I.

Introduction

Baptists, Protestant Christians who accept the basic tenets of the 16th-century Reformation (justification by faith, the authority of the Scriptures, and the priesthood of the believer) but have added other beliefs and practices, including baptism of believers by immersion only, the separation of church and state, and the autonomy of the local church. The Baptists are important for their emphasis on these and other beliefs and for their numbers. In the late 1990s there were about 43 million Baptists worldwide, with 162,000 churches.

The great majority of Baptists (about 33 million in the late 1990s) are distributed in 14 major denominations in the United States, where they make up two-fifths of the Protestant population. Other countries where Baptists are strong are, in descending order of total membership, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire), South Korea, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Canada, Indonesia, Russia, and Romania. The largest number of Baptists are in North America (77 percent), followed by Asia (9 percent), Africa (8 percent), South America (3 percent), Europe (2 percent), and Central America and the Caribbean Islands (1 percent). Baptists espoused some of the religious convictions of the Anabaptists, although no established connection existed between the two groups. Organizationally, Baptists originated in the early 17th century in Holland and England, with John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, English separatists from the Anglican church, as leaders.