Baptists and their polarizing ways: Transnational polarization between Southern Baptist missionaries and Brazilian Baptists

Abstract

Polarization in Baptist life has a long history. Baptists have had polarized relations with other competing religious groups and with themselves. Baptist focus on freedom, dissent, conscience, local church independence, among other foundational principles, render Baptists prone to diversity and disagreement. Diversity, salted by the absolute certainties of religious belief, easily translates into polarization. Triumphalism, fundamentalism, and other types of ironic dogmatisms formed in the context of freedom have produced polarized beliefs. Those religious beliefs, however, cannot be separated from the interplay of sources of power: class, gender, and race. In the context of the United States, a discussion of Baptists cannot be separated from these power components, especially matters of race. Significantly, if not surprisingly, Baptists exported their racial, triumphalist identity and commitments abroad in their missionary endeavors. Brazilian Baptists, for example, heard the gospel from Southern Baptists, but they heard that gospel in a racialized form that was captive to Southern US racist culture. Southern Baptists shared the gospel, but they also resisted efforts by native Brazilians in The Radical Movement to indigenize their faith.