The Baptists of Maine

I never thought of Maine as Baptist country until recently.

After all, the state is one of the most secular in the nation. Sixty-six percent of Mainers say they seldom or never attend church. Only Vermont has a higher percentage of its population who never darken a church door.

But this week, the Portland Press Herald reported that Maine’s Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated churches experienced a higher growth rate than the SBC experienced in any other region of the country.

Nationally, SBC membership has experienced steep declines; New England is the only region of the country in which Southern Baptist churches are growing. And Maine has taken the lead in SBC church growth. SBC-affiliated churches in Maine tripled in membership between 2010 and 2020 and experienced a 19 percent increase between 2018 and 2023.

Of course, given small size of the Southern Baptist population in Maine, such reports need to be taken with a grain of salt, because when measured by percentage increase rather than absolute numbers, the conversions of just a few people can appear to count for a lot. By this measure, Maine’s Shaker community experienced a growth rate during the last year that outpaced even the Baptists, because last year Maine’s last remaining living Shaker community experienced a 50 percent rate of growth when the two Shakers who lived there converted another person and brought the total worldwide Shaker membership up to three.

It is true that Maine’s total number of Southern Baptists is still very small. There were only 2,700 Southern Baptists in Maine in 2010, and not much more than 8,100 in 2020. (Texas, by comparison, has 2.4 million Southern Baptists). Even West Virginia – which might be a fairer comparison, given that Maine and West Virginia have a similar population size of under 2 million – has 35,000 Southern Baptists, organized into 234 congregations, while Maine still has fewer than 30 SBC-affiliated churches.

But still, some of Maine’s Southern Baptist churches are growing rapidly, with much of the growth coming from new church plants that don’t call themselves either “Southern” or “Baptist.” The Portland Press Herald reported that Central Baptist Church in Augusta has grown from only 70 people in 2011 to 1,500 weekly attendees today. For Maine, that’s about as close as any congregation is likely to get to being a megachurch. Augusta, after all, despite being the state capital, has a population of less than 20,000, and it’s not very close to any other larger towns; a person would have to travel more than 30 miles to get to any community that’s larger. Even the combined Augusta-Waterville metro area is equal to only 124,000 people – which means that a church of 1,500 represents more than 1 percent of the entire metro population. To put that into perspective, if a single congregation in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area attracted a similar percentage of its local population, it would have a weekly attendance of 100,000 people and would be a contender for the largest megachurch in the United States.

Central Church’s membership is not coming from people who transferred in from other likeminded evangelical congregations; it’s coming from conversions. Already this year alone, the church has baptized 100 people.

And there are several new SBC-affiliated churches being planted this year, including one in Orono that will be aimed at the student population at the University of Maine’s flagship campus.

But Maine’s Baptist roots go far deeper than the recent Southern Baptist church plants that have experienced dramatic growth in the past 15 years. Maine actually has one of the oldest Baptist traditions of any state. Long before there was a Southern Baptist Convention, there were Baptists in Maine. But Maine’s Baptist history has also been tumultuous, because revivals have frequently been followed by fragmentation and decline, followed by another wave of revivals.

Maine’s first Baptist congregations emerged in the late seventeenth century as outgrowths of Massachusetts Puritanism. New England Puritans were paedobaptists – not credobaptists, like all Baptists are – but their theology of a regenerate-only church membership was in tension with their paedobaptist practice, at least in the view of some seventeenth-century Puritans. Because the Puritans restricted church membership only to those who could give a testimony of a regenerating conversion – and because their standards for such testimonies were quite rigorous, at least by modern standards – a significant number of people who had been baptized as infants could not qualify for church membership, despite attending church regularly. In some communities, in fact, more than half the people in the town could not qualify for church membership. And because they were non-members, they were not eligible for the sacraments. They could not partake of the Lord’s Supper, and they were not allowed to have their children baptized in the church.

That led to the emergence of two different factions. One group – the advocates of what was called a “Half-Way Covenant” – wanted to enlarge the church covenant to include those who could not give a testimony of salvation. They wanted to open communion to those individuals and allow them to have their children baptized. In short, they wanted to make the Puritan churches of New England a little more like the established church in England, where church membership was not so narrowly restricted to the regenerate.

