A Baptist Democracy: Separating God and Caesar in the Land of the Free

The first decades of the 20th century were days of robust optimism in the United States. These were the confident years of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressive reform and high purpose. It was an age when Americans went off to war believing that they could-and would-somehow make the world safe for democracy. This period also marked the high tide of what author Lee Canipe calls "Baptist democracy": the moral overlap between Baptist theology and American democracy that continues to shape the way Baptists in the United States understand and articulate their faith. In this book, Canipe traces the rise of Baptist democracy as reflected in the work of three prominent leaders who made their most significant contributions to Baptist life between 1900 and 1925: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), E. Y. Mullins (1860-1928), and George W. Truett (1867-1944). Celebrating the harmony between the principles of their church and the ideals of their state, these three Baptists eloquently articulated what, by the turn of the twentieth-century, had become an article of faith for many of their fellow Baptists: What American democracy is to worldly government, Baptist principles are to religion-God's chosen way for humanity. Or, as George Truett put it in 1911, "the triumph of democracy, thank God, means the triumph of Baptists everywhere."