History

A Baptist Timeline

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You don’t really have to study all of history. In fact, pretty much all you need to know is right here:

Pre 1611 – First there were the disciples then all the stuff in Foxes Book of Martyrs. Almost everything else that happened is Catholic so pay it no mind. (Although Anabaptist kind of sounds like Baptist so we think they’re cool.)

1611 – The start of everything. Anybody before this didn’t use the real Bible so therefore there were no Bible-believers until this date.

1730-1740 Great Awakenings and general revival breaks out all over everywhere. Most of those involved weren’t Baptists but we’ll pretend they were when we talk about them.

1776 – Baptists found America and God finally has a place to send all the blessings he doesn’t give Israel anymore.

1845 – Southern Baptist Convention is formed and immediately apostatizes

1861–1865 Civil War breaks out for the sole purpose of giving Baptists preachers illustration material and making places to take our Christian school kids on field trips. Also something about black people (not sure on this one).

1871 – D.L. Moody meets Ira Sankey. People say they make a really cute couple.

1920 – Billy Sunday preaches and liquor gets banned. Baptists are suddenly at a loss for what to preach against.

1941 World War II breaks out and the United States saves everybody. It may have been going on before then but nobody ever got a good sermon illustration out of stories about French or Polish people.

1950 – The world reaches the pinnacle of wonderfulness. People are more godlier than they ever have been before. Everybody is saved or about to get saved. Everybody dresses exactly like they all did in Bible times. White men run everything. Life is good.

1963 – Prayer gets taken out of public schools. The end is nigh.

1964 – The Beatles come to America. The end is here.

1965 to Present – The End Times. Listen for the trumpet. But while you’re listening also go to a Bible college, get married, have lots of kids, and spend all your time soul-winning (and not listening to the Beatles).

109 thoughts on “A Baptist Timeline”

      1. I was hoping to use your law firm to send out any cease and desist orders for anyone violating my TM claim.

        3. I could easily see 1 of 6 having to expand all they way to 9 to fulfill all the demand for legal services since showing up here to file their various legal briefs/beefs.

  3. I think I probably could have been first this time if I hadn’t checked my e-mail first. That’ll teach me!

  4. I’ve always wondered what they thought happened before 1611 when we got the “real” Bible. What do they think people read before then? 😕

    1. One of my fundy U’s biggest arguments against the critical text (granted, it wasn’t the only one, but still) was that “if it’s the most accurate version of the Bible then what did all those people have before it came along?” Even though they claimed not to be KJVO, the KJV is obviously more then just a translation to them and they go on and on about how its the best most accurate most wonderful Bible EVER.

      Anyway, every time they were pounding that idea into our heads, I always wondered the same thing. What did the English speaking people have before 1611, since they think the KJV is the end-all of English translations (or the end-all of all Bibles everywhere, depending on what fundy camp they fall into)? I guess it never struck them as being even a little arrogant to assume that God didn’t give His complete Word to anyone before 1611.

      1. Before the KJV, the Bible that the common people used was generally the Geneva Bible. Before there were Bibles in English, people had to rely on knowing Greek & Hebrew to read the Bible (or, trust the preacher that knew Greek and Hebrew to explain it).

        1. Remembering, of course, that before 1611, and for a long time after, the common people couldn’t read at all, and relied on a priest/minister (who may or may not have been able to read much Latin, never mind Greek or Hebrew)to tell them what they were supposed to know to live a good life and get to Heaven.

        2. Throughout the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance, most people who read the Bible at all read it in Latin translations such as the Vulgate, not in the original Hebrew and Greek.

        3. The Greek-speaking world had the NT in its native tongue, and the Septuagint. Still, most people couldn’t read, and if they could, a bible would have cost $500,000,000,000.98. Not to mention the cost of highlighters and Ol’-Glory-within-a-Jesus-fish-camouflage bible covers…

        8. I was going through some old posts the other day and saw some Reader Mo posts and thought I haven’t seen him here lately. Now I can say I have seen you lately. And it is good to see you.

        9. Before 1611 and before most people could read they had stained glass windows to tell them the pertinent Bible stories.

          1 picture = 1000 words. 😉

          (Hi, Reader Mo!)

        10. And wall paintings. Many old churches had Bible stories depicted on the walls to instruct the congregation, since most, if not all, of them couldn’t read.

          Welcome back, Reader Mo!

