Rhode Island can legitimately claim to be the home of Baptists in America. The first three varieties of Baptists in the New World - General Six Principle, Particular, and Seventh Day - made their debut in this small colony. And it was in Rhode Island that the General Six Principle Baptists formed the first Baptist association; the Seventh Day Baptists organized the first national denomination of Baptists; the Regular Baptists founded the first Baptist college, Brown University; and the Warren Baptist Association led the fight for religious liberty in New England. In Retracing Baptists in Rhode Island, historian J. Stanley Lemons follows the story of Baptists, from their founding in the colonial period to the present. Lemons considers the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration upon Baptists as they negotiated their identities in an ever-changing American landscape. Rhode Island Baptists, regardless of variety, stood united on the question of temperance, hesitated on the abolition of slavery before the Civil War, and uniformly embraced revivalism, but they remained vexed and divided over denominational competition, the anti-Masonic movement, and the Dorr Rebellion. Lemons also chronicles the relationship between Rhode Island Baptists and the broader Baptist world. Modernism and historical criticism finally brought the Baptist theological civil war to Rhode Island. How to interpret the Bible became increasingly pressing, even leading to the devolution of Brown's identity as a Baptist institution. Since the 1940s, the number of Baptists in the state has declined, despite the number of Baptist denominations rising from four to twelve. At the same time, the number of independent Baptist churches has greatly increased while other churches have shed their Baptist identity completely to become nondenominational. Lemons asserts that tectonic shifts in Baptist identity will continue to create a new landscape out of the heritage and traditions first established by the original Baptists of Rhode Island.
J. Stanley Lemons is Emeritus Professor of History at Rhode Island College.
Introduction Part One: Awakenings 1. Baptist Beginnings 2. Sixes & Sevens and Musical Discord 3. The Rise of the Regular Baptists 4. Calvinism Challenged Part Two: Transformations 5. The Freewill Baptists 6. Contested Ground 7. Missions and Sunday Schools 8. Trials and Tribulations Part Three: Divisions 9. Freemasons and Dorrites 10. Slavery, Race, and Antislavery 11. Rum, Romanism, and Americanization 12. Brown University and the Baptists 13. Wars of Religion Part Four: Remakings 14. Revivals and Revivalists 15. The Daughters of Eve and the Better Half 16. Tides of Change 17. The Changing Mainline
Retracing Baptists is the destination for those desiring to journey deep into the history of Baptists in Rhode Island. It is full of the particularities that set Rhode Island apart, but it also reveals the similarities that Rhode Island Baptists share with Baptists in America more broadly. That Retracing Baptists in Rhode Island reads more easily and quickly than its girth might suggest testifies to Lemons' writing and intimacy with a place and history he knows well. --John Inscore Essick "American Baptist Quarterly" ...Lemons provides the most comprehensive treatment of Rhode Island Baptists ever written by examining them from their early seventeenth-century beginnings to the present day. --Jacob Hicks "Church History" Besides the enlightening text Lemons does an excellent job of providing resources for further study in his work... This work helps to remind historians that Baptists in Rhode Island did more thanhelp found the faith in America and that they need to communicate that to their students. --Alan J. Lefever "Journal of Ecclesiastical History" Lemons has written an engaging and interesting history Baptists in Rhode Island. The writing style makes the work accessible to college students and the breadth of topics makes it valuable to graduate students. Individuals interested in the origins of Baptist in America, Baptists in New England, and Baptist polity and practice need to have this book in their libraries. --Lloyd Harsch "Baptist History and Heritage"
