Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America

Eric C. Smith is Senior Pastor of Sharon Baptist Church in Savannah, Tennessee, and Associate Professor of Church History at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is also the author of John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America (OUP, 2022).

• Introduction1. "The humble Baptists": Oliver Hart's Baptist Community2. "The power of religion greatly displayed": Baptists and the Great Awakening3. "All things are become new": Moving to the South4. "Bringing many souls home to Jesus Christ": Moderate Revivalism in Charleston5. "A regular Confederation": Laying the Foundations of the Baptist South6. "Every day brings fresh wonders!": The 1754 Charleston Revival7. "Seals of my ministry": Training the Next Generation8. "Promoting so laudable a Design": Baptist Development in the 1760s9. "Comforts and mercies, losses and crosses": A Transitional Season10. "The rising glory of this continent": The American Revolution11. "Directed in the path of duty": Staying the Course12. "The Baptist Interest": A Respectable Denomination in a New Nation13. "All the Baptists on the Continent": A Dream Briefly Realized

Smith has done an exemplary job of demonstrating Hart's seminal role in American Baptist development in the eighteenth century. One hopes for similar fresh studies of figures such as Edwards and Gano, as well as younger contemporaries such as Richard Furman, Thomas Baldwin, and John Leland. Embedded in their overlapping stories is the larger story of how Baptists in America evolved from backwater sectarians in 1715 to a national evangelical denomination by 1815.