Baptists

====United States====
[[File:Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site August 2016 01 (Ebenezer Baptist Church Horizon Sanctuary).jpg|thumb|[[Ebenezer Baptist Church]] in [[Atlanta]], affiliated with the [[Progressive National Baptist Convention]]]]

Leading up to the [[American Civil War]], Baptists became embroiled in the controversy over [[slavery in the United States]]. Whereas in the [[First Great Awakening]], [[Methodist]] and Baptist preachers had opposed slavery and urged [[manumission]], over the decades they made more of an accommodation with the institution. They worked with slaveholders in the [[Southern United States|South]] to urge a paternalistic institution. Both denominations made direct appeals to slaves and free Blacks for conversion. The Baptists particularly allowed them active roles in congregations. By the mid-19th century, northern Baptists tended to oppose slavery. As tensions increased, in 1844 the Home Mission Society refused to appoint a slaveholder as a missionary who had been proposed by Georgia. It noted that missionaries could not take servants with them, and also that the board did not want to appear to condone slavery.<ref>Robert E. Johnson, ''A Global Introduction to Baptist Churches'', Cambridge University Press, UK, 2010, p. 150</ref>

In 1845 a group of churches in favor of slavery and in disagreement with the [[abolitionism]] of the Triennial Convention (now American Baptist Churches USA) left to form the Southern Baptist Convention.<ref>Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, Charles Reagan Wilson, ''Encyclopedia of Religion in the South'', Mercer University Press, US, 2005, p. 796</ref> They believed that the Bible sanctions slavery and that it was acceptable for Christians to own slaves. They believed slavery was a human institution which Baptist teaching could make less harsh. By this time many [[Planter class|planters]] were part of Baptist congregations, and some of the denomination's prominent preachers, such as [[Basil Manly Sr.]], president of the [[University of Alabama]], were also planters who owned slaves.

As early as the late 18th century, Black Baptists began to organize separate churches, associations and mission agencies. Blacks set up some independent Baptist congregations in the South before the Civil War. White Baptist associations maintained some oversight of these churches.

In the postwar years, [[freedmen]] quickly left the white congregations and associations, setting up their own churches.<ref>{{citation|first=Leroy|last=Fitts|title=A History of Black Baptists|pages=43–106|place= Nashville, TN | publisher = Broadman Press|year=1985}}</ref> In 1866, the Consolidated American Baptist Convention, formed from Black Baptists of the South and West, helped southern associations set up Black state conventions, which they did in [[Alabama]], [[Arkansas]], [[Virginia]], [[North Carolina]], and [[Kentucky]]. In 1880, Black state conventions united in the national Foreign Mission Convention to support Black Baptist missionary work. Two other national Black conventions were formed, and in 1895 they united as the [[National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.|National Baptist Convention]]. This organization later went through its own changes, spinning off other conventions. It is the largest Black religious organization and the second-largest Baptist organization in the world.<ref>Fitts (1985)</ref> Baptists are numerically most dominant in the Southeast.<ref>{{citation|publisher=Department of Geography and Meteorology, [[Valparaiso University]] |format=[[GIFF]] |url=http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/baptist.gif |title=Baptists as a Percentage of all Residents, 2000 |url-status = dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100522053048/http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/baptist.gif |archive-date=22 May 2010 }}.</ref> In 2007, the [[Pew Research Center]]'s Religious Landscape Survey found that 45% of all African Americans identify with Baptist denominations, with the vast majority of those being within the historically Black tradition.<ref>{{cite web|title=A Religious Portrait of African-Americans| publisher = Pew forum | url= http://www.pewforum.org/A-Religious-Portrait-of-African-Americans.aspx| date = 2009-01-30 }}</ref>

[[File:Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mathew Ahmann in a crowd.) - NARA - 542015 - Restoration.jpg|thumb|[[Martin Luther King Jr.]], a Baptist minister and civil rights leader, at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, D.C. The [[Civil Rights movement]] divided various Baptists in the U.S., as slavery had more than a century earlier.]]

In the American South, the interpretation of the Civil War, abolition of slavery and postwar period has differed sharply by race since those years. Americans have often interpreted great events in religious terms. Historian [[Wilson Fallin]] contrasts the interpretation of Civil War and [[Reconstruction era|Reconstruction]] in White versus Black memory by analyzing Baptist sermons documented in Alabama. Soon after the Civil War, most Black Baptists in the South left the Southern Baptist Convention, reducing its numbers by hundreds of thousands or more.{{Citation needed|date=July 2018}} They quickly organized their own congregations and developed their own regional and state associations and, by the end of the 19th century, a national convention.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Brooks|first=Walter H.|date=1922-01-01|title=The Evolution of the Negro Baptist Church|journal=The Journal of Negro History|volume=7|issue=1|pages=11–22|doi=10.2307/2713578|issn=0022-2992|jstor=2713578|s2cid=149662445}}</ref>

