Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America

The American Baptist church originated in British North America as "little tabernacles in the wilderness," isolated seventeenth—century congregations that had grown into a mainstream denomination by the early nineteenth century. The common view of this transition casts these evangelicals as radicals who were on society's fringe during the colonial period, only to become conservative by the nineteenth century after they had achieved social acceptance. In Bodies of Belief, Janet Moore Lindman...