Dipped in controversy

Hallelujah chorus

Baptists in America: A History. By Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins. Oxford University Press; 352 pages; $29.95.

IN 1995, a century and a half after it was founded by supporters of slavery, the Southern Baptist Convention apologised to African-Americans. “We genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty,” wrote the group, which had by then become America’s largest Protestant denomination.

It was a landmark moment, reflective of a complex and chequered history. American Baptists’ roots lie in the noble struggle for religious liberty. In colonial times they were a tormented minority, their preachers sometimes clapped into prison. Baptists held that only declared believers should be baptised, which offended other Protestants, who thought that infants should get a dipping. Some also complained that the Baptist rituals were too ostentatious. One 18th-century Anglican clergyman wrote that the Baptists gave the rite to “lascivious persons of both sexes” who wore “very thin linen drawers…which when wet, so closely adheres to the limbs, as exposes the nudities...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1C0UduJ