      2. I guess a better way to put that would have been “I wonder what fundies like that THINK the people had before 1611.” I do appreciate the history, though. 😉 😀

  5. 1920, Baptists might’ve been thrilled with prohibition, but no one was properly regulating women, and some of those loudmouths were actually going out and VOTING! I can just imagine the sermons on those unsubmissive you know whats.

    2. Sadly, people actually believe this s***…

      “By the 20th century, American Christians saw the “height” of Christian activism as banning alcohol while at the same time affirming a woman’s right to vote. Both ideas were unmitigated disasters; God has not allowed the civil magistrate to outlaw wine and God never gives women the “right” to vote (cf. 1 Tim 2:11ff). But by ignoring God’s law, American Christians both destroyed their own credibility (the Prohibition era is STILL a matter of public ridicule and repealing prohibition set the legal precedence for pornography, sodomy and the acceptance of other moral failures) and the integrity of own families.”

      (obviously, these are a slightly different flavor of fundies)

      http://christian-civilization.org/articles/biblical-patriarchy-and-the-doctrine-of-federal-representation/

        1. considering that some of the fundy men I dated would drive a woman to drink, this seems compassionate. 🙄

      2. If you start lettin’ them wimmens vote the next thing you know they’ll get it in their purty little heads that they should be allowed to run for office and that is clearly agin the Bible.

        1. The 1950s were the days. The War had so distracted us that we had forgotten the evils of women riding bicycles and driving automobiles and working in factories and voting and earning spending money. We had even forgotten the evils of alcohol. There was nothing to crusade against except the Soviets who wanted to destroy the American dream, and they lived far away from us. Life was good and we liked Ike.

  6. 1792-1875 — The life and death of the greatest present age hero to Baptists, Charles Finney (the heretic).

    1. I was surprised that he wasn’t mentioned in this timeline. His impact is widespread.

      1. Revival the Holy Grail of the IFB. There is no other Religious high as great as the emotional fix that a Revival can produce. Oh the orgasmic delights of a pew clearing Altar Call. Ummmmmm! And the ones gathered at the altar seem to get something out of it too. Oooooo, the experience of Church when it is on Fire! Yes! Yes! YES! Who needs Jesus, God or the Bible when you can have R-E-V-I-V-A-L! Don’t it just thrill your soul?

        3. I have become so jaded in my Christian walk that when I hear the term revival the Steve Martin film “Leap of Faith” plays in my head. I feel the altar call is one best acts of the ministry. I remember comedian mike waranke (sp?) had the best one. gave his testimony then while he did the altar call he took up an offQering. said he wasnt oral roberts in his prayer tower or the schullers trying to another window for the crystal cathedral. he said his family just had one van that was broke all of the time. come to find out it was all lies. he wasnt a priest in the satanic church ever and was worth millions

  7. So, the British Invasion was the beginning of the end?

    Now I have a GREAT sermon. How those liberal Europeans sent rock bands to invade this wonderful Baptist country and then send in their bad morals to further tear it down.

    Now, all I need is the right verse snippet for a good proof-text.

    1. I am pretty sure I have already heard that sermon a time or two. Or some variation of it anyway.

    2. Since part of the British Invasion was not only music but also fashion trends, I would think you could use James 2:3 (KJV of course that mentions “gay” clothing) as your starting point and twist and proof away my friend.

    3. Joel 1:5-7
      5Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

      6For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion.

      7He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.

      What better text for a fundy sermon? It’s from a book that no fundy actual knows anything about, it mentions drunkards so that’s a nice launching point for a 20 minute rant against the evils of liquor (Hay-men!), and you can draw out all sorts of bizarre comparisons to how the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and, Heaven forbid, the Sex Pistols all looked like crazy lions with crazy hair, brandishing their teeth while they sang their hypnotic Devil music that ruined God’s chosen nation.

      1. And I think the lion is England’s mascott (or whatever you call it.) It is a very *English* thing anyway, pictures of lions on all the shields and letterhead and all…

    4. Or maybe Dan 3:10 Thou, O king, hast made a decree, that every man that shall hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, shall fall down and worship the golden image:

      Obviously all music except the organ and white piano cause idolatry and sin, and a King (Britain has a royal family) decreed it. But Britain now has a QUEEN!! which puts a woman in control, so now 15 minutes of submission get inserted. The golden image could be an amber bottle, so here the wine-bibbing tirade commences. I’ll work in breeches/britches somehow to then segue into short hair. I’ll throw in the James and Joel passages on the fly to sound well versed.

