ok, you Baptists got me confused. You protest against protestants??
If you think you're confused Baptists are more confused. Here are some good articles and small excerpts that might explain some of the questions being raised about Baptists:
Baptist Beginnings by Leon McBeth
A lot of people ask these questions. We want to know about our denominational roots. To know our beginnings will help us understand ourselves today.
These sound like simple questions, and one might expect brief and simple answers. The story of Baptist beginnings, however, is surprisingly complicated; and not everyone agrees on the conclusions. Perhaps this is one reason such questions have been so controversial in the past.
Some people try to trace organized Baptist churches back to New Testament times or to John the Baptist. One writer even suggested that Adam was the first Baptist! Certainly we believe that our doctrine and faith root in the New Testament, but we first meet our organized denomination considerably this side of Adam.
Our best historical evidence says that Baptists came into existence in England in the early seventeenth century. They apparently emerged out of the Puritan-Separatist movement in the Church of England. Some of these earnest people read the Bible in their own language, believed it, and sought to live by it. They formed separate congregations which accepted only believers into their membership, and they baptized converts upon their profession of faith. Their opponents nicknamed them "Baptists," and the name stuck.
Protestants are the Christians who emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century to emphasize the authority of Scripture, the priesthood of believers, and salvation by grace. Major categories of Protestants include Lutherans, Reformed (Zwinglian and Calvinistic), Anabaptists, and the Church of England. Major heroic figures emerged in the Protestant groups, including Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, Balthasar Hubmaier, Conrad Grebel, Menno Simons, and Thomas Cranmer.
One of the major marks of Protestantism has been confessional development. As each of the Reformers reacted against the Medieval Catholic tradition in one way or another, they sought to define their beliefs in terms of “confessions” or statements of their beliefs. At meetings like the Colloquy of Marburg (1529) and the Diet of Speyer (1529), the confessions were presented in support of basic beliefs of the new groups. These confessions later gave shape to “denominations” as we know them today.
Baptists came along in historical development in the next century after the rise of the original Protestant denominations. They identified quickly with many of the teachings and practices of the Anabaptists, such as affirming the authority of the Bible, religious liberty, believer’s baptism, and religious experience. But, Luther’s teaching on the love of God and the priesthood of believers was also important to Baptists. John Calvin’s understanding of the sovereignty of God, God’s grace, the atonement of Christ, and the sacraments/ordinances were picked up by many early English and American Baptists. Zwingli’s positions on the simplicity of worship and the authority of Scripture were also definitive for early Baptists. Thomas Cranmer’s work in the Book of Common Prayer (1549) shaped the worship practices of many, both directly and indirectly. So, the debt of Baptists to earlier Protestants was indeed great.
In their first century of development in seventeenth-century England, three basic types of Baptists cooperated with several other “Protestant” groups. General Baptists worked with Seventh Day Baptists in exchanging pulpits, and Calvinistic Baptists wrote confessions of faith that imitated those of Presbyterians and Congregationalists. Baptists and Quakers sought common cause in religious toleration in the Restoration Period. Most importantly of all, Baptists joined Congregationalists and Presbyterians in forming the Three Dissenting Denominations, a body of political advocates that sought to gain concessions from the established Church for marriages, burials, and political rights of dissenters.
Many Baptists worldwide have continued to think of themselves as Protestants and interacted with other Protestants in significant ways. In launching the world missionary movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, Baptists joined Protestants in sending missionaries and cooperating with other groups like Presbyterians and Congregationalists overseas. In the United States, Baptists joined with other groups in promoting spiritual awakenings like camp meetings and the Great Revivals. In England, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians joined to form the Bible Society cause in 1802.
Doctrinal Dissent and Individual Conscience
This emphasis upon the rights of individual conscience caused Baptists to create organizational and denominational structures that protected this right. Baptist churches, associations, societies, conventions, and denominations maintained a relative autonomy that allowed groups of Baptists to disagree with each other and to form new organizations when theological differences became too great. While Baptists were loosely held together by common beliefs about baptism and personal, experiential faith in Jesus Christ, doctrinal uniformity was impossible given the Baptist insistence upon soul freedom, church freedom, Bible freedom, and religious freedom.[2] Baptists who disagreed theologically with other Baptists in a church, association, or denomination were always free to move down the street and start a new organization.