Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900

Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900

Wills, Gregory A.

Paperback

Series: Religion in America

19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Christianity

ISBN10: 0195160991
ISBN13: 9780195160994
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Mar 13 2003
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.02 Depth: 9.44
Language: English
No American denomination identified itself more closely with the nation's democratic ideal than the Baptists. Most antebellum southern Baptist churches allowed women and slaves to vote on membership matters and preferred populists preachers who addressed their appeals to the common person. Paradoxically no denomination could wield religious authority as zealously as the Baptists. Between 1785 and 1860 they ritually excommunicated forty to fifty thousand church members in Georgia alone. Wills demonstrates how a denomination of freedom-loving individualists came to embrace an exclusivist spirituality--a spirituality that continues to shape Southern Baptist churches in contemporary conflicts between moderates who urge tolerance and conservatives who require belief in scriptural inerrancy. Wills's analysis advances our understanding of the interaction between democracy and religious authority, and will appeal to scholars of American religion, culture, and history, as well as to Baptist observers.

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