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The 18th Century New Evangelicals

The new Evangelicals were New Light or Separate Baptists from New England, whose leaders began to sift into North Carolina and Virginia in the 1750s, and who soon began to establish their own churches and create new ones. Baptists had appeared in the South earlier in the century – Charleston had had a Baptist congregation since 1695 – but they were quiet, well-mannered folk who were not active proselytizers.

The New Lights, however, were neither quiet nor well-behaved even by Evangelical Presbyterian standards, for they openly attacked the Anglican clergy, ordained semiliterate men as ministers, stubbornly refused to apply for licenses to preach, and valued emotional outbursts in their meetings as a sign of God’s presence and favor.

Through these actions, the Baptists managed to attack most of the underpinnings of colonial order. They denied the authority of the Crown to direct the moral life of the community through the Church of England, as well as the right of the Crown to legitimate religious leadership.

The Separate Baptists did not insist that education should be a prerequisite for ordination. They were scornful of traditional prerequisites for spiritual leadership and did their best to repudiate all traditional forms. The New Light Baptists taught there were three distinguishing characteristics of the true Christian.

(1) A personal religious experience of overpowering emotions rooted in a specific time and place.  So powerful were the emotions released at Separate Baptists meetings that they were often characterized by seizures, convulsions, and uncontrollable weeping.

(2) The immersion in living water of adults who professed faith in Christ Jesus.

(3) Submission to the authority of the church to scrutinize carefully the personal as well as public life of each Christian.

Within four years of their settling in North Carolina, the Separate Baptists had converted enough people to enable six churches to form an association on New Light principles.

SOURCE: Religion in the Old South by Donald G. Matthews © 1977; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago, IL; pp. 22-24.

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