Baptist historiography in the new century: what themes should we be addressing?

Baptist history is a field full of opportunities for new investigations. (1) To be sure, over the years, a number of areas have attracted our attention.

The most obvious is institutional history, that is, denominational, associational, and local church matters. The American Baptist Historical Society together with American Baptist Archives Center and the American Baptist-Samuel Colgate Historical Library have provided resources for people looking at Baptists in the North and West, while the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives and the Baptist History and Heritage Society have done likewise in the South as well as in other parts of the country. In Europe are the rich holdings of the Angus Library at Regents Park College and the affiliated Centre for Baptist History and Heritage in Oxford, England, and the library and Oncken Archive at the German Baptist theological seminary in Elstal bei Berlin.

As I documented in the September 2003 issue of the American Baptist Quarterly and the efforts of the BWA's Heritage and Identity Commission so clearly reveal, the exploration of Baptist history is taking place around the globe. (2) We are becoming increasingly aware of this explosion of scholarship, and we want to do everything in our power to encourage and foster this development. A good starting place for our inquiries is the compendium Baptists Around the World that Albert W. Wardin, Jr., organized and to which many of us working in the field contributed. (3)

Another approach to enhancing our historical understanding is to look at the specific controversies that have occupied so much attention. Walter B. Shurden reminded us of several of these in Not a Silent People (1972), a concise work aimed at sensitizing the layperson, and which in 1995 was revised to reflect more recent concerns. (4)

Among the questions and concerns that have occupied so much Baptist attention are the following:

1. What were our origins--is there a lineal succession of people who practiced Baptist principles from the New Testament days to the present, or did the Baptist movement emerge out of sixteenth-century Mennonite roots or English Puritan Separatism?

2. Were Baptists a missionary people, or did they oppose sending out missionaries throughout the world?

3. What was the role of Baptists in perpetuating slavery and then white supremacy? How did racial separatism negatively impact the churches and denominationally-supported institutions? Significant scholarship continues to appear on this topic, such as Mark Newman's work on segregation in the last half of the twentieth century, (5) and Paul Harvey's study of racial identities in the post-Civil War era and into the twentieth century. (6)

4. What were the conflicts resulting from high Calvinism which fed into Landmarkism and the debate over the total autonomy of the local congregation and the rejection of any meaningful form of connectionalism or vision of the larger church? (7)

5. What was the nature of the debates over theology and how to interpret the Bible--the Downgrade controversy in Britain, the fundamentalist-modernist struggle in America, and the associated issue of creedalism? These debates resulted in such things in the South as the J. Frank Norris movement and the Bible Baptist schism, and the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message (BFM) in 1925 as a confessional statement, while in the North, an ongoing conflict raged inside the Northern Baptist Convention over whether the New Hampshire Confession of 1833 should be made normative. This conflict culminated in the schisms of the General Association of Regular Baptists (GARB) in 1932 and the Conservative Baptist Association in 1947.

6. How did issues surrounding biblical literalism or inerrancy affect Baptist life? The controversy that erupted over Ralph H. Elliott's commentary on Genesis in 1961-62 (8) led to a revision of the BFM in 1963, and was carried to its extremity by W. A. Criswell's Why I Preach that the Bible Is Literally True and Harold Lindsell's highly influential Battle for the Bible. (9) In the North, the battle over inerrancy manifested itself in the bitter attacks on Fuller Theological Seminary and infighting within the Evangelical Theological Society, while in the South the fundamentalists gained control of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leadership, which resulted in schism and the denomination's increasing withdrawal from the larger realm of Baptist life. This withdrawal was reflected in such actions as the defunding of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs and the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Switzerland, the revision of the BFM in 1998 and 2000 to place wives under the authority of their husbands and to deny women the right to a place in the ordained ministry, and the SBC withdrawal from the Baptist World Alliance in 2004.

We in the North have struggled with the problem of how to affirm our diversity as a people of God and yet hold our denomination together. The differences in theology and attitude to social concerns were major factors in the schisms in 1932 and 1947, and the hemorrhage of members and funding has occurred ever since. The latest catastrophe to befall the American Baptist Churches in the USA (ABC), as the denomination has been called since 1972, was the demise of the Board of Educational Ministries, the successor to the hallowed American Baptist Publication Society. Many American Baptists question how much longer the ABC-USA can survive, given the tensions produced by the homosexuality issue and the continuing financial crisis. A lively group of American Baptist Evangelicals and an equally determined Fellowship of Welcoming and Affirming Churches have polarized the denomination, and those in the middle are in a quandary as to what to do. The creedal issue has revived as well, as the Evangelicals have recently called for a formulation of a confession of faith. They regard the use of such a confession as an antidote to an "anything-goes" doctrine of soul liberty that allows an individual to believe whatever he or she wishes, regardless of how heterodox or even heretical those beliefs might be.

