The Southern Baptist Convention

A Research Paper on the “The Contribution of Baptists in the Struggle for Religious Freedom”

I sat down at my kitchen table with Michael Bruxvoort, a friend and fellow Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on October 25th, 2015. We laughed and talked about his journey through life and all the memories, obstacles and pleasures along the way. Among the many topics we spoke about, the ones that seemed most relevant to him and myself were: the family dynamics of religion within his household, his process of religion through secular spaces and lastly, his transition to Chapel Hill, NC and making it his home. Our conversation through Michael 's life shows how his faith has shaped him to be the man he is today. Through this paper, I will explain and analyze these topics in hopes of better understanding geographies of religion.

There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious. If a pastor has offspring by a woman not his wife, the church dismiss him, if she is a white woman; but if she is colored, it does not hinder his continuing to be their good shepherd. (Jacobs 64)

The Making of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message. A. J. Smith Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008.

Between 1820 and 1860, Americans constructed 40,000 new churches compared to the 10,000 they constructed in the 40 years before 1820. At the end of the revival period, ”one-third of all Americans attended church regularly.”(P.400) Many of the early revival preachers embraced Christian evangelicalism, the established groups sought to take advantage of the popular enthusiasm to build their particular denominations. Methodists and the Baptists established themselves as leading American denominations as a result of the Second Great Awakening. The two faiths had a mutual sense of affinity with regard to doctrine, but the Baptists created a radically decentralized hierarchy that empowered local ministers and individual churches.

It can be assumed that Christianity shaped slave culture in several ways such as developing a common bond among slaves. At the some time, it could also be argued that slavery altered Christianity in various ways including the formation of Methodist and Baptist denominations. However, these were not the only manners in which both cultures had an effect on each other. Black converts dramatically increased the number of Christians in the New World. The ideas instilled in slaves by Christianity gave some slaves thoughts of rebellion and influenced African-American music and dance. Not to mention the church was a major supporter of the proslavery argument which conveyed slavery as a positive thing during the

The Holy Bible authorities people to be evangelists for Jesus Christ, and they will impart their beliefs on others, therefore knowing the doctrine of Jesus Christ is important.

In 1844, there was great division over the issue of slavery. The Baptists of the South felt that the Northerners’ position that “‘slaveholding brethren were less than followers of Jesus’ effectively obliged slaveholding Southerners to leave the fellowship” . There was also disagreement between the Northerners and Southerners over the number of missionaries being supported and sent to the South (probably because of

Along with the division between rural and urban plantation missions, in the 1830s and 1840s, concern arose among Southern churchmen after acknowledging that multitudes of districts in the Southwest had churches that could not contain even “one-tenth of the Negro populations; besides others in which there are no churches at all”. The fact that nearly all Southwestern slave states lacked Christian institutions before plantation missions meant that religion played little to no role in the lives of the majority of slaves residing within these boundaries. Even after missionaries brought the gospel to both rural and urban slaves at home, the prevalence of plantations missions varied from state to state. This deviation shaped the role of religion in the lives of black slaves depending on which state they lived and worked in. Although missionaries urged all slaveholders to actively participate in catechizing their slaves, since the plantation mission movement geographically centered in lowland South Carolina and Georgia masters and

The denomination for the Jim Crow Laws first originated in the mid 1800s from a character in a Minstrel Show. The Minstrel Show was one of the first forms of American regalement ever engendered and took place in 1843. The exhibition was performed by successors of African American musical composition and dance routine actors. The first Minstrel Show was in Virginia and commenced by a group of four men from Virginia who all painted their faces ebony and performed a minute musical composition and dance skit in a minute theater in Incipient York City. Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white actor, performed the Jim Crow Minstrel Show. Rice’s inspiration emanated from an older ebony man whom would sing and dance in Louisville, Kentucky. Rice’s skit ended in the same chorus as the old ebony mans musical composition which went like this "Wheel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb"ry time I

Religious justifications played a significant function in the intellectual maintenance and creation of racial hierarchies’ construction. According to Finkelman, the religious defenses of slavery fit together with the White’s assumption about race. Ministers from the South all agreed that only Slavery could impose Christian morality upon the Blacks. In addition, they urged Masters to respect marriages between slaves by avoiding sexual exploitation of their slaves. In this way, Southerners justified slavery as an institution, which proved beneficial to slaves due to the generous and humane side based on Christianity.

Church of the Brethren does not accept abortion. Participating in abortion is not support their beliefs. Church of the Brethren is a denomination that was formed to continue their practices their own way. They started as a small group and to this day still recruit new members. They solely use the New Testament as their source of guidance for the practice they preach. Rational Choice theory explains Church of the Brethren 's position in opposing abortion.

Long before their contact with whites, Africans were a strongly religious, and deeply spiritual people. During the early history of slavery, the African American spirituality was often seen by whites as a pagan faith. These rituals and dogmas were seen by whites as Voodoo, Hoodoo, Witchcraft, and superstitions. They often commented on these "pagan practices," and fetishes, and were threatened by them. As a result, great effort was put on eradicating these practices, and many were lost within a generation.# Although tremendous efforts was placed on eradicating the “superstitious” religious beliefs of the African slaves, they were not immediately introduced to the religion of white slave masters, Christianity. Many planters resisted the idea of converting slaves to Christianity out of a fear that baptism would change a slave's legal status. The black population was generally untouched by Christianity until the religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. The Bible was manipulated to support the institution of slavery and its inhumane practices. Christianity was used to suppress and conform slaves. Slaveholders, priests, and those tied to the Church undermined the beliefs of the millions of African-Americans converts.# White Christianity was used to justify the enslavement of blacks. By the early nineteenth century, slaveholders had adopted the view that Christianity would make slaves more submissive and orderly.

The General Conference of the United Methodist Church voted in 1968 to abolish the African-American Central Jurisdiction and to merge all churches regardless of race under the new United Methodist Church. It set a goal for each Annual Conference area to merge together by 1972. South Carolina began discussions on merger as early as 1966, but it took until 1972 to accomplish the goal. The two conferences, the all-white 1785 Conference, and the African-American 1866 Conference merged at the 1972 Annual Conference meetings in Spartanburg. This paper will focus on the issues that faced the merger starting with the first Plan for Merger in 1970 until the completion of the merger in 1972.

It has always been widely discussed in the media about the way certain issues currently present in our culture should be approached by the church. One of the most delicate questions is how to deal with the awareness of the church and its followers of the complex biological and psychological nature of human sexuality. It is stated in The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, 2012 that “God’s grace is available to all, that nothing can separate us from the love of God.” Besides, Methodists claim to be “in respectful dialogue with those with whom we disagree, to explore the sources of our differences, to honor the sacred worth of all persons.” Despite such tolerant, promising doctrines, a huge amount of the discussions on the topic of LGBT come down to accusations and black-and-white judgments having nothing to do with Christian dialogue.