        2. All I can think of is, in re-written words sung by Paul, get back. Get back. Get back into the I F B.

        1. Nice to see you chiming in, sir! I’m gonna unpack my tarp to protect from outbursts of laughter.

    5. Back in the day, there were sermons about how rock music was a Communist plot to undermine America’s youth. It was all the Russkies’ fault.

      I wish I were making this up, but I’m not.

      2. I had a coach at my fundy lite jr high that said that the russians were using the music biz to destroy the american moral fiber. that was 1985. my mom was a child of the sixties born again christian who still liked dylan and the beatles she used to work in a packing plant then went to college and was a history phd candidate. she and her colleagues laughed when I said that. the next morning she went with me to school and told coach that his job was to coach and teach not to espouse unprovable batshit crazy conspiracy theories. this is the second time I have heard this fheory

      3. Oh boy, I remember that, including a book in our school library titled “Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles”, it also hinted that Henry Kissinger may have been the Anti-Christ.
        Of course the USSR has since broken up, the Beatles are old history, rock music now just sucks, and have no idea what’s happened to Kissinger, so that all proves… 😕 ❓

    6. Hold up there, Uncle! We had our very own wicked rock-and-roll music, long before the Beatles. Why, Elvis the Pelvis had to be blocked out from the waist down when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show! And before that there were Jazz and Blues(but they were played and sung by other-than-white people, and good God-fearing Fundies didn’t listen. Much.).

      1. @The Other Jean,I was in Fundystan long enough to know how to never let the truth get in the way of a good message. And besides, as “Americans”, we have to blame someone else for our social ills.

    1. Hmmmmmm….. The Beatles first came over with short hair and conservative suits, and just a few years later we had the Sgt. Peppers album cover.

      That obviously means that preachers who don’t wear dark suits, or at least a sport coat and tie, are on the slippery slope.

    2. Whenever I see old pictures of Chubby Checker, I think “This guy was considered chubby?” Since those days, we have become a much fatter nation, folks.

  12. 1970’s: Jesus Freak movement. The nerve of them talking about Jesus having hair longer than his collar.

  14. 1909 – Scofield Reference Bible first published, giving fundamentalists an excuse for blasting “confessional” Christians while claiming to be “Biblicists”. The fundamentalist Christian / Zionist marriage gets going.

      1. And let’s not forget that ol Cyrus was a divorcee. Yet the KJV is not really considered Anointed by some fundie circles unless it is a Scofield Bible. Just hunker in the bunker and occupy til Jesus comes..

  15. 2005- Dr. Jack Schaap writes a fundamentalist manifesto on sex entitled, “Marriage: The Divine Intimacy.” Due to the book’s interpretational accuracy and exegetical soundness, Schaap’s work is praised and applauded by all.

  16. 33 a.d. through 1611 – the early antecedents of the Baptist Church, commissioned personally by Christ and the Apostles, struggle for survival against the Satanically inspired and controlled Catholic Church. “The Trail of Blood” documents this history. Please ignore the fact that most of the sects portrayed in this booklet believed in a unitarian godhead and practiced communal property ownership and communal sex. 😳

  17. This is actually a more sane version of history than some Fundies ascribe to. If you’re out of the Jack Chick/Trail of Blood school you know–know, mind you–that Baptists were the original denomination founded by Jesus and therefore a) were in hiding through all of what apostates call Church history until the late Reformation, when they mysteriously reappear, and b) are not Protestants, since, in the words of a cantankerous acquaintance, “Protestants came out of the Catholic Church and Baptists were never in the Catholic Church.”

    Add in the little bits of Jack Chick spice–such as the Catholic Church secretly founding Islam, funding Nazism and the Soviets at the same time, and training elite squads of nubile teen girls to infiltrate good Babdist congregations–and you have “history” worthy of Dan Brown.

    Someday I’m putting together A Brief History of Everything According to Jack Chick. It’ll be the comedy hit of the year.

    1. A quote from my former IFB pastor:

      John the Baptist wasn’t John the Presbyterian. He wasn’t John the Catholic. No, he was John the Baptist. We go all the way back. 😯

      1. Yeesh. I know a Methodist minister who prefers “John the Baptizer” as both more accurate and less loaded–for precisely that reason. As if modern Baptists would ever welcome a wild-eyed bug-eating hermit in camel skin into their congregation anyway.

      2. That is the ACTUAL logic used in the “ABC’s of Christian Growth” for convincing one of being a Baptist. (written by Robert J. Sargent.)