Numerous other questions with regard to Baptist history have been debated through the years, both in the United States and Britain, including such matters as doctrine, church polity, congregational life, and differences between General and Particular Baptists. Yet, I feel we need to move beyond these questions to look at new and different issues in our scholarship. To some extent, many Baptist scholars are already doing this, but I believe much more remains to be done, and new areas require our attention. I would like to suggest some realms of Baptist life that hold opportunities for fruitful investigation. By no means exhaustive, this list identifies possibilities for more intensive research. I especially want to emphasize the importance of moving beyond American considerations and looking at the questions of Baptist history in global terms, as we are truly a worldwide movement. Let me identify twelve areas of fruitful scholarly concerns that I believe we should consider focusing on.

1. International links among Baptists. We need to look at the wide variety of ties that have developed among Baptists We need to become aware of indigenous or independent Baptist works around the world and learn how they relate to each other. The most important agency linking our people is the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). It has done much to promote cooperation among Baptists by convening regional meetings, establishing relief programs, providing assistance in evangelism, promoting peace witness, initiating literature projects, and organizing other ventures focused on specific matters. The BWA archives housed at the American Baptist Archives Center in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, are a treasure trove of source material in this area. One of the most tragic events of our time is the foolish and short-sighted action of the Southern Baptist leadership in taking the SBC out of the BWA, thereby choosing the route of narrow sectarianism over cooperation with the global Baptist community. We do not yet know the extent of the damage this action has done to the global Baptist witness.

Numerous connections within denominational organizations also exist. The SBC links its mission churches abroad, and this process is worthy of study, especially if the leadership succeeds in its plans to make this a shadow BWA. How other Baptist bodies, both in the United States and other countries, connect with one another should also be looked at. Some indications of the directions this work might take are contained in the March 2001 thematic issue of the American Baptist Quarterly that focused on partnerships in Baptist interchurch relations.

Another worthy research project would be an analysis of the development of the ecumenical vision. Some bodies, such as the ABC, the British Baptist Union, and a few non-Western unions, relate to the World Council of Churches (WCC). What influences do these Baptist groups have on the WCC, and how does this connection affect the constituent bodies? As for regional organizations, the European Baptist Federation is a model of this type of connectionalism, as Bernard Green's recent study reveals. (10) Examining what the African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American churches have been doing in this regard would be an interesting study.

2. The work of new types of western (British and North American) missionaries. By this, I mean those missionaries who have enabled the preservation and development of indigenous cultures, as opposed to westernizing them. These missionaries seek to understand the contemporary missiological theory that stresses contextualized mission work and reaching people in their cultural situations without transforming their cultures into something more western in character. Missionary historian Frederick Downs's works on northeast India reveal some interesting developments along this line, but it is an area in need of further scrutiny. (11) I think it is especially important to demonstrate that missionaries are most effective when they equip the indigenous Christians to carry out evangelistic work and to plant new churches, rather than simply do it themselves, as the new, and in my opinion faulty, policy of the SBC's International Mission Board requires.

3. The missionary work of non-western Baptists. The Koreans and Brazilians are important examples of missionary churches in the Baptist world. In fact, Brazilian Baptist leader Fausto Aguiar de Vasconcelos reported in the June 2004 issue of the on-line Baptist Studies Bulletin that the more than one million Baptists in his country now support 540 missionaries in 59 countries around the world. The historical backgrounds of these non-Western Baptists need to be explored and their effectiveness assessed. We should become acquainted with what churches in other countries are doing to reach non-Christians outside their borders. The porous national boundaries and fluid travel situations have made this the practice of churches all over the world. Their efforts enjoy little documentation, but their stories need to be told.

