Not That Kind of Baptist

And yeah, Southern Baptists, i- in addition to being the largest Protestant denomination in the country, I haven't checked the numbers recently, but if memory serves, I believe the Southern Baptist Convention is larger than all other Baptist denominations combined.

So they are definitely in the majority.

And a lot of the stereotypes about Baptists, you know, being very conservative, fundamentalist, a lot of that comes out of the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention.

But if you know a bit about Baptist history, it looks a lot different from how Southern Baptists conduct things today.

So we got our start as Baptists in the English Reformation.

Across continental Europe, most Places, most countries, the churches during the Protestant Reformation chose a side.

You know, if you were in Germany, you were Lutheran.

If you were in, you know, Northern Europe or, or Switzerland, you were a Presbyterian.

Basically, if you were anywhere in Europe that hadn't been fully conquered by the Romans back in the day, you were a Protestant.

And then if you were in the heart of the old Roman Empire, you know, Italy, Spain, France, you were Catholic, and it was kind of very clean cut.

You can actually draw a little border between the Protestant areas and the Catholic areas during the Reformation.

However, things, as they often do, went a little differently in England.

Henry VIII, who started out as a proud Catholic and actually persecuted Protestants early on in his reign, decided he wanted a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Spain.

The Pope said no, and Henry, not wanting to be bossed around by the Bishop of Rome, decided to form his own church.

He put the English Protestants, who were pushing to reform the church for years, he put them in charge, and the Church of England was born.

Fast-forward a couple decades, Henry dies, and his daughter Mary comes to the throne.

You might know her as Bloody Mary or Queen Mary.

She imprisons, locks up, and executes most of the Protestant church leaders in England, and she declares that England is Catholic again.

But then after a few years, Mary dies.

Her sister Elizabeth comes to the throne, and of course, Elizabeth is Protestant, so now England is Protestant again.

So basically in England, while the rest of Europe was kind of neatly choosing sides, England went from Catholic to Protestant, back to Catholic, and then to Protestant all over the course of about 30 years based on who the monarch was.

And with each of those transitions, there was a lot of blood, a lot of persecution of the losing side.

This also, though, made England a bit of an incubator of sorts for all kinds of ideas about church and state, Protestantism and Catholicism, what your particular brand of Christianity would look like.

You had the Church of England, which in the end landed on a sort of middle path between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Then you had the Puritans, who I think a lot of us are probably familiar with.