated its imminent rise to national preeminence.