4. The role of women in the life of the church. This topic is an area of study rapidly gaining in importance. We need to know more about how women rose to places of leadership in congregations and denominational organizations and struggled to overcome patriarchal resistance in the process. Lydia Hoyle of Campbell University Divinity School has produced a revealing study of the role of the Southern Baptist Woman's Missionary Union (WMU) in training young Baptist women for leadership in the church, (12) and the WMU as an organization of strong-willed and highly-dedicated women deserves more intensive study. The histories by Catherine Allen and others reveal much about the motivation of these women and how they exercised their leadership gifts, but more remains to be done. (13) DeLane Ryals's inspiring account of Southern Baptist women who ministered in the New York City area helps us to see the unfortunate impact that the resurgence of patriarchalism has had upon the gospel witness. (14) Allen's tragic account of the ongoing marginalization of women in the SBC stirs us to question how and why such a retrograde movement could be occurring today. (15)

Studies of women's ministerial organizations in the ABC and the ill-fated SBC could tell us much about how women perceived their calls to ministry and how they responded to the challenges of theological education and parish life. In the North, we know of Susan E. C. Griffin (1851-1926), who, when she and her husband were called to a co-pastorate of Elmira Heights Baptist Church in New York state in 1893, became the first woman to be ordained as an American Baptist minister. Anthea Butler is currently working on the life and work of Joanna R Moore (1832-1916), a remarkable woman who trained black women to read in post-Civil War Tennessee and so identified with the people with whom she worked that she requested that she be buried in a black cemetery when she died. (The evil of segregation even continued to the grave.) Although several things have been written about Helen Barrett Montgomery (1861-1949), who was a preacher, author, administrator of a women's mission agency, Greek scholar, and first woman to preside over the Northern Baptist Convention, still we lack a first-rate scholarly study of her.

Annie Armstrong (1850-1938), the founder of the WMU, was a talented leader, while Southern Baptist missionary Lottie Moon (1840-1912) engaged in extraordinary labors in the China mission that few males could match. The stories of missionary wives, who were in every sense partners with their husbands in ministry, need to be told. We already know a lot about Adoniram Judson's wives, 16 but many others were just as faithful and involved in the work of proclaiming the gospel of Christ. The same is true of single women missionaries. They carried out a virtually identical ministry to that of the men in the far-away places of the world, but when they returned home, they had to submit to the patriarchal system.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 is an important study of female activism in the black churches. (17) Six of the contributors to Cecil Staton's Why I Am a Baptist are Baptist women leaders in both the North and South. (18) Charles Deweese is currently engaged in a study of the history and service of women deacons in Baptist churches, a process that needs to be better appreciated, as that struck a forceful blow at the reigning patriarchal structure of the church. We are making progress in learning about the changing roles of women in the church, but much remains to be done. The resurgence of patriarchy in the SBC and the impact of regressive movements in the larger realm of evangelicalism such as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood only make the scholarly reconstruction job more difficult.

5. The missionary vision of African Americans. This vision and how those in the African Diaspora engaged in evangelism among the peoples in their ancestral home are exciting topics. Horace O. Russell provides a revealing account of how African Americans in Jamaica engaged in missionary work in West Africa in the mid- and later nineteenth century. (19) Leroy Fitts's work on Lott Carey has opened our understanding of the first black missionary to Africa. (20) Sandy Martin's study on black missionaries to Africa is another important work. Unfortunately, scholars have only begun to scratch the surface in this vital area. (21)

6. The formation of Baptist churches among Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking peoples in North America. This important development needs to be more clearly documented. The interrelationship between these churches and sister churches in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Brazil must be traced. The impact of publishing houses like the Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, a Spanish language enterprise in El Paso, Texas, formerly supported by the SBC and now an independent organization, needs closer scrutiny. American Baptists also have been heavily engaged in ministry among Hispanics, and an interesting example of the American Baptist Historical Society's concern in the area is the recent publication of a Spanish-language edition of Edwin Gaustad's popular Doing Church History--Your Own! (1991), a convenient hands-on guide for those wish to write the history of their congregations.

7. Baptist works among East Asian peoples, especially the immigrant communities in North America. This vast topic awaits closer examination. American Baptist historian Timothy Tseng put together an issue of the American Baptist Quarterly in September 2002 that called attention to the possibilities for further research in this area. The issue focused on Asian American Baptists, beginning with the planting of the first Chinese congregation in Sacramento, California, in the 1850s and the formation of the Chinese Baptist churches in San Francisco and Seattle and the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle as American Baptist missionary efforts. Tseng demonstrated that the Chinese and Japanese immigrants embraced the Baptist way of life during an era of racial segregation and looked to the conversion of their homelands as a source of hope. The converts found the Christian faith to be a source for cultural renewal and national salvation in the face of Euro-American imperialism. Although most people assumed the churches would be the means of assimilating the immigrants into the white culture, they, in fact, eventually became self-supporting congregations and adopted a more biblical and multi-cultural outlook.

