Who gets to be a Baptist?

You can’t tell a Baptist anything.

This is one of the highest praises and damning criticisms of the group.

They are a contrarian type of people. Willing at times to bite their noses off to spite their faces and bite it harder to spite yours.

Being from the South, I’ve been around them my whole life. I sat beside them on the infrequent Sunday mornings my great aunt carried me to church. After worship, I was forced to listen to them at lunch counter diners, where they’d finish preaching the minister’s sermon to the unconverted at the table over.

By unconverted, I mean the Methodists.

For years, I associated them with red-carpet sanctuaries and redder-faced pastors. I saw them as Bible thumpers, slinging the out-of-context word of God at those who didn’t get in line.

There’s been some chatter the last few weeks here at Baptist News Global about who gets to claim the title of “Baptist.” On social media, there’s been an uptick in who’s a Baptist and who ain’t. Several comments have gone so far as to call for BNG to remove “Baptist” from its name, since it criticizes the powers and principles deployed by the empire.

O ye of little faith and church history.

Shit-stirring Baptists have been doing so since their beginning.

Let me explain.

While an exact date is debated, many historians attribute the founding of the Baptist movement to a duo of nonconformists: John Smyth and Thomas Helwys. Smyth would administer a self-imposed believer’s baptism upon himself, seeing this as being essential to authentic conversion. At the same time, Helwys, having left Smyth in Holland to return to England, would draft a defiant letter to King James I, reminding the king that he, too, was only a man and not God, and that he needed to stay out of the business of any soul wanting to draw near to God.

From these two individuals comes a flood of dissenting souls who call themselves Baptists.

It’s hard to talk Baptist rabble-rousers without mentioning Roger Williams. Williams, a former Puritan minister, would firmly advocate for the separation of church and state by denouncing the Church of England’s involvement with the American colonial churches. He’d openly debate the prominent clergymen of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, including John Cotton.

Williams kicked up such a storm that he was exiled from the colony in the fall of 1635 for sharing his rebellious teachings and opinions. The following year, Williams and those who followed him settled on a piece of land purchased from the local indigenous people in what is now Rhode Island. Williams designated it a “shelter for persons distressed of conscience.” Providence Plantation would soon become a place that welcomed all religions and fellow dissenters. Those who stayed loyal to the crown would call Williams a heretic.

One of the most famous examples of dissent ever recorded comes from a Baptist’s pen. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail was a call to attention of the systematic oppression experienced by African Americans. King’s work during the Civil Rights Movement was spurred by his Black Baptist church heritage.

His acceptance of dissent would move his pulpit into the public square. He would speak out against other forms of injustice taking place, famously drawing attention to the Montgomery bus struggle in the late 1950s and later openly opposing the United States’ involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s. King’s upbringing, his belief in nonviolence resistance, and the influence of Baptist thinkers such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Howard Thurman earned him a Nobel Peace Prize from some and the label of an outside agitator from others.

And then there was Will Davis Campbell. A Mississippi Baptist born into a sharecropper family, Campbell initially dissented against his Southern upbringing by attending divinity school at Yale University in the Northeast. Campbell would return to the South after graduation and from his small Louisiana pulpit preach on civil rights and the need for racial reconciliation. Talk of such matters would lead him to leave his first and only church, and later, in his dismissal as the director of religious life at the University of Mississippi.

Until his death in 2013, Campbell would see himself as a preacher without a steeple and a Baptist who was Southern but not a Southern Baptist. He’d work with those like King, John Lewis and Ralph Abernathy behind the scenes in the 1960s. After the death of his friend Jonathan Daniels, Campbell was moved to minister to those he saw as part of the group he thought Jesus would include as some of the least of these: poor Southern whites.

Campbell would draw criticism from both conservative and liberal camps, never letting either pigeonhole him. Like King, he was called many things, from race traitor to iconoclast. He always referred to himself as a Baptist preacher.

So for the folks who appear confused or single-minded about the use of the “Baptist” moniker, I would ask this: What kind of Baptists are you talking about?

If not a Baptist in the likes of Smyth, King or Campbell, then what kind? Help me out a little.

Are you talking Missionary Baptists? Welcoming and Affirming Baptists? Those claiming the Baptist Bible Fellowship? The Central Baptists? The Converge Baptists? The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship? American Baptist Churches USA? American Baptist Association? Regular or Old Regular Baptists? The Free Will or Full Gospel Baptists? Then we have the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship Association and the completely different Fundamental Baptist Fellowship of America? Or how about the General Baptists? National Baptists? National Progressive Baptists? Independent Baptists? Six-Principle Baptists? Are we talking Old Time Missionary Baptists? What about the Reformed Baptist crowd? Maybe the Separate Baptists or Separate Baptists in Christ? Perhaps the folks who make up the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference? United Baptists? The anti-tract Two Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists? How about the Baptist World Alliance? And let’s not forget my favorite, the Primitive Baptist Universalists. These “No Hellers” of Appalachia are a faithful group that believes the atonement, death and resurrection of Jesus are so powerful that all people ultimately receive redemption through him. Are we talking about any of them? Are we talking about any of these?

Sadly, I think I already know the answer, and it sounds like the old joke about the man who arrived in heaven and had to tiptoe past a mansion filled with a congregation of singing and celebrating souls. The man asks St. Peter why they had to be so quiet.

“That’s the Baptists,” Peter says. “They think they’re the only ones here.”

Might I add: “Yes, they do, Peter. Those fundamentalist Southern Baptists think they’re the only ones down here, too.”

 

Justin Cox received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity and McAfee School of Theology, where he received his doctor of ministry. He is an ordained minister holding standing in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and American Baptist Churches USA. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. His thoughts and reflections are his own.

 

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