Beleaguered Behemoth

Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins, both of Baylor University, observe that the story of Baptists in America is by most accounts a success story: “Baptists, who command tens of millions of American adherents, including the largest Protestant denomination in America (the Southern Baptist Convention) and the largest African American organization of any kind (the National Baptist Convention USA Inc.). Baptists such as Billy Graham have enjoyed access to the highest reaches of American political power. Baptist pastor Rick Warren seems (as much as anyone) to have taken on Graham’s unofficial role as ‘America’s pastor,’ even hosting a presidential forum at his Saddleback Community Church in 2008.”

You wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to Baptists, though. Kidd and Hankins think that “Baptists’ enduring feeling of being under attack—a sense impressed deeply on them by English and colonial persecution” is part of the secret of their success, as it “helps them to be vigilant and to flourish.” Despite the fact that “Baptists have transformed numerically from a beleaguered minority into a Protestant behemoth,” their “commitment to bearing witness to the gospel, the resistance to forces regarded as hostile to Christ, his Word, and his kingdom—those dispositions remain.”

Baptists come by their paranoia honestly. As Kidd and Hankins detail, the Baptists were the original American outsiders, “troublers of churches in all places,” according to the Puritans, who banished and beat and imprisoned them, often for preaching Baptist doctrine or singing Baptist hymns.

The Baptist disposition will be a gift to mainstream denominations, used to commanding the center of American, who may well find themselves in need of Baptist vigilance in the coming decades.