While Georgia’s Southern Baptist governor, Joseph Brown, is making headlines as the Georgia legislature is in session, some Southern Baptists in the state are talking about this week’s Christian Index editorial by editor Samuel Boykin. Confederate political and religious leaders remain defiant in their defense of slavery and certain that God is on their side.…
Today Joseph Andrew Jackson Lightburn, a Baptist minister and boyhood friend of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, is appointed a brigadier general and ordered to report to the Army of Tennessee. He serves admirably throughout the war, afterwards retiring to spend the rest of his life serving as a minister, including at the Broad Run…
Today, the 800 African members (most of whom are slaves) of the First Baptist Church of Charlottesville (Virginia), in the wake of the recent enactment of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln‘s Emancipation Proclamation, politely make a request to white leaders of the Southern Baptist congregation: may they be allowed to form their own congregation? Well understanding…