But another, smaller group believed that Puritan churches needed to be more theologically consistent in their quest for a regenerate church membership. If church membership was only for the regenerate, they said, then baptism, like the Lord’s Supper, should be given only to those who could give a testimony of regeneration. In other words, only believers (not infants) should be baptized. And if the church consisted only of the regenerate, it could not encompass the entire community; church and state would have to be separate, and there could be no established church, in either the Anglican or Puritan sense.

The first Massachusetts Puritan to reach those conclusions was Roger Williams, who left his position as minister of Salem’s church after a heresy trial in 1635 and fled to Rhode Island to plant the first Baptist church in North America (and the first English colony with religious toleration and church-state separation). But Williams was far from the last to reach these conclusions, because his Baptist theology was in some ways simply a logical extension of Puritan views of regeneration and church membership. In 1654, Harvard College president Henry Dunster resigned his administrative position after refusing to have his infant son baptized because of his new credobaptist beliefs.

If this happened even in the Boston area, under the watchful eye of church elders who were on the lookout for heresy, it was even more likely to happen on the northern frontier – which is what the wilds of Maine were in the late seventeenth century. In 1681, William Screven, one of the settlers in Kittery, Maine, began preaching Baptist doctrines and convinced eight other members of the community to get baptized by immersion, thus forming Maine’s first Baptist church. But the minister of the local established Congregationalist church in Kittery joined with the magistrate to have Screven and his fellow Baptists arrested on the charge of “unlawful preaching.” Even after being fined, he refused to desist – but to avoid further persecution, they left Maine and relocated to South Carolina.

That ended the Baptist movement in Maine for about eighty years. But in the late eighteenth century, as Americans of the revolutionary era broke free of state church control, Baptists again experienced rapid growth – and some of that growth reached Maine. As Baptist churches in central Massachusetts grew, some Baptist congregations decided to send missionaries to the Massachusetts frontier, which is what Maine was at the time. In 1772, Haverhill, Massachusetts Baptist minister Hezekiah Smith traveled to North Yarmouth, Maine, and planted a Baptist church there. Isaac Case then traveled from Haverhill to plant more Baptist churches in Maine, including some in the Bowdoin area.

During the early nineteenth century, Maine’s Baptist churches experienced their greatest moment of growth. As the established Congregationalist church declined in popularity, people in frontier areas of New England began looking for more democratic alternatives – and in northern New England, that primarily meant the Baptist church. Further south, evangelical converts might have become Methodists or Presbyterians, but in Maine, they became Baptists. Between 1804 and 1850, more than 120 new Baptist churches started in Maine.

Baptist churches of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century attracted people who wanted a fervent, radical commitment that eschewed the worldly compromises that they associated with the established Congregationalist churches. By proclaiming that the church should consist only of regenerate members, Baptist churches encouraged members to pursue personal holiness and practiced church discipline against those who did not. “Worldliness” not only meant sins such as drunkenness or carnal conduct – the sort of behavior that commonly elicited church discipline in other denominations in this era – but also social fashion-consciousness. “Church met and voted,” the minutes of the Baptist church in Berwick, Maine for December 5, 1772 stated. “1. That it shall be esteemed a matter of offence for a brother to wear more buttons on his clothes than are needed or convenient for the body. . . . Also for a sister (1) to wear ruffles, (2) to bow ribbons, (3) to wear laces on their clothes” (Burrage, History of the Baptists in Maine, 42).

Although these churches were countercultural, they were not entirely independent, because from Hezekiah Smith’s earliest days of preaching, he sought an alliance with other New England Baptists through the New Hampshire Convention, which coordinated mission work and provided some regional control over Baptist doctrine.

Originally, most Baptist churches were Calvinist in their view of human depravity and God’s sovereign electing grace. But in the late eighteenth century, Benjamin Randall, a Baptist minister in New Durham, New Hampshire, began preaching a fully Arminian Baptist theology, and he made some converts in Maine who were labeled “Freewill” or “Free” Baptists.

