Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

To: Springfield Reformer
So no, the whole smear thing on Baptists, or any other genuinely Christian group, based on the temperance movement, is baloney.

Let alone the broad brush

20 posted on 02/20/2015 5:51:13 PM PST by daniel1212 (Come to the Lord Jesus as a contrite damned+destitute sinner, trust Him to save you, then live 4 Him)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies ]


To: daniel1212

The problem though is that in the United States the baptist movement was fueled by the progressive temperance movement. Prior to the Civil War there were very few baptists in the United States. In fact, anabaptism had been largely stamped out all over the world. After the Civil War the progressive movement began and rejected anything historic. This extended into the church, in fact in many ways the progressive movement was a product of the church.

It should come as no surprise that the baptist movement began in the south and to this day is still centered in the south. During the Civil War both the north and the south were convinced God was on their side. Obviously the south lost, losses were horrific on both sides but worse in the south. The despondency associated with losing caused a shift in the south from historic churches, largely calvinistic, to something that completely rejected the historic churches that had led the south to lose the war. The baptist movement offered people an anti-historic church and it offered people a better life through law.

I don’t think people appreciate just how much the civil war negatively affected the church in this country. It is from that war that the progressive movement in both the north and the south flow. The south outright rejected the historic church, which was easy to do because the historic church said God was on the side of the south and the south lost. In the north, the carnage of the war didn’t cause people to leave the church but it did cause them to seek its fundamental change. Within two generations the mainline southern churches didn’t exist or otherwise became baptist. In the north the mainline churches remained in name but they utterly rejected historic Christian theology. The nation has never recovered.


22 posted on 02/23/2015 5:17:34 AM PST by LeoMcNeil
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson