The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by Hill Samuel S. Wilson Charles Reagan

Author:Hill, Samuel S., Wilson, Charles Reagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Restorationist Christianity

This style of Christianity that self-consciously seeks to ignore historical Christian forms and traditions and to reproduce primitive Christianity has flourished in the American South, but it is not unique to the South. Restorationism has deep roots in British Protestantism and appeared with particular vitality in the left wing of that heritage, especially among the Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, and, later, the early Methodists. Thus, restorationist traditions that persist in America today—in addition to the modern heirs of the Swiss and German Anabaptists—include Mormons, various types of Baptists, various Holiness and Pentecostal groups, Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ.

At least two factors influenced the openness of southern Christianity to the restorationist impulse in the 19th century. First, the Baptist and Methodist dominations of southern religion created a climate of deference both to the Scriptures and to Christian antiquity. Second, the stubborn persistence of the southern frontier until well into the 20th century in some regions (for example, Appalachia and the Ozarks) created a cultural situation particularly resistant to modernity and especially amenable to various types of primitivism. When Baptists and Methodists with a primitivist theological orientation settled in large numbers on the southern frontier, it was perhaps inevitable that this potent religious/cultural mix would spawn numerous restorationist movements, some of which would coalesce into lasting denominations.

Four major movements, all with a self-conscious restorationist orientation, emerged in the South after 1800: the Churches of Christ; the Primitive or Anti-mission Baptists; the Landmark Baptists; and southern Pentecostalists, especially the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) and to a lesser extent the Assemblies of God.

Churches of Christ emerged in Tennessee, Kentucky, and southern Ohio under the leadership of Barton W. Stone in the first decade of the 19th century and by 1825 had made headway into northern Alabama. Reflecting in many ways the quest for liberty that characterized the American Revolution, participants in this movement threw off the yoke of history and bondage to historical traditions, rejected the authority of creeds and clerics, used the primitive church as portrayed in Scripture as a model for their individual and ecclesiastical behavior, and styled themselves simply “Christians” and their congregations “Churches of Christ.” Stressing personal piety, they argued that a universal emulation of the primitive church would bring Christian unity through God’s power.

Although Stone and some of his “Christian” colleagues had Presbyterian roots, the vast majority of both members and leaders in the new movement came from the ranks of Separate and Regular Baptists, whose allegiance both to Scripture and to the primitive church made them restorationists in their own right. This was particularly true of the Separate Baptists, who determined to follow the Bible as their only confession of faith in the mid-18th century. They followed Shubal Stearns to North Carolina and Virginia in 1755 and later in the century migrated to Kentucky and Tennessee, where they increased the ranks of the Christian movement. The Stone movement had approximately 13,000 members in the late 1820s.

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