The New Hampshire Convention of which the Maine Baptist churches were a part attempted to split the difference between the Freewill Baptists and the “Regular” Baptists who were more Calvinistic. The New Hampshire Confession of 1833 affirmed God’s sovereignty in election, but also emphasized the necessity of human response to God’s call, an approach that seemed to satisfy most of those on either side of the controversy. But before the two factions fully reconciled, they formed rival colleges. Maine’s Regular Baptists founded Colby College in Waterville, while the Freewill Baptists founded Bates College in Lewiston. Thus, two of Maine’s three leading liberal arts colleges today have nineteenth-century Baptist origins; the other leading liberal arts college, Bowdoin College, was founded by Congregationalists.

Maine’s Baptists believed that education should improve society morally and socially. Colby was designed initially to prepare graduates for foreign missions. Bates was founded by abolitionists who led the college to become an early leader in educating women and African Americans, as well as white men.

As Maine’s Baptist colleges pursued an agenda of social uplift, so did some of the state’s Baptist churches. Many of Maine’s Baptist churches joined Baptist missions organizations and, in the late nineteenth century, became active in the temperance movement. Most ended up in the Northern Baptist Convention after it formed in 1907.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Baptists were the largest and most successful Protestant church in Maine. The 1906 religious census showed that 15 percent of Maine’s population was Baptist, compared to only 10 percent that was Congregationalist. (Presbyterians and Lutherans each had almost no presence in the state, accounting for far less than 1 percent of the population. Methodists, the third largest Protestant group in Maine, accounted for 9 percent of the population).

But even if Baptists were Maine’s largest Protestant group, they were not culturally dominant in the way that Baptists were in the South. That was partly because the largest religious group in Maine was, by far, the Catholic Church; Catholics made up 53 percent of the population in Maine in 1906. It was also because Baptists, though dominant among Protestants, were still a plurality rather than a majority of the Protestant population. To the extent they were active in the political sphere, it was mainly by working with other Protestants to accomplish Protestant aims – namely, temperance laws and efforts to curb Catholic political power by insisting on strict church-state separation.

By the early twentieth century, Maine’s Baptists had also become theologically eclectic. They still retained an evangelical piety, an emphasis on personal conversion, and a general respect for the Bible, but because they also valued education and mission, they were willing to accept new cultural and scientific ideas that were in tension with their historic biblicism.

In the early twentieth century, the Northern Baptist Convention quickly became dominated by theological liberals, as did Maine’s Baptist colleges. Shailer Mathews (1863-1941), a theology professor who was born in Portland, Maine, and was then educated at Colby College before pursuing graduate study at Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts and further doctoral study in Germany, became a leading voice of theological liberalism at the University of Chicago. While still claiming that he held onto an “evangelical” faith, Mathews argued that the message of Christianity needed to be reframed to emphasize the Social Gospel and the needs of modernity rather than the traditional orthodox Christian doctrines about the incarnation and the atonement. In his autobiography New Faith for Old, he described how provincial his Baptist upbringing in Portland felt, as people around him encouraged strict Sabbath observance and abstention from alcoholic beverages, and opposed evolution. In his graduate studies, he rejected many of those old ideas and embraced an evolutionary understanding of history, but at the same time, he remained an active Baptist and served as president of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1915.

Mathews’s journey paralleled the spiritual journey of some of Maine’s other educated Baptists. When he returned from graduate study for a brief stint of teaching at Colby, he expected to encounter the same pietistic biblicism that he had experienced as an undergraduate. Instead, he found that the college president was urging faculty to read the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, and that some of the other faculty were now just as liberal as he was. Both Colby and Bates quickly became theologically liberal before cutting their denominational ties and becoming entirely secular.

In the late twentieth century, a few enterprising Baptist evangelists started new independent Baptist churches that were more “fundamental” or evangelical than most of the congregations in the American Baptist Churches USA (as the Northern Baptist Convention was eventually renamed). Today there are 70 independent Baptist churches in Maine, compared to 136 churches affiliated with the ABC-USA.

