Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of evangelical greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early nineteenth-century movement: a searing experience of doubt that motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After the Civil War, African American Primitives elevated a renewed Calvinism coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into the twentieth century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist spirit, unmoored from its original theological underpinnings, seeped into the music of renowned southern artists such as Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose ""high lonesome sound"" appealed to popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of postwar American life. In an account that weaves together religious, emotional, and musical histories, Strangers Below demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive Baptists on American religious and cultural life.

This is a letter explaining the great love of Jesus and how it is inside of you and how you can use it in a world that is ignorant of it.

An instruction manual for people that have recently been saved.

The Perversion and Subversion of John 3:16 reveals a rancid putrid cancer in the Christian realm today. The Bible is being rewritten and reinterpreted in the new versions. Ancient heresies cloaked in a new garb have found a new venue. A battle for true Biblical Christianity rages out of sight and mind of the average Christian. This book documents, without a doubt, the most important Christian issue in our time. It is time for Bible believing Christians to return to our true Biblical heritage and take a firm stand with our traditional conservative Biblical faith.