        I’m not sure if it’s in this chapter or not…
        http://bit.ly/GBBNJI

  19. I LOVE it! I’m so tempted to snarkily send it to my dad who sent me an attached “History of the Baptists” with my birthday e-mail last year…but I won’t 🙂

  20. I’m a bit of a history buff, so this all made me laugh pretty hard, but I think my favorite part was this:

    “1776 – Baptists found America and God finally has a place to send all the blessings he doesn’t give Israel anymore.”

    Mainly because, to hear it from the Baptists, this is pretty much true, completely disregarding the fact that most of the Founding Fathers were Episcopalian, with a few Deists, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc., and even three CATHOLICS!

    That’s right, kids, the evil Satanistic Catholics even managed to get their filthy hands on the most sacred of documents, the Constitution!

    1. Three? I thought Charles Carroll from Maryland was the only Roman Catholic. Who were the other two?

      1. Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, but at the 1787 Constitutional Congress he was joined by his cousins Daniel and John Carroll. So I guess it kind of depends on what constitutes a “founding father”. 😛

        Disclaimer: I don’t actually know all of this off the top of my head, I had to look it up. 😀

  21. When I went to fundy U I remember the rule book saying that they would allow easy listening music that was “pre-1960”. That sums up their view of the 50’s and before as glorious and the 60’s as of the devil.

    1. I remember several years ago my father saying that there had been no decent music in the last 30 years. Really, Dad? My entire lifetime (at the time) and NO good music? I told him he was exaggerating which was a polite way of saying that he wasn’t telling the truth.

  23. Sadly, that pretty well summed up what I was taught about church history. I think the only “older” church history I read was Foxes Book of Martyrs and a few key Reformation figures biographies. Everything else was those little white biographies of spiritual “leaders” from the 1800’s on (since the IFB doesn’t do the whole saints thing), all men with 2-3 exceptions if I recall correctly.

    I’ve been trying to remedy some of this knowledge gap but 2,000 years of Christian history is a daunting amount. Even basic/general overview book are large enough to swallow the 7th Harry Potter book 😛 .

  24. There are times when I don’t understand this site at all. You are making fun of a “Baptist timeline” and making jokes like it’s some kind of made up history that fundamentalists contrived. The Beatles’ coming to America and the British invasion was indeed the start of a cultural revolution in America, in Britain, and the world. It went well beyond just new musical tastes. Some of you seem to be so ignorant of history that you think the Beatles are some sort of made up group or something. The Beatles probably did more to effect historical changes and cultural transformations than just about any other force in the last several hundred years. Why do you choose to show your ignorance and deny this fact and act as if they are some non-descript group that did nothing and were no more relevant than your neighbor’s garage band that lasted two weeks and only played to their moms?

    Any cultural historian who has not lost his or her mind to LSD will tell you the Beatles were a powerful change agent in history. Now, some of you are so confused that you actually think Communism and free love and hippies and all that is a good thing. That just shows your further ignorance. But to make jokes implying that the Beatles were a non-factor and only a concern to fundamentalists is woefully ignorant.

    1. Ah, someone who A) doesn’t recognize satire and hyperbole and B) seems to miss the point entirely.

      Yes the Beatles were a big deal. No, it didn’t bring the End of Civilization As We Know It&#8482

    2. “…You are making fun of a “Baptist timeline” and making jokes like it’s some kind of made up history that fundamentalists contrived….”

      Yes we are and yes it is.

    4. The Beatles probably did more to effect historical changes and cultural transformations than just about any other force in the last several hundred years.

      Well, so much for the French Revolution. 😯

  25. 1928 — Bob Jones founds the first Christian institution of higher learning in world history.

      1. weird seeing Bob Jones and Higher learning in the same sentence.

        Greater indoctrination I could see…

  26. Don’t forget, in 1859 Charles Darwin published the Devil’s Bible, directly responsible for communism, nazis, atheism, humanism, and homosexuality.

  27. I will never forget Dr. Mullinex beginning his “church history” class in Rev. According to him, the letters to the seven churches represented eras in (Western only) civilization. Of course, we are living in Laodicia. Because, you know, if we lived in any of the previous ages it would ruin the imminent secret rapture theory. SFL: made up history.

    1. Sounds like Mullenix to me for sure. He always seemed like a total mouthpiece all too happy to say whatever it was he was told to, without putting any thought into it at all.

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