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Galvanized By The Gospel: Nineteenth-Century Baptist Missions And The Anti-Mission Response, Anna B. Holdorf

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century brought significant changes to the American religious landscape. In addition to inspiring the creation of new denominations, the Awakening’s emphasis on religious democracy and the era’s prevalent postmillennial ideology motivated Protestants to establish numerous mission societies and other “benevolent” organizations to aid in the spreading of the Christian gospel. Baptists, too, were launched to a level of evangelistic fervor in the early 1800s that the denomination had never before witnessed. While many Baptists embraced the nineteenth-century mission movement, a significant number of “anti-mission” Baptists rejected it as antithetical to “pure” Baptist …