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.

Between 1776 and the mid-1800s, the number of Baptists in the United States grew at a staggering rate, rising from fifty thousand at the outbreak of revolution to more than a million as the nation edged toward civil war. As the Second Great Awakening swept through the Old Southwest, it generated religious enthusiasm among Methodist and Baptist converts who were intent upon replacing old forms of Protestantism with an evangelical vibrancy that reflected and often contributed to the unsettled social relations of the new republic. No place was better suited to embrace this enthusiasm than Kentucky. In Born of Water and Spirit, Richard C. Traylor explores the successes and failures of Baptists in this area, using it as a window into the elements of Baptist life that transcended locale. Traylor argues that the achievements of Baptists in Kentucky reflect, in many ways, their success and coming of age in the early national period of America. The factionalism that characterized frontier Baptists, he asserts, is an essential key to understanding who the colonial Baptists had been, who they were becoming in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, and who they would become after the Civil War. In this highly nuanced study, Traylor looks at the denomination in light of what he calls its "Baptist impulse"-the movement's fluid structure and democratic spirit. These characteristics have proven to be its greatest strength as well as the source of its most terrible struggles. Yet, confronting theological clashes, along with the challenges that come with growth, forged the Baptist identity and shaped its future. The first three chapters examine the primary elements of the impulse: rituals of conversion, baptism, and communion; the Baptist preacher; and the significance of the local church to the sect. Following these chapters are explorations of the reformations and forces of change in the early to mid-1800s, the role of women and African Americans in developing the group, and the refinement and reorientation of priorities from 1840 to 1860. This important denominational history will be of great value to scholars of American religious history and the history of the early American republic.

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.

When we enter the life of the early Church, we find them eating their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God. We follow Paul from prison to prison, but his shout is, "Rejoice in the Lord alway; and again I say, Rejoice" Evidently emotion had not been outlawed among the saints in those days. Today the same church member who yells like a Comanche Indian at a football game sits like a wooden Indian in the house of God on Sunday. When David danced before the returning ark his wife despised him and was smitten with barrenness. Today happy Christians are frowned upon by those dismal souls who thus proclaim their spiritual barrenness. In the temple Pharisees complained because the children cried their "hosannas" around the Saviour (Matthew 21: 12-16). Hilarious, child-hearted Christians have always brought down the scorn of those who measure piety by the length of the face.