Throughout history Christians have consistently been faced with the task of discerning what aspects of the culture could be reconciled with the Christian faith. While not every decision carries remarkable consequences, inattention to the danger of cultural influences has led some to abandon core doctrines or the faith altogether. Studying how our forebears have interacted with their culture can cultivate wisdom for our decisions in the present. In two previous essays on John R. Gower (here and here), I described the culture that Southern Free Will Baptists faced around the turn of the twentieth century and showed how the Cumberland Association decided to embrace the broader temperance movement. While they considered temperance to be in-line with biblical principles, they did not unreflectively accept all cultural forces. In this essay, we will observe their reluctance to go with the flow of the culture when it threatened to ameliorate their commitment to historic Free Will Baptist doctrine.
Unity Movements and Ecumenicalism
In my first essay in this series, I provided a brief introduction to the Populist political movement in the South at the end of the nineteenth century and emphasized that it was only one aspect of a broader cultural emphasis on cooperative action to reform society and compete economically with cooperatives. However, the desire to build cooperative institutions and political movements was not confined to society and politics. During the last half of the nineteenth century, a rising tide of unity movements swamped nearly every American Protestant denomination and led the Northern Freewill Baptists into merging with the Northern Baptists in 1911.[1] Those who advocated for unity were inclined toward ecumenicalism and harnessing the power of numbers. In fact, they had much in common with the cooperativists and Populists, though that point has often been overlooked.
During the late nineteenth century, most Protestant denominations in America, under the influence of the Enlightenment and the rise of Pietism, embraced varying levels of ecumenism. Denominations everywhere were looking to build stronger institutional organizations within and bridges with likeminded groups without.[2] As Robert L. Vaughn and Robert E. Picirilli have shown, Southern Free Will Baptists were not immune to the unity movements.[3] Vaughn and Picirilli specifically focus their attention on the competing unity movements of the late nineteenth century, led by Bushrod W. Nash in North Carolina and Alvin D. Williams in Tennessee.
Bushrod W. Nash and Alvin D. Williams
Nash, who was from the Union Baptist movement in Virginia, sought to build a Southern Baptist Association (not to be confused with the Southern Baptist Convention) consisting of all Baptist churches that held to “free grace, free agency, and free communion.” Nash had some success among Free Will Baptists in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, beginning as early as the 1850s but failed to achieve fully his goals because many Free Will Baptists were rightly concerned about losing their distinct identity.[4]
Williams was a Randall Movement Freewill Baptist from Pennsylvania. After four decades of pastoring numerous churches across the Randall Movement, he moved to Kennesaw, Nebraska, in 1872 or 1873 as the first pioneer family in the area. He was active among Nebraska Freewill Baptists before he decided to move to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1889. He seems to have moved to Middle Tennessee with the goal of building a unity movement among Southern Free Will Baptists and other “white liberal Baptists,” by which he meant those holding to the “freedom of the will, universal atonement, and other Arminian teachings about soteriology, as well as to open communion.”[5]
While his precise motives are unclear, he saw some success in building connections between Free Will Baptist associations from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. He seems to have been received well in Nashville, serving as the moderator for the Cumberland Association in 1890, before he gave up the unity effort and moved on to Indiana in 1891.[6] This feat is all the more impressive because, according to Williams, the Southern Free Will Baptists opposed any “further aid from Northern men than may be asked for and rendered consistently with the ideas and feelings of the Southern brethren.”[7] So, Southern Free Will Baptists were leery of Northern help and perceived real differences between their doctrines and those of Northern Freewill Baptists.
The Cumberland Association and the Limitations of Unity
John Gower seems to have had a special affinity for Williams and his work. Along with Williams, Gower and J. E. Hudgens from Ashland City were elected to serve as delegates from the Cumberland Association to the General Association meeting in Hartselle, Alabama, in December 1890. The 1890 report of the Cumberland Literature and Union Committee, which was filled by Gower with two other laymen and two ministers, praised God for increased interest in the uniting of all white Liberal Baptists of the South.
The Literature and Union Committee also recommended supporting the Herald and Enterprise periodical edited by Williams and used to promote the Southern unification movement. The Herald and Enterprise took out an advertisement on the back page of the 1890 Cumberland minutes, highlighting that the “one unity organization” of the General Association would “add greatly” to the “efficiency, strength, and prosperity” of white Liberal Baptists. The desire to promote a more efficient and robust movement through cooperative organizations fits well with the ideals and motivations of the Populist movement, made up of deeply religious Southern farmers who sought to use social and political action to give power and influence to their values.
