Joshua Guthman, “Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture” (UNC Press, 2016)

UNC Press Presents Podcast · Jan 25, 2017 · 48m

Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over the faith’s future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. In Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) Joshua Guthman tells the story of how a band of anti-missionary and anti-revivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America’s oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their…