Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 67:2 (Jun 2024)
Article: Reassessing American Baptist Antimissionism
Author: Casey G. Mccall

JETS 67:2 (June 2024) p. 325

Reassessing American Baptist Antimissionism

Casey G. Mccall*

* Casey G. McCall is the lead pastor at Ashland Community Church in La Grange, Kentucky. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: By 1816, American Baptists in the South began to voice dissent toward the emergent missionary movement growing largely out of New England Protestantism. Historians have long pointed to antimissionism as an example of theological diversity within early American evangelicalism, treating it as a homogenous theological movement rising out of high Calvinism. This study situates antimissionism in its cultural and political context in order to show that the earliest versions of antimissionism were rooted in a longstanding Jeffersonian political mythology combined with primitivism and only later developed predestinarian grounds. It seeks to reassess antimissionism as a cultural and political protest.

Key words: antimissionism, Baptist history, Jeffersonianism, primitivism, American Protestantism, populism

When the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville travelled the United States in 1831 to observe America’s unique system of democracy, he marveled that, despite constitutional separation of church and state, Christianity maintained tremendous influence over society. Religion thrived in America, not from the top down, through government mandate, but from the bottom up, through grassroots organizing and voluntary submission to Christian mores. America showed Tocqueville something unique and counterintuitive—that religion could succeed apart from government establishment.1 Tocqueville’s visit to America happened to come on the heels of an explosion of organized Protestant missionary activity that sought to instill Christian values within every level of society. To mitigate fears of moral corruption as America’s borders expanded westward under what many considered an immoral Jeffersonian government, eastern Protestants sought to save the Christian republic through missions. New England Federalists—mainly Congregationalists and Presbyterians—worked to organize likeminded Protestants toward the goal of evangelizing and civilizing the nation. Believing that no republic could survive without a virtuous citizenry, thousands answered the call to missionary service.2 According to Sam Haselby, in the forty years between 1787 and 1827, New

JETS 67:2 (June 2024) p. 326

Englanders alone established 933 Protestant voluntary associations and poured immeasurable financial resources into missions.3

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