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The fact is that infant baptism is death to any church. It leads people to think that they are saved because they were baptized as infants. As Dr.Grady writes in his history of the United States,

The Puritans had learned the hard way why their Baptist brethren were insistent upon a regenerated church membership. That the entire Protestant Reformation was destined toshare a similiar fate is implied in our Lord's description of the Roman Catholic Church in Revelation 17:5 as the The Mother of Harlots

For although spiritually productive as 'children' (Luther's 95 Thesis etc), the Protestant denominations would eventually come of age and pursue their mother's career as religious prostitutes.

Without a built-in safeguard to keep the unregenerate out, decay was inevitable. Only by rejecting infant sprinkling and embracing believer's baptism can a church experience the divine perpetuity promised in Matthew 16:18b, And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it

What Hath God Wrought by Dr. William P. Grady, p.89.)

This should cause the fur to fly!:>

Even so come Lord Jesus

The fact is that infant baptism is death to any church. It leads people to think that they are saved because they were baptized as infants. As Dr.Grady writes in his history of the United States, ...

This is the hardline Baptist position and traditional argument. I think most Baptists are familiar with this argument. However, it is not persuasive outside Baptist circles. It's more inflammatory than persuasive to paedobaptists, I think.

There are a few other phrases that deal with this line of thinking. I hope we don't need to air those rather militant arguments here.

The fact is that infant baptism is death to any church. It leads people to think that they are saved because they were baptized as infants.

Now, now! Certainly there is truth in your accusation. Infant baptism may in fact lead to this sort of complacency. Personally, I have railed against this kind of thinking in my own Lutheran church. However, I also have a number of friends who come from adult baptism traditions who assure me that there are many teens in their churches who are baptized simply because everyone (parents, grandparents, pastors, teachers) expects them to do it, not because they are expressing a real faith of their own. I have also known many Christians, baptized as adults, who are content with "I-trust-Jesus-as-my-personal-Lord-and-Savior-and-I'm-going-to-heaven" -- but they never grow into the mature faith Paul and the rest of the New Testament calls us to.

Would you deny that there are many Christians who have been baptized as infants, who have then been nurtured in faith and grown into a vibrant relationship with God in Jesus Christ? I know quite a few such Christians in Lutheran and other infant-baptizing churches, as well as those who come from adult-baptizing churches.

The trouble in both our traditions, it seems to me, is that authentic discipleship is too rarely modeled and that baptism can too easily become a rubber-stamp exercise no matter what age it's done.