Baptist
From RationalWiki
The Baptists are a loose grouping of different Protestant Christian sects that range from moderate to extremely conservative. The largest (and best known) sect within the United States is the "Southern Baptists", formed in the late 1800s because the broader group refused to allow slaveowners to be missionaries in Africa. They became rather more liberal in the early part of the 20th century, but were taken over by reactionaries in the 1970s. The American Baptist Association is a somewhat more moderate Baptist denomination. Smaller denominations include the largely black National Baptist Convention, the fundamentalist Bible Baptist Fellowship, the Free Will Baptists, Missionary Baptists, the Calvinist Primitive Baptists, Regular Baptists, and last but not least the fundamentalist Independent Baptist movement which thinks all the other Baptists are too "liberal".
Overall, Baptists believe in adult baptism (rather than baptism of infants) and in the supremacy of the individual conscience. A Baptist cannot be excommunicated from the church in any way, though they might be shunned by the individual members. Moreover, the structure of the Baptist church is rather democratic, with congregations sending envoys to large gatherings, where general guidance and matters of dogma are decided. Each congregation is then free to ignore whatever is decided at those meetings.[1]
[edit] In the media
- See Oh Brother Where Art Thou (Coen & Coen) for a particularly stirring trip "down to the riverside". Along with many other great songs and general hilarity.
- In Matewan (a good film about striking West Virginia miners), the two churches in town are the "the Missionary folks, they's the hard-shell Baptists, and there's the Free Will folks, which is your soft-shell Baptists."
- The People vs. Larry Flynt has two good Baptist students at Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College breaking the news to the good reverend that Falwell has been parodied in an issue of Hustler. The question is, what were these two good Baptist boys doing with an issue of Hustler?