White preachers in Alabama after Reconstruction expressed the view that:

{{blockquote|God had chastised them and given them a special mission – to maintain orthodoxy, strict biblicism, personal piety, and "traditional" race relations. Slavery, they insisted, had not been sinful. Rather, emancipation was a historical tragedy and the end of Reconstruction was a clear sign of God's favor.}}

Black preachers interpreted the Civil War, [[Emancipation Proclamation|Emancipation]] and Reconstruction as "God's gift of freedom." They had a gospel of liberation, having long identified with the [[Book of Exodus]] from slavery in the Old Testament. They took opportunities to exercise their independence, to worship in their own way, to affirm their worth and dignity, and to proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Most of all, they quickly formed their own churches, associations, and conventions to operate freely without white supervision. These institutions offered self-help and racial uplift, a place to develop and use leadership, and places for proclamation of the gospel of liberation. As a result, Black preachers said that God would protect and help him and God's people; God would be their rock in a stormy land.<ref>Wilson Fallin Jr., ''Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama'' (2007) pp. 52–53</ref>

The Southern Baptist Convention supported [[white supremacy]] and its results: [[Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era|disenfranchising most Blacks and many poor whites]] at the turn of the 20th century by raising barriers to voter registration, and passage of [[racial segregation]] laws that enforced the system of [[Jim Crow laws|Jim Crow]].<ref>{{Cite news|last=Hassan|first=Adeel|date=2018-12-12|title=Oldest Institution of Southern Baptist Convention Reveals Past Ties to Slavery|language=en-US|work=The New York Times|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/us/southern-baptist-slavery.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220101/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/us/southern-baptist-slavery.html |archive-date=2022-01-01 |url-access=limited|access-date=2020-06-18|issn=0362-4331}}{{cbignore}}</ref> Its members largely resisted the [[civil rights movement]] in the South, which sought to enforce their constitutional rights for public access and voting; and enforcement of midcentury federal civil rights laws.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Hankins|first1=Barry|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b59T47P8CaUC|title=Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture|publisher=University of Alabama Press|year=2002|isbn=978-0-8173-1142-1|location=Tuscaloosa, Alabama|page=74|language=en|quote=One scholar has called the proslavery racism that gave birth to the SBC the denomination's original sin. He argued that the controversy of the 1980s was part of God's judgment on a denomination that for most of its history engaged in racism, sexism, and a sense of denominational superiority. Whatever the merits of this particular argument, the Southern Baptist Convention, like most southern institutions, reflected, manifested, and in many instances led the racism of the region as a whole. Nowhere was this more prevalent than during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when most of the leaders of the opposition to desegregation were Southern Baptists. For just one example of a fairly typical Southern Baptist attitude, one can turn to Douglas Hudgins, pastor of one of the South's most prominent churches in the 1950s and 1960s, First Baptist, Jackson, Mississippi. Hudgins used the moderate theology of E. Y. Mullins, with its emphasis on individualism and soul competency, to argue that the Christian faith had nothing to do with a corporate, societal problem like segregation. He, therefore, refused to speak up for African Americans and, in more ways than he could have known, helped inspire a whole generation of Southern Baptists to rest comfortably in their belief that segregation was natural and that the Civil Rights movement was a perversion of the gospel.}}</ref>

In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that recognized the failure of their ancestors to protect the civil rights of African Americans.<ref>Marisa Iati, [https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2018/12/12/southern-baptist-conventions-flagship-seminary-admits-all-four-its-founders-owned-slaves/ Southern Baptist Convention's flagship seminary details its racist, slave-owning past in stark report] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211221055908/https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2018/12/12/southern-baptist-conventions-flagship-seminary-admits-all-four-its-founders-owned-slaves/ |date=21 December 2021 }}, washingtonpost.com, US, 12 December 2018</ref> More than 20,000 Southern Baptists registered for the meeting in Atlanta. The resolution declared that messengers, as SBC delegates are called, "unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin" and "lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest." It offered an apology to all African Americans for "condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime" and repentance for "racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously." Although Southern Baptists have condemned racism in the past, this was the first time the convention, predominantly White since the Reconstruction era, had specifically addressed the issue of slavery.

The statement sought forgiveness "from our African-American brothers and sisters" and pledged to "eradicate racism in all its forms from Southern Baptist life and ministry." In 1995, about 500,000 members of the 15.6-million-member denomination were African Americans and another 300,000 were ethnic minorities. The resolution marked the denomination's first formal acknowledgment that racism played a role in its founding.<ref>"SBC renounces racist past – Southern Baptist Convention", ''The Christian Century''. 5 July 1995</ref>