Why is it when you go to the South of the USA almost everyone is a Baptist? Sometimes you’ll find an Italian or Greek person, and even they will be of the Baptist religion?
How did so many people get converted apparently en masse? When did it happen? And how does religious freedom and the separation of church and state factor in it?
:):):)
Having an Italian or Greek lastname doesn’t make someone Italian or Greek. A lot of those people will have already been born into a Baptist family, same as those with English, German or French lastnames; I note you do not expect these to be Episcopalian, Lutheran, Catholic, Animist or Muslim. Others may have been through different denominations along their lives. Religious freedom allows people of any genetic, religious and cultural background to practice whichever religion they want to.
There’s a Baptist church on every corner. The smallest hamlets will have 3 or 4 baptist churches.
There’s also many split offs from the basic Baptist church:
Southern Baptist
Missionary Baptist
Hard shell Baptist
More I cannot remember.
The separation of church and state has nothing to do with it except it keeps the state out of the church and church out of the state.
IMHO
Baptists come in many divergent varieties, and formal seminary training is not required in many groups, unlike more mainstream denominations. Thus it’s pretty easy to self-ordain and setup an independent church with certain tax benefits.
In the years before the Civil War (sometime around the 1840s, I think), the Baptist church in the south split over the issue of slavery. The new Southern Baptist faction was opposed to abolition and was also opposed to civil rights for blacks (even if they were freemen), so you can see how it might be fairly popular in the South, given the beliefs of most Southerners at that time.
If you compare that to other churches, the Methodists for example were also split over the issue of slavery, with northern Methodists strongly opposed to it and southern Methodists being much more tolerant of it. However, unlike the Baptists, the southern Methodists were not as clearly supportive of slavery. Southern Baptist clergy were free to own slaves. Southern Methodist clergy were not supposed to own slaves (though some did). Most other protestant Christian religions in the south held similar views (i.e. the official position of the church was that they tolerated slavery but did not recommend it).
The Catholic church didn’t split, but while the Pope vocally opposed slavery, church leaders in the U.S. were much more ambivalent about the issue.
If you are a white southern racist in the 1800s, are you going to feel more welcome in the church that openly supports your racism and slavery, or are you going to feel more welcome in the church that only tolerates it and recommends against it, or only locally supports slavery while the church’s leadership opposes it? You are going to go to the church that openly supports racism and slavery, of course.
Quakers were strongly opposed to slavery, and were largely responsible for getting the whole abolition movement going in the North. Their strong anti-slavery stance was probably the strongest factor preventing the Quaker religion from spreading into the South.
Many black slaves were introduced to Christianity through the Baptist church. Many evangelicals thought that it was their duty to bring Christianity to the slaves. Note that both pro-slave and anti-slave factions of the Baptists both used various Bible passages to support their claims. In most areas of the South, blacks were not allowed to lead churches, so blacks had to go to white churches (they were segregated, of course, with pews specifically for whites only and other pews set aside for blacks). After the Civil War, blacks were finally allowed to lead their own churches, so they split off from the white churches and formed their own branches of the Baptist church.
I don’t know enough about the Baptist church to say why they remained popular through the 20th century and to modern times, but the Baptist church certainly got a large boost during the 19th century due to the divisive issue of slavery and the fact that the church split into factions that strongly supported that faction’s beliefs.
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That’s how its work in **THEORY **but listen to all those Baptisst et all calling Hilary Clinton Satan’s spawn, and Barak Obama the same or the antichrist…then you’ll get a true idea of how much religious groups stay out of politics.
In Pico-Union/Koreatown there’s a storefront Evangelical church squeezed in somewhere practically in the middle of every block.
I’ve often thought that, if I ever fall upon really hard times, I can always put on a suit, borrow a tambourine, rent out a cheap storefront, brush up on my Pentecostal Spanish, and easily get by with a new career.
What is a “hard shell Baptist”?
I have an image of a church where the pastor wears a lobster costume?
Primitive Baptists who are opposed to mission societies and, for most of them, the use of musical instruments in worship:
A subset of Hard-Shell Baptists are Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists:
What’s this about two seeds? Satan, of course!
This is untrue.
The Southern Baptist church has historically been a pillar of white supremacy, and the south is chock full of white supremacists (though they call themselves “race realists” now.)