Since the 1960s, the vision of ministry among Asians has changed and expanded due to the great influx of Filipino, Korean, Indian, and Southeast Asia immigrants. In some ways, the work became less denominational in character. As Tseng's bibliography reveals, a growing body of literature exists in this field. The Korean story particularly is crying for increased attention, as revealed by the symposium covering the gamut of Korean religion edited by Kwang Chung Kim and R. Stephen Warner, Korean Americans and Their Religions: Pilgrims and Missionaries from a Different Shore. (22)

8. The contributions of Baptist public figures. The lives and contributions of Baptist public figures need examination. A significant number of Baptists have been involved in public life, and their stories need to be told. Among the major Northern/American Baptist figures were Charles Evans Hughes, presidential candidate in 1916 and Supreme Court justice, and Harold E. Stassen, governor of Minnesota and prominent presidential candidate in the 1940s. Perhaps the most avowedly Southern Baptist figures active in politics were Brooks Hays, congressman from Arkansas, and President Jimmy Carter. Three other twentieth-century presidents had Baptist ties, Warren G. Harding, Harry S Truman, and Bill Clinton. Senator Mark O. Hatfield from Oregon is another distinguished Baptist statesman. Hays, Hatfield, and Carter have all published memoirs that testified to their faith. (23) Many other Baptists have held high public offices, and their stories need to be told and their witness evaluated.

Baptist public figures in other lands should be identified and their biographies written. For example, Welsh Baptist David Lloyd George was a prominent Liberal politician in Great Britain during the early part of the twentieth century and prime minister in the later years of the First World War. Tadeuz J. Zielinski, a Baptist lawyer and theologian in Poland, served for a time in the Polish parliament and today is a respected expert on human rights questions. The Australian Peter Costello is from a Baptist family in Melbourne and a leading figure in the Liberal Party. He is currently a member of Parliament and holds the cabinet post of treasurer.

This list of Baptist figures in public life just scratches the surface. I am sure it could be expanded greatly through further research. Learning how the faith of these individuals affected their public actions and policies would be helpful, and if it did not, then why not. It could give us a more comprehensive picture of Baptists engaging in public life.

9. Civil religion as the new faith of Baptists in the United States. Civil religion is an enormous problem that has largely been swept under the carpet of patriotism. (24) A useful exercise would be to see how the American flag is exalted in the church, how much patriotic songs are used in worship, and how often the nation is exalted in sermons. I am convinced that many Baptist preachers are more committed to the religion of Americanism than to that of Jesus Christ. It is amazing how many of them have bought into the Christian America historical mythology, which is directly linked to their erosion of commitment to the historical Baptist principle of church-state separation. (25)

10. The local history of Russian and East European Baptists. We need more research in this area, especially with regard to Russian and East European Baptist congregational life and the relations between Baptists and the various state authorities. The magisterial work of Albert Wardin in 1995 and his new biography of Gottfried Alf point the way here. (26) Some themes that could be treated are: Baptist growth in these regions and what enabled or inhibited it, the leading personalities, conflicts among groups, ethnicity as a factor in religious strife, and the tensions between connectionalism and schisms. A salutary development is the endeavor at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague to encourage students from Eastern Europe to write the histories of their unions and congregations. In this way, a body of scholarly material is beginning to accumulate.

11. Baptist institutions of higher education. More work needs to be done on these institutions, both in the West and other countries. How did they impact the cultures in the countries where they existed? Who were the national leaders trained in these institutions, and how did they exercise their faith? An even more important question is that of why Baptist institutions abandoned their roots and became like secular universities? This problem is raised in larger works like George M. Marsden's The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief and James T. Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches. (27) This alleged "apostasy" has been the grist for many a fundamentalist mill, and further investigation would be useful to learn how and why this occurred.

