The General Baptists, those who upheld against the Calvinists the Arminian teaching that all human beings are offered salvation, began in England, but soon spread to the American colonies, especially North Carolina. Their energetic leader from the 1720s, the ex-Quaker Paul Palmer, increased their numbers so that by the 1750s there were some forty-three churches of this distinctive persuasion. During the Great Awakening, however, Calvinists associated with the Philadelphia Baptist Association persuaded most of them to discard their Arminian beliefs so that they were reduced to only four churches in the South. This book concentrates on recounting how, from their base in North Carolina, the Free Will Baptists, as they usually called themselves, subsequently grew hugely and expanded westwards, steadily assimilating churches arising from the Awakening that had been less sure of their identity.

In the North-East, by contrast, a new and dynamic group of Freewill Baptists (that was the normal Northern spelling) led by Benjamin Randall was fully aligned with the Awakening. This movement receives two chapters in this book, one on its rise and the other on its decline until it merged with the mainline Northern Baptist Convention in 1911, but this is not the place to find details about it. The author praises The Awakening of the Freewill Baptists by Scott Bryant (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011) as a source of further information about its early years, though justly pointing out against Bryant that Randall did not elevate his personal experience to the level of scripture as an authority. The book under review does not claim to shed extensive light on the denomination’s later years, probably exaggerating the decay of evangelical conviction in its ranks.

The author, however, goes on to explain the gradual consolidation of the Free Will Baptists in the South. Their doctrines became more uniform, with an insistence not only on general redemption but also on what they considered the corollary, the possibility of the apostasy of the truly converted. So did their practices, with the acceptance as ordinances of open communion, the admission of all true believers to the Lord’s supper, and the pedilavium , the washing of the feet of other members. This rite became a prized distinction, which is why it is depicted on the cover of the book. The laying on of hands after baptism, another traditional General Baptist ordinance, remained common but by the twentieth century was not a requirement. An extremely helpful chapter sets out these points of faith and practice systematically.

By 1935, sufficient standardization had taken place for the churches to unite in the National Association of the Original Free Will Baptists of the United States. The author suggests, following an article of 1965 which adopts the categories of Ernst Troeltsch, that this was the outcome of a transition from a sect-type body to a church-like body. That was not, in reality, the case, because church-like bodies, in Troeltsch’s view, make exclusive claims to rectitude. The Free Will Baptists did indeed evolve from sect-like origins, but into a denomination as defined by David Martin (“The Denomination,” British Journal of Sociology, 13 (1962), 1–14), a religious organization with modern structures that regards itself as part of a wider set of ecclesial bodies. That is exactly what the author describes: the denomination institutionalized, with its own college, Sunday school curriculum, women’s auxiliary, home and foreign missions, but also an awareness that it was part of the post-war evangelical coalition. Its theologians generated a “Reformed Arminianism” close to the teachings of the members of the National Association of Evangelicals, which it joined for a time.

The author of this book, J. Matthew Pinson, is himself at the heart of the National Association, the president of its Welch College, and the author of a book defending foot-washing. He has worked diligently to provide an account of how the denomination came to be, but the volume is more than a denominational apologetic. Its length (over 500 pages) allows it to be almost encyclopedic, though there is a downside. The book contains a great deal of repetition, with, for example, a point about the absence of an association’s records between 1854 and 1879 being made five separate times on pages 98, 99, 103, 106, and 107. Although it is also a pity that there are no maps to clarify the development of the various associations during the nineteenth century, the copious notes (pp. 383–471) contain a wealth of additional information. Historians from outside the denomination, as well as members of its churches, will find here a careful study of the Free Will Baptists of the American South.