While the people of the Cumberland Association at the turn of the twentieth century were certainly influenced by the prejudices and cultural norms of their day, the explicit designation of this unity movement as being for whites is likely more for descriptive purposes than prescriptive. The Cumberland Association certainly included black members in the 1840s as several enslaved men and women were included in Robert Heaton’s ministerial book. More broadly, the Cape Fear Association of Free Will Baptists included a significant number of black congregants until they appealed to separate into their own congregations after emancipation in 1865. Furthermore, Northern Freewill Baptists, including Williams, had been known for their work with black people, including some integrated congregations, but still used the term “white” to describe the general makeup of their group.[8] Vaughn and Picirilli also have good reason to suggest that the General Association’s firm messaging about being for whites was at least partially motivated by Nash’s attempts to undermine Williams by accusing him of being an advocate for racial mixing in society.[9] However, this emphasis may suggest that Populist support for segregation had influenced Southern Free Will Baptists at the time.
Neither Nash nor Williams was ultimately successful in building a lasting unity movement. Though the reasons for their failure are not altogether clear, many who were most interested in Nash’s overall mission seemed to have joined the Disciples of Christ as a clearer articulation of their doctrinal commitments.[10] On the other side, both Nash’s and Williams’s unification programs required Free Will Baptists to reduce their doctrinal non-negotiables too far for comfort. Their movements also seem to have been dominated by their individual personalities. After Williams moved to Indiana and after Nash died, their unity movements lost steam and quickly dissipated. Also, the logistics of travel and communication in the South prior to the mid-twentieth century made the prospects of building a regional association of farmers and farmer-preachers much more unlikely.
Conclusion
John R. Gower’s life provides a fascinating insight into the culture and interests of Free Will Baptists at the turn of the twentieth century. His background in farming cooperatives, the temperance movement, and Democratic politics offers more nuance to our understanding of the association’s stance on alcohol and the motivations of those who were inclined toward unification programs. The broader cultural forces of the day significantly influenced the beliefs and practices of the Cumberland Association and Free Will Baptists throughout the South. However, that influence was not determinative. The clerical and lay leaders of congregations and associations worked through tensions between their understanding of the Bible and its application in their lives. The same tension between culture and the church holds true in the present. As we wrestle with the principalities and powers of our age, we need to take stock of how the culture is shaping and influencing our assumptions and patterns of thought. Let us be wise as serpents and gentle as doves in our labor.
[1] J. Matthew Pinson, The Free Will Baptists: A New History, America’s Baptists series, ed. Keith Harper (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2025), 171–81; William F. Davidson, The Free Will Baptists in History (Nashville: Randall House, 2001), 254–57; Jesse F. Owens, “When Free Will Baptists Went Liberal (Part I),” Helwys Society Forum (June 19, 2017), https://www.helwyssocietyforum.com/when-free-will-baptists-went-liberal-part-i/; Jesse F. Owens, “When Free Will Baptists Went Liberal (Part II),” Helwys Society Forum (June 22, 2017), https://www.helwyssocietyforum.com/when-free-will-baptists-went-liberal-part-ii/.
[2] Samuel McCrae Cavert, Church Cooperation and Unity in America: A Historical Review, 1900–1970 (New York: Association, 1970), 14–15, https://archive.org/details/churchcooperatio0000cave/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater; Conrad Cherry, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 54–56; Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 197–98; Robert T. Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 303–06; Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 307–09.
[3] See Robert L. Vaughn and Robert E. Picirilli, “Free Will Baptist Participation in Unity Movements in the South, 1870 to 1910,” in Free Will Baptist History: Exploring Our Origins and Identity, by Robert E. Picirilli (Nashville: Randall House, 2019).
[4] For a much more detailed overview of Nash’s work, see Vaughn and Picirilli, “Free Will Baptist Participation in Unity Movements,” 137–60.
[5] Vaughn and Picirilli, “Free Will Baptist Participation in Unity Movements,” 132n2.
[6] Vaughn and Picirilli, “Free Will Baptist Participation in Unity Movements,” 162–63.
[7] “Southern Unity,” Morning Star (Aug. 22, 1889).
[8] Thank you to J. Matthew Pinson for giving background information about the Northern movement. His The Free Will Baptists offers a fuller treatment of black Free Will Baptists than has been conducted up to this time.
[9] Vaughn and Picirilli, “Free Will Baptist Participation in Unity Movements,” 166–67. For information on the relationship between Populism and North Carolina Free Will Baptists, see Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
[10] Vaughn and Picirilli, “Free Will Baptist Participation in Unity Movements,” 158–59.
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