1832 THE GREAT BAPTIST SEPARATION - FROM LOCAL CHURCHES TO THE BENEVOLENT EMPIRE

By: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“1832: The Great Baptist Separation—From Local Churches to the Benevolent Empire,” argues that the Old School–New School conflict was not a polite intramural quarrel but a nationwide re-wiring of Baptist life—a rolling series of fractures (late 1820s → 1830s → into the 1840s) driven by whether churches would submit to a new institutional “benevolent empire” (boards, societies, Sunday schools, seminaries, press) or reject it as extra-scriptural machinery that displaced the local church and the Spirit’s direct work.

The paper does three big things:

1. Defines the camps and clarifies “Old School” diversity.
   You keep “Old School Baptist” as the umbrella for the anti-mission/anti-society party, but you now explicitly divide the Old School world into three streams—Absoluters, Means Baptists, Conditionalists—so the reader doesn’t mistake “Old School” for one monolithic theology.

2. Answers the “how big was it?” question with measurable claims and geographic logic.
   You frame the size as substantial but not “most Baptists,” emphasizing that Black Rock (1832) standardized and accelerated an already-brewing separation. You give “scale language” (hundreds of churches / tens of thousands) and then explain why the rupture hit harder in some places than others:

• South/Appalachian uplands become the Old School “core belt” (WV/KY/TN/NC especially).

• The New School grows thickest where institutions can run: towns, print hubs, convention centers, travel corridors.

1. Builds a state-by-state, region-by-region “fault line map” and then carries it west.
   After outlining the New School infrastructure (conventions/societies, press, education pipeline, Sunday school unions), you track the split through the South, the Midwest (with Ohio/Indiana/Illinois as the “hot zone” where association minutes make the fight concrete), and then into the Far West, where you argue the controversy rode the wagon trails and reproduced itself in frontier form. You finish with a growing roster of named western figures on both sides (e.g., Oregon missionary stream names like Fisher/Johnson/Chandler/Cheedle/Sperry, and frontier anti-mission champions like Parker/Thompson/Crow), plus institutional markers like the Siloam Association as an anti-mission organizing signal in the Pacific Northwest.

Overall, it reads like a thesis with a clear burden: the split created two competing moral imaginations of “faithfulness”—one that sees coordinated means as obvious obedience, and one that sees those same means as a rival authority structure that corrupts church life.