In the 1980s, during the heyday of the Moral Majority, some of the independent Baptist churches in Maine encouraged a Christian conservative subculture by operating Christian private schools and in some cases, a Christian radio station. In Bangor, for instance, the Bangor Baptist Church (which was affiliated with the fundamentalist Baptist Bible Fellowship, of which Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, was also once a part) launched Bangor Christian School and the WHCF Christian radio station, which was the one place Bangor residents could hear James Dobson’s Focus on the Family in the 1980s. The church experienced explosive growth in the early 1980s as it participated in the culture wars of the Christian Right. But then, when the pastor who had overseen the church’s growth was caught in a sexual scandal that nearly destroyed the congregation, the church called Falwell to serve as interim pastor for a year – which he did.

Some of Maine’s Baptist churches thus had a direct connection to the Christian Right politics of the 1980s. But what happened in Lynchburg or in other parts of the South could not be replicated in Maine, because Maine’s population was too secular and too politically liberal. Maine’s Protestants were mostly mainline, not evangelical, and the state’s Republican Party was mostly pro-choice and was not interested in working with the Christian Right. When Bangor Baptist pastor Herman C. Frankland ran as an independent candidate for governor in 1978, he received 18 percent of the vote – which was an impressive showing for a fundamentalist Baptist pastor running on an independent ticket, but was not enough to either win or push the state’s Republican Party toward the Christian Right. The winner of the 1978 gubernatorial election was the Democratic candidate Joseph Brennan, a Catholic.

When I was growing up in Maine in the 1980s and early 1990s, most of the state’s leading elected officials were pro-choice, regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans. Maine’s culturally conservative Baptists (along with other evangelicals) were thus reminded every time they went to the voting booth that they did not have political power in the state. And as Maine’s population increasingly became unchurched and entirely secular, they were increasingly conscious that they themselves were a small countercultural Christian minority. In some ways, this returned them to the status they had had in their early history in the state, when they had resisted the dominant Congregationalist culture by pursuing a radical theology of a church comprised only of regenerate believers intent on holy living.

The history of Maine’s Baptists shows that the state’s Baptist churches have often been unstable and have tended to experience rapid rises and hard falls. Maintaining a theology of regenerate church membership has not been easy; whether because of persecution, worldliness, heresy, or scandal, Baptist churches in Maine have sometimes declined as quickly as they have increased – and as a result, they have never enjoyed the majority status they have in the South, despite their prevalence.

But at several points in Maine’s Baptist history, the state has also proven to be fertile ground for revival. And in Maine, Baptists have arguably larger role in the transmission of evangelical theology than any other denomination has in the state – perhaps because Baptist theology makes sense for Maine Protestants who have traditionally been suspicious of ecclesiastical hierarchy and control and who have been eager to find an alterative to the worldliness or sin that they have found elsewhere.

At a time when Maine has become overwhelmingly secular, perhaps the state is ready for a revival once again – and maybe Maine’s Baptist church plants will play a role in spreading the gospel of regeneration. Today, in what was once an overwhelmingly Catholic and mainline Protestant state, evangelicals outnumber both Catholics and mainline Protestants, with 22 percent of the state’s population identifying as evangelical. The evangelical population in Maine is also growing, even as the rest of the state’s Christian population is rapidly declining; 11 years ago, in 2014, evangelicals were only 14 percent of the population, according to the Pew Religious Landscape Study. And today nearly half of Maine’s evangelicals are Baptists, who now far outnumber members of any other Protestant denomination in the state.

If Maine’s Baptists do lead an evangelical revival in the state, perhaps they can be an example for evangelicals in other parts of the country who are looking for a way to distance the church from political advocacy. Given the still relatively small numbers of evangelicals in Maine, the Baptists in the state are in no position to exercise political power anytime soon. Perhaps the impossibility of pursuing politics will keep them focused on what the state’s Baptists at their best moments have been about: preaching the gospel and forming churches of believers.

That’s what got William Screven in trouble with the authorities more than 300 years ago. And maybe it’s something that will still attract notice today when it comes from a successful Baptist church planter.

Elsewhere on the internet:

I’m grateful to Paul Thompson (a professor of history and dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences at North Greenville University) for a wonderful interview that ran at Anxious Bench this week.

And we’re only seven weeks away from the release date for my new book from Notre Dame Press: Abortion and America’s Churches. You can preorder the book now from Notre Dame Press or from Amazon.