Date of Award
2013
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in History
Department
Arch Dalrymple III Department of History
First Advisor
Charles Reagan Wilson
Second Advisor
Elizabeth A. Payne
Third Advisor
Ted Ownby
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
The schism between American missionary and anti-mission Baptists of the 1820s and 1830s stemmed from an ideological disagreement about how Baptists should interact with the rest of society. While anti-mission Baptists maintained their distance from "worldly" non-Baptist society, missionary Baptists attempted to convert and transform "the world." Anti-mission Baptists feared that large-scale missionary and benevolent societies would slowly accumulate money and influence, and that they would use that influence to infringe on the autonomy of local congregations and the religious liberty of the nation. While histories of this topic often portray anti-mission Baptists as obscure and paranoid of an imagined "law religion," I argue that they were not paranoid. Rather, their observation of missionary Baptists' efficient, outward-looking world view, embodied in the novel benevolent societies, helped them foresee the gradual growth of evangelical influence in society. While most Baptists did not shift their attention towards legislating their own moral values on society through secular law until the late nineteenth century, the roots for this shift were in the business-minded benevolent societies of the early nineteenth century. Far from being an obscure offshoot of the past, anti-mission Baptists represented—and represent—an alternative to the active involvement of conservative evangelicals in politics. Much like their dissenting American Baptist ancestors of the colonial era, they carried on the legacy of religious liberty and local church autonomy despite the radical changes of the early nineteenth century.
Recommended Citation
Lindbeck, John, "There Is A Gnawing Worm Under The Bark Of Our Tree Of Liberty: Anti-Mission Baptists, Religious Liberty, And Local Church Autonomy" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 636.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/636