The SBC passed a resolution apologizing for its past behavior in 1995. Many members disliked that, but they haven’t deserted the church because (A) it’s not like the church is actually doing anything concrete about it, and (B) it’s not like there’s a more extreme conservative church that people are going to switch to.
There are about 15 million affiliated with the Southern Baptists, which makes it large but hardly “everybody” when you consider that the South has 124 million people. Plus, it’s really, really important to remember that the SB is more than 90% white. If you say “everybody,” you’re cutting out half the population at a stroke. The SB is a few percent black, and there are other majority black baptist denominations.
It’s true that SB is politically and culturally powerful, though, and that makes it stand out. But even as a generalization, “everybody” is a poor one.
There are a LOT of Methodists, Episcopalians, and especially Catholics in the South.
The Baptists are just the loudest and most nosy of all the denominations, which is why you KNOW when you’ve met one. “Have you been saved?” “What church do you go to?” are not questions that most denominations will bring up within 5 minutes of meeting you. But they are with Baptists.
There is a small sect of Universalist Baptists, who believe that God is too loving to not eventually save everyone. The most famous member of this group was probably bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley.
A lot of it was because how the various Christian sects decided to evangelize. Some of them, like Catholics, built one mission at a time, sending ordained ministers/priests out as fast as they could. Methodists sent out lay ministers, which were a lot more plentiful.
As for the Baptists, well, every time the Baptists had an argument, they split. Baptists didn’t really have organized seminaries in the beginning, so anybody who could read a Bible and preach on it could become a minister, which eliminated staffing problems. The Baptists who believed in free will split with the Baptists who believed in predestination. The pro-slavery and anti-slavery Baptists split. Black and white Baptists were split, etc. You could end up with multiple Baptist churches in a small town, each of them a tiny bit different from the others, whereas Lutherans would pretty much have one church for each ethnic group (Germans vs. Scandinavians), and Catholics were limited by how many priests were available.
There are a lot of Methodists in the south, it’s the “second” religion. There aren’t many Episcopalians (they’re not concentrated in any particular area I think, maybe the northeast). There are very, very few Catholics except in New Orleans (and not necessarily so in all parts of Louisiana). Plus e.g. Cuban and Mexican Catholics in Florida and Texas.
Catholics in the south range from 26% of Louisiana to 4% (!) of Mississippi.
It’s an easy path. “Stealin’ in the name of the Lord” is traditional. “Preach a little gospel; sell a couple bottles of Doctor Good.” Don’t forget [del]groping[/del] faith-healing, and casting-out-Satan podcast subscriptions. I’ll ordain you if you wish. For a percentage.
Bonus plan: Forge a personal ministry to deal hands-on with infidelity, frigidity, substance abuse and dealing, gambling, auto theft, and loss of faith. Be sure to collect tithes - cash or in kind.
This page has a fair amount of detail on the religious demographics of the southern US.
It seems Baptist denominations make up about 27% of the population (divided into 11% Southern Baptist Convention, 6 % other evangelical Baptist denominations, 3% mainline Baptist denominations, 7% historically Black Baptist denominations). The Catholics clock in at 15%, which makes them the largest single denomination, and the second largest of the Christian traditions, as analysed by Pew. The Methodists aren’t the “second religion”, according to this data; all Methodist denominations together come in at less than 7%.
When it happened was during the Second Great Awakening. This was a religious revival movement that swept through the United States from around 1800 to 1830. It was a movement based on emotional religious sermons addressed to very large crowds of people at public gatherings which were aimed at converting large groups of listeners.
There had been some Baptists before the SGA but they were a minor sect. But their message fit in well with the movement and they expanded greatly.
Note, however, that this varies widely across “the South.” In Mississippi, e.g., the various Baptist denominations (including historically black churches) include 50% of adults; the Methodists’ 6% does place them second, just ahead of the nondenominational evangelical churches (5%) and Catholics and Pentecostal (4% each). Meanwhile, in Texas the Catholics (23%) outnumber the Baptists (20%), doubtless due to the large Hispanic population, whereas in Oklahoma the opposite is true: 30% of adults are Baptist and 8% are Catholic.
And, as mentioned above, Baptists have the capacity to expand. Baptists lack a hierarchical structure. They lack an educational requirement. They lack an ordination requirement.