Oliver Hart was arguably the most important evangelical leader of the pre-Revolutionary South. For thirty years the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Hart’s energetic ministry breathed new life into that congregation and the struggling Baptist cause in the region. As the founder of the Charleston Baptist Association, Hart did more than any single person to lay the foundations for the institutional life of the Baptist South, while also working extensively with evangelicals of all denominations to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening across the lower South. One reason for Hart’s extensive influence is the uneasy compromise he made with white Southern culture, most apparent in his willingness to sanctify rather than challenge the institution of slavery, as his more radical evangelical predecessors had done. While this capitulation gained Hart and his fellow Baptists access to Southern culture, it would also sow the seeds of disunion in the larger American denomination Hart worked so hard to construct. Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America is the first modern biography of Oliver Hart, at the same time interweaving the story of the remarkable transformation of America’s Baptists across the long eighteenth century. It provides perhaps the most complete narrative of the early development of one of America’s largest, most influential, and most understudied religious groups.
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