12. The small Baptist bodies. These bodies are often overlooked. We know about the large unions and conventions, but the smaller and more marginal ones are not given the attention they deserve. We need to ask such questions as: Why do these bodies exist? What are their distinctive contributions? To what extent are they vestigial churches? What produced the fissiparous situation that led to the formation of so many churches? The problem of separatism is one both northern and southern Baptists must confront. In the South are such large bodies as the Baptist Bible Fellowship, Missionary Baptist Association, and American Baptist Association, and smaller ones like the Free Will Baptists, Primitive Baptists, and Old Regular Baptists. We have been sensitized to the variety of small churches by Bill J. Leonard, (28) Loyal Jones, (29) Deborah McCauley, (30) John G. Crowley, (31) and Howard Dorgan. (32) The Free Will, American, and Missionary Baptists all have recent official histories. (33)

In the North, the GARB has an in-house history by Paul Tassell and the Conservative Baptists have one by Bruce Shelley, but these are hardly works of critical scholarship. (34) The level of treatment of the black denominations is also inadequate, although the amount of literature on African American Baptists is growing slowly. (35) An important step in this direction is the June 2004 issue of the American Baptist Quarterly, which is entitled "The Black Baptist Experience in America." Objective treatments of many of the smaller or lesser-known churches may be found in the brief but informative articles in Albert Wardin's Baptists Around the World. The signal example of a small Baptist body preserving and telling its history is undoubtedly that of the Seventh Day Baptists, and for this we are deeply indebted to the selfless labors of Don A. Sanford. (36)

As suggested at the beginning of the essay, this list of topics for research is by no means exhaustive. However, it does indicate a number of ways in which we may go. It is now time for us to move beyond the controversies that have for so long kept us focused on our internal differences and internecine conflicts. Plenty of new territory exists which needs to be explored, and I would encourage all Baptist historians to turn their attention toward these new directions. Much remains to be done.

(1.) I wish to dedicate this essay to the memory of William R. Estep, Jr. (1920-2000), of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Although I never studied with him, he was nevertheless one of my mentors. He took a personal interest in me and encouraged me to broaden my grasp of the Christian heritage by looking at the Mennonite roots of the Baptist tradition and to bring my understanding of the political dimensions of modern evangelicalism to bear on the problems facing Baptists today. Without his friendly nudging and kind words on many occasions, I would never have ventured this far into the field of Baptist history.

(2.) Thematic issue, "Baptist Historical Studies: A Worldwide Enterprise," American Baptist Quarterly 22 (September 2003); Richard V. Pierard, "The Globalization of Baptist History," American Baptist Quarterly 19 (June 2000), 165. Many of the Heritage and Identity Commission papers have been published in the three quinquennial volumes of the Baptist World Alliance's Study and Research Division: Faith, Life, and Witness, ed. William H. Brackney with Ruby J. Burke (Birmingham, AL: Samford University Press, 1990); Baptist Faith and Witness, ed. William H. Brackney and L. A. (Tony) Cupit (Birmingham, AL: Samford University Press, 1995); and Baptist Faith and Witness Book 2, ed. L. A. (Tony) Cupit (McLean, VA: BWA, 1999).

(3.) Albert W. Wardin, Jr., ed., Baptists Around the World: A Comprehensive Handbook (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1995).

(4.) Walter B. Shurden, Not a Silent People: Controversies That Have Shaped Southern Baptists (Nashville: Broadman, 1972); revised ed. (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1995).

(5.) Mark Newman, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001).

(6.) Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

(7.) This theme has been insightfully revisited in the Spring 2004 (vol. 39, no. 2) thematic issue of Baptist History and Heritage

(8.) Critics charged Elliott with "liberalism" because he utilized modern critical scholarship instead of literally interpreting the first eleven chapters of Genesis in his volume The Message of Genesis in the Broadman Bible Commentary series. He was fired from his post at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the book withdrawn from print.

(9.) W.A. Criswell, Why I Preach that the Bible Is Literally True (Nashville: Broadman, 1969); Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), and "The Bible in the Balance (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979).

(10.) Bernard Green, Crossing the Boundaries: A History of the European Baptist Federation (Didcot, U.K.: Baptist Historical Society, 1999).

(11.) Frederick S. Downs, The Mighty Works of God. A Brief History of the Council of" the Baptist Churches of North East India: The Mission Period 1836-1950 (Guahati, Assam: Christian Literature Centre, 1971); Christianity in North East India: Historical Perspectives (Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1983); Essays on Christianity in North-East India (New Delhi: Indus Pub. Co., 1994). See also Herman G. Tegenfeldt, A Century of Growth: The Kachin Baptist Church of Burma (South Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1974).

(12.) Lydia Huffman Hoyle, "Queens in the Kingdom: Southern Baptist Mission Education for Girls, 1953-1970," in Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century, ed. Dana L. Robert (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 101-12.

(13.) Catherine B. Allen, A Century to Celebrate: History of Woman's Missionary Union (Birmingham, AL: WMU 1987); Alma Hunt, History of Woman's Missionary Union (Nashville: Convention Press, 1976); T. Laine Scales, All That Fits a Woman: Training Southern Baptist Women for Charity and Mission, 1907-1926 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).

