Matt Hawkins ن

A severe problem with the way some do Baptist history is that they fail to understand that finding an individual Baptist who held a particular position only establishes that the position existed among some Baptists. By itself, it proves little about Baptist consensus. What matters are the consensus positions Baptists developed over time, why these positions developed, and what Baptists collectively chose to profess or support. As applied to the National Reform Association and its push for a constitutional amendment, here are three major considerations: 1. There does not appear to be a single nineteenth-century Baptist state convention, national Baptist body, or major Baptist association that formally endorsed the NRA's proposed Christian Amendment, which would have provided constitutional recognition of God, Jesus Christ, and divine revelation. 2. To the contrary, we find evidence of nineteenth-century Baptist newspapers writing *against* support of the NRA's proposed Christian Amendment, the Christian Index and the Examiner and Chronicle being two examples. 3. The NRA and its push for its Christian Amendment were Presbyterian to the core. The association was spearheaded and institutionally endorsed by the RPCNA. Its Christian Amendment was endorsed across multiple branches of Presbyterianism. Its organizers, active workers, and leading advocates were disproportionately Presbyterian. It received support across multiple Presbyterian newspapers. I can go back in Baptist history and find individual Baptists who supported female preachers, anointing the sick with oil, laying on of hands, foot washing as an ordinance, and many other things. Does that then mean that any of these represented a consistent Baptist position, much less a Baptist consensus? The fact that someone can point to the Baptist D. C. Eddy as one president of the NRA and the Baptist William Carey Crane as one vice president is largely irrelevant to what Baptists on the whole believed about church and state and to what Baptists collectively did or did not support during the NRA’s unsuccessful campaign for its Christian Amendment. Far more convincing is the fact that we have found no comparable Baptist body endorsing the Christian Amendment while multiple Presbyterian counterparts did and the fact that prominent Baptist newspapers actually argued against supporting the amendment.