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Changing Pattern. Who are the people who have built this record? Are they back-country farmers with a Bible-banging, hellfire preaching kind of religion that snaps its galluses loudly and contemptuously at other Protestants, all liberals and the Pope? Theodore Adams is one of their most noted pastors, yet he never flails the air with more than a finger when he preaches to his congregation, which includes young executives and their wives, painters, postmen and the managers of chain stores. Are they diehard Confederates to whom a Northerner is necessarily a Yankee and a Yankee is always unnecessary? Pastor Adams is one of the most influential men in the South, but he was born in New York and raised in Oregon and Indiana.
Perhaps the most typically Baptist thing about Pastor Adams is that he does not conform to the Baptist pattern. And the pattern itself is changing.
The Bible Belt. Baptist Christianity, like many another dissident religion, found a happy home in the U.S. Its fierce egalitarianism, its jealous separation of church and state, its warm, free form of worship—all had strong appeal for the kind of man most likely to succeed on the new continent. And so the cantankerous, nonconformist, freedom-worshiping Baptists and the cantankerous, nonconformist, freedom-worshiping Americans took to each other and grew up together.
On the new continent in the 17th century, it was not love at first sight, as is shown by the case of Roger Williams, who founded America's first Baptist church (though he abandoned the Baptist persuasion within a few months to become a "Seeker" or Independent). He landed in Boston in 1631, having come from England under the impression that he was a Puritan, but almost at once he was at loggerheads with Boston's Puritan clergy.
Before long, Roger Williams was convicted of having "erroneous and dangerous" opinions before he escaped and founded the town of Providence ("for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience").
In Virginia the Episcopalians had their try at stamping out the Baptists. When two Baptists were mobbed and brought to trial for disturbing the peace ("They cannot meet a man upon the road," said the prosecuting attorney, "but they must ram a text of scripture down his throat!") a young Episcopal lawyer named Patrick Henry rode 50 miles to defend them.
"For preaching the gospel of God!" he stormed to the court. "Great God! Great God! Great God!" As the frontiersmen pushed west into the new land, Baptist preachers were never far behind them, scriptures in their saddlebags. After the Civil War, which caused a split in the denomination that has never fully healed, the Northerners settled themselves in the big cities to tend their machines, and the number of Baptists among them began to stabilize.
But in the rural South they kept right on increasing. They baptized in rivers and creeks and cow ponds. They worshiped in barns and splinterboard churches and held great sin-chasing revivals in tents.