(14.) DeLane M. Ryals, "Southern Baptist Women Ministering in Metro New York, 1970-1995," Baptist History and Heritage 39 (Spring 2004), 90-99.

(15.) Catherine B. Allen, "Shifting Sands for Southern Baptist Women in Missions," in Robert, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers, 113-26.

(16.) See, for example, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The story of the family of Adoniram Judson, the dramatic events of the first American foreign mission, and the course of evangelical religion in the nineteenth century (New York: Free Press, 1980).

(17.) Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

(18.) Cecil R Staton, Jr., ed., Why I Am a Baptist: Reflections on Being Baptist in the 21st Century (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1999).

(19.) Horace O. Russell, The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church: Jamaican Baptist Missions to West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).

(20.) Leroy Fitts, Lott Carey: First Black Missionary to Africa (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1978); The Lott Carey Legacy of African American Missions (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1994).

(21.) Sandy D. Martin, Black Baptists and African Missions: The Origins of a Movement, 1880-1915 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989).

(22.) Kwang Chung Kim and R. Stephen Warner, eds., Korean American and Their Religions: Pilgrims and Missionaries from a Different Shore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

(23.) Brooks Hays, Politics Is My Parish: An Autobiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Mark O. Hatfield, Not Quite So Simple (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976); Against the Grain: Reflections of a Rebel Republican (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2001); Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (Nashville: Broadman, 1975), Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam, 1982), An Hour before Daylight: Memories of My Rural Boyhood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

(24.) My own works provide a starting point for those interested in the question: Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988 [Japanese translation, Tokyo: Reitaku University Press, 2003]); Pierard, "Civil Religion" in The Encyclopedia of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1999), 1:583-588; and Pierard, "'In God we trust.., all others pay cash': Reflections on Civil Religion," Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice 10, no. 3 (August 2002): 11-19.

(25.) By far the most thorough discussion of this matter is the two-part series by Stephen M. Stookey, "In God We Trust?: Evangelical Historiography and the Quest for a Christian America," Southwestern Journal of Theology 41 (Spring & Summer 1999), 41-69 and 5-37.

(26.) Albert W. Wardin, Jr., Evangelical Sectarians in the Russian Empire and the USSR (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995), and Gottfried F. Alf: Pioneer of the Baptist Movement in Poland (Brentwood, TN: Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2003). Important books include Walter Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals since World War II (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1981), and Heinrich Lowen, Russische Freikirchen: Die Geschichte der Evangeliums-christen und Baptisten bis 1944 (Bonn: Verlag fur Kultur und Wissenschaff., 1995).

(27.) George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

(28.) Bill J. Leonard, ed., Christianity in Appalachia: Profiles in Regional Pluralism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

(29.) Loyal Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

(30.) Deborah Vansau McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

(31.) John G. Crowley, Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South: 1815 to the Present (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

(32.) Howard Dorgan, Giving Glory to God in Appalachia: Worship Practices of Six Baptist Subdenominations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); In the Hands of a Happy God: The "No-Hellers" of Central Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997). The latter is an account of the Primitive Baptist universalist churches.

(33.) Michael R. Pelt, A History of Original Free Will Baptists (Mount Olive, NC: Mount Olive College Press, 1966); William E Davidson, The Free Will Baptists in History, rev. ed. (Nashville: Randall House Publications, 2001); John W. Duggar, The Baptist Missionary Association of America, 1950-1986 (Texarkana, TX: Baptist Publishing House, 1988); Robert Ashcraff, gen. ed., History of the American Baptist Association (Texarkana, TX: American Baptist Association, 2000). A substantial history of the Baptist Bible Fellowship is lacking, but useful factual information about it can be found in George W. Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1973).

(34.) Paul N. Tassell, Quest for Faithfulness: The Account of a Unique Fellowship of Churches (Schaumburg, IL: Regular Baptist Press, 1991); Bruce Shelley, A History of Conservative Baptists (Wheaton, IL: Conservative Baptist Press, 1981).

(35.) Leroy Fitts, A History of Black Baptists (Nashville: Broadman, 1985); William L. Banks, A History of Black Baptists in the United States (Philadelphia: W. L. Banks, 1987); James M. Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986).

(36.) See especially Sanford's A Choosing People: The History of Seventh Day Baptists (Nashville:

Richard V. Pierard is Stephen Phillips Professor of History at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.