Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 20:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Almost Baptists: Baptistic Pedobaptists In American History (1650–1950)
Author: Obbie Tyler Todd

Almost Baptists: Baptistic Pedobaptists In American History (1650–1950)

Obbie Tyler Todd

Obbie Tyler Todd serves as pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, and adjunct professor of theology at Luther Rice College and Seminary.

When Lutheran historian Martin Marty referred to the “baptistification” of America in 1983, he was referring to a fairly recent phenomenon. In the twentieth century, Baptist ideas like believer’s baptism, congregational polity, and local church autonomy had been absorbed into America’s Protestant churches, whether or not they actually identified as Baptist. The result was, according to Marty, the “most dramatic shift in power style on the Christian scene in our time, perhaps in our epoch.”1 With the rise of non-denominational churches and other denominations which mirror Baptist teachings, one can certainly see Marty’s point. Nevertheless, if indeed such a thing as “baptistification” ever existed, it began long before the twentieth century. After the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, Yale President Timothy Dwight (1752–1817) bemoaned the rise of “Separatists” who no longer wished to associate themselves with the state church in Connecticut. Dwight believed that these “Separate” Congregationalists, also known as “New Lights,” were really just Antinomians in disguise, “most of whom for the purpose of avoiding the legal obligation of supporting ministers became Baptists.”2 In Dwight’s establishmentarian view, the Separate Congregationalist church was just a half-way house for tax-dodging Baptists. As the grandson of the famed Puritan Jonathan Edwards and the so-called “Federalist Pope of Connecticut,” Dwight found it difficult to believe that Congregationalists would become Baptists out of

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conviction rather than convenience.3 Although Dwight unfairly judged Baptists, he made a rather astute observation about Baptist-leaning pedobaptists: once Congregationalists began clamoring for a church separated from the state, it was only a matter of time before they rejected infant baptism. He wasn’t wrong. One such Separate Congregationalist from Connecticut, Shubal Stearns (1706–1771), founded Sandy Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina, arguably the most prolific Baptist church in American history.

To some in Connecticut, revivalism itself was a kind of “baptistification” of America. When Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) criticized the individualism of revivalists, he dismissed it as a “Baptist” view of human development, wherein a person “becomes, at some certain m...