M. Goodwin- The Baptist denomination was the most popular among the slaves, and today it stands at the top numerically among the black churches. What would you say accounts for this?
H. Thurman- Oh, I don’t know, I am not very smart in these ways. I suppose some of it was just circumstantial. But if I put my mind to it. I can think of one or two things that are important. First, the Baptist denomination has a highly charged and highly convincing emotional content. Second, it has a tradition of freedom. There is so much local autonomy that any Baptist church can ordain its own men; it’s not accountable to anybody beyond its own congregation. I would say that its democratic practices in ordination account for the general appeal of the denomination. Not its religiosity, but the fact that in the Baptist denomination any man is as significant as any other. Even the head man is no longer the head man when the rest of us decide that he isn’t. And this would have a special appeal to people who were terribly circumscribed everywhere else in their world. These, I believe are the primary characteristics that made and make the Baptist denomination popular among blacks, and among whites too. It seems to me that in specifying them I have described the very genius of the church.
