The Southern Baptist Convention ( SBC ) is a United States-based, mostly conservative Christian denomination. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the US with over 16 million members and more than 42,000 churches.
The word Southern in Southern Baptist Convention stems from its having been founded and rooted in the Southern United States. The SBC became a separate denomination in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, following a regional split with northern Baptists over the issues of slavery and missions. Since the 1940s, the SBC has lost some of its regional identity. While still heavily concentrated in the US South, the SBC has member churches across America and has 42 state conventions.
Southern Baptists put a heavy emphasis on the individual conversion experience including a public immersion in water for baptism and a corresponding rejection of infant baptism. SBC churches are evangelical in doctrine and practice. Specific beliefs based on biblical interpretation can vary somewhat due to the congregational governance system that gives autonomy to individual local Baptist churches.
History
Origins
Further information: Baptists in the United StatesMost early Baptists in the British colonies came from England in the seventeenth century, when the established Church of England persecuted them for their distinct religious views. Baptists like Roger Williams and Dr. John Clarke immigrated to New England in the 1630s.
The oldest Baptist church in the South, First Baptist Church, Charleston, South Carolina, was organized in 1682 under the leadership of Rev. William Screven. A Baptist church was formed in Virginia in 1715 through the preaching of Robert Norden, and another in North Carolina in 1727 through the ministry of Paul Palmer. By 1740, there were about eight Baptist churches in the colonies of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, with an estimated 300-400 members. New members, both black and white, were converted chiefly by northern Baptist preachers who traveled in the South during the Great Awakening. Baptists welcomed African Americans to more active roles than did other denominations. As a result, black congregations and churches were founded in South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia before the Revolution.
In Virginia and most southern colonies before the Revolution, the Anglican Church was the state-established church and was supported by general taxes, as it was in Britain. It opposed the rapid spread of Baptists in the South. Particularly in Virginia, many Baptist preachers were prosecuted for "disturbing the peace" by preaching without licenses from the Anglican Church. Both Patrick Henry and James Madison defended Baptist preachers prior to the American Revolution in cases considered significant to the history of religious freedom. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786 by the Virginia General Assembly. Madison later took his own ideas and the ideas encompassed in this document about the importance of religious freedom to the Constitutional Convention, where he ensured they were incorporated into the constitution. When the American Revolution began, most Baptists became active patriots in the cause of independence.
Triennial Convention
Main article: Triennial ConventionBy the mid-1800s, numerous social, cultural, economic, and political differences existed among business owners of the North, farmers of the West, and planters of the South. These differences led to the formation of three separate Baptist national societies: the Triennial Convention, the Home Mission Society, and Baptists in the South.
Slavery was the most critical issue among Baptists. Early Baptist and Methodist evangelicals in the South before the Revolution had promoted the view of the common man's equality before God, which embraced African Americans. They challenged the hierarchies of class and race, and urged planters to abolish slavery.
Baptists struggled to gain a foothold in the South. The next generation of Baptist preachers accommodated themselves to the society. Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery, they began to interpret the Bible as supporting its practice. In the two decades after the Revolution, preachers abandoned their pleas that slaves be manumitted. Many Baptist preachers even wanted to preserve the rights of ministers themselves to be slaveholders. The Triennial Convention and the Home Mission Society reaffirmed their neutrality concerning slavery.
Georgia Baptists decided to test the claimed neutrality by recommending a slaveholder to the Home Mission Society as a missionary in the South. Home Mission Society's board refused to appoint a slaveholder as a missionary, a decision that the Baptists in the South saw as an infringement of their rights.
A secondary issue that disturbed the churches in the South was the perception that the American Baptist Home Mission Society did not appoint a proportionate number of missionaries to the southern region of the U.S. This was likely a result of the Society's not appointing slave owners as missionaries.
Baptists in different regions also preferred different types of denominational organization. Baptists in the north preferred a loosely structured society composed of individuals who paid annual dues, with each society usually focused on a single ministry. Baptists in southern churches preferred a more centralized organization of congregations composed of churches patterned after their associations, with a variety of ministries brought under the direction of one denominational organization.
Formation of the SBC
The increasing tensions and discontent of Baptists from the South regarding national criticism of slavery and issues over missions led to their withdrawal from the national Baptist organizations. They met at the First Baptist Church of Augusta, in May 1845. At this historic meeting they formed a new convention, naming it the Southern Baptist Convention. They elected William Bullein Johnson (1782-1862) as the new convention's first president. He had served as president of the Triennial Convention in 1841.
Consequences and repentance of early racism
Residual effects of the decision to separate from other Baptists in defense of white supremacy and the institution of slavery have been long lived. A survey by SBC's Home Mission Board in 1968 showed that only eleven percent of Southern Baptist churches would admit Americans of African descent. African Americans gathered to develop their own churches early on, including some before the American Revolution, to practice their distinct form of American Christianity away from attempts by whites at control. Within the Baptist denomination, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans established separate associations.
During the conservative resurgence, the Southern Baptist Convention of 1995 voted to adopt a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery. The resolution repenting racism marked the denomination's first formal acknowledgment that racism played a role in its early history. By the early 21st century there were increasing numbers of ethnically diverse congregations within the convention. In 2008, almost 20 percent were estimated to be majority African-American, Asian or Hispanic and there were an estimated one million African-American members.
Historical controversies
During its history, the Southern Baptist Convention has had several periods of major internal controversy. The denomination's lack of a hierarchical form of government (polity) lends itself toward public displays of disagreement.
- Landmarkism which led to the formation of Gospel Missions and the American Baptist Association as well as many unaffiliated independent churches.
- The "Whitsitt controversy" (1896–1899), in which Dr. William H. Whitsitt, professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, set forth his theory that the English Baptists did not begin to baptize by immersion until 1641, when a part of the Anabaptists, as they were then called, began to practice immersion.
- The Southern Baptist Convention conservative resurgence of 1979 was a major internal disagreement that captured national attention. Russell H. Dilday, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1978 to 1994, described the resurgence/takeover as having fragmented Southern Baptist fellowship and as being "far more serious than a controversy." Dilday described it as being "a self-destructive, contentious, one-sided feud that at times took on combative characteristics." After 1979, Southern Baptists have become polarized into two major groups—moderates and conservatives. All leaders of Southern Baptist agencies were replaced with presumably more conservative (often dubbed "fundamentalist" by dissenters) to reflect the manner in which the majority of messengers (delegates) to the annual meeting of the SBC voted.
Today
The SBC has grown from its regional, sectionalist roots to a major force in American and international Christianity. There are Southern Baptist congregations in every state and territory in the United States, though the greatest numbers remain in the Southern United States, its traditional stronghold.
The national scope of the Convention inspired
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