In Retracing Baptists in Rhode Island, Emeritus Professor of History at Rhode Island College J. Stanley Lemons aims to demonstrate that the history of Rhode Island Baptists matters. Despite Rhode Island being the colony/state where the first Baptist church, association, and denomination in America started, historians of Baptists have shortchanged the story and contributions of Rhode Island Baptists (1). In the twentieth century, one can trace a lack of regard for Rhode Island Baptists to William G. McLoughlin's two-volume New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (Harvard University Press, 1971). He argued that Roger Williams, the founder of the first Baptist church in America and of the Rhode Island colony, had “little or no influence or role to play in the larger struggle in New England” to obtain religious liberty. In contrast, McLoughlin focused on the achievements of Massachusetts Baptists like Isaac Backus instead of Williams and the Rhode Island Baptists. Since McLoughlin, Lemons argues that historians have followed suit and neglected the Rhode Island Baptists (2). To address such neglect, Lemons provides the most comprehensive treatment of Rhode Island Baptists ever written by examining them from their early seventeenth-century beginnings to the present day.

Lemons's work is more than a corrective to Baptist historiography, however. His book also successfully looks “at how the larger movements of missions, Sunday schools, anti-Masonry, racism, abolitionism, revivalism, associations and conventions, and the clash of liberal and conservative understandings of the Bible affected the local scene” (9). His book thus explores key themes in American historical studies and in the history of American Christianity.

After a short introduction, the author divides his work into four sections, which are four or five chapters apiece. The first section, “Awakenings,” discusses the beginnings of Baptists in England and America, the rise of various denominations such as the Six Principle Baptists and the Seventh Day Baptists, and the profound impact that the First Great Awakening had on Baptist growth in New England. Section 2, “Transformations,” considers how the Second Great Awakening led to the proliferation of various groups in Rhode Island such as the Freewill Baptists and new religious movements like the Shakers and Society of Universal Friends. Sunday schools and missions organizations also became more widespread and helped foster a large degree of inter-Protestant cooperation in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the third section, “Divisions,” noticeable cracks in the unofficial American Protestant establishment grew as the nineteenth and early twentieth century progressed. Rhode Island Baptists grappled with freemasonry, slavery, the dramatic rise in immigrants—particularly Catholic immigrants—coming into the state, Brown University's disaffiliation from Baptists, and the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy. The final section, “Remakings,” details how Rhode Island Baptists made use of professional revivalists to try to reach an ever-increasing non-Baptist populace in the early to mid-twentieth century. Baptists also navigated the challenges of homosexuality, the role of women in ministry, and how to maintain a Baptist identity in the midst of a society that frowns upon denominational and religious labels.

Lemons's focus on key revivalists and the various means they used to produce results (i.e., obtain conversions) and how they impacted Rhode Island Baptists is a real strength to his work. For instance, Charles G. Finney believed that anyone could choose to get saved. Lemons notes that Finney “reduced the drama of salvation to a simple idea: God has one vote, the devil has one vote, and you have one vote. The majority decides one's eternal fate. Each individual casts the deciding vote. This concept fit perfectly with the optimistic, democratic, and individualistic ethos of the nineteenth century” (378–379). To elicit conversions, Finney emphasized altar calls, singing, lively preaching, calling out the unconverted by name, and holding weeks-long or months-long “protracted meetings.” He preached for three weeks in Providence in August 1831 and successfully brought new Christians into various churches in the area, which included Baptist churches. Baptist evangelist Jacob Knapp imitated Finney's methods and was an effective revivalist in Rhode Island as well (380). Whenever Rhode Island Baptists felt that they were not reaching the community properly or that there was a sense of deadness in the church, they invited a prominent evangelist to come in and shake things up spiritually. Chapter 14 records a seemingly never-ending stream of evangelists who came to Rhode Island to effect change.

Another strength of Lemons's work is the significant attention that he gives to the role of women in Rhode Island Baptist churches. In the seventeenth century all the way to the final quarter of the eighteenth century, in General Baptist groups, “women were allowed to speak in meetings, to prophesy, and to vote” (37). Calvinistic Baptists, which became more prominent in Rhode Island by 1800, restricted women's roles. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, Rhode Island Baptist women found a way to have leadership roles despite such restrictions. Margaret Gano and Eliza Pitman, the daughters of two Rhode Island Baptist pastors, established the Female Mite Society in 1806 in Providence. According to Lemons, the Providence Female Mite Society was “the first missionary group of any sort in Rhode Island. The members of the Mite Society pledged to contribute a penny each week for home missions” (174–175). Missionary societies, as well as temperance and other societies, mushroomed throughout the nineteenth century. Many Baptist women formed and led in these societies, though most Rhode Island Baptist women at the time could not be ordained. A notable exception was Clarissa Danforth, a Freewill Baptist woman who was ordained as an evangelist in 1815 and who ministered in Rhode Island thereafter (133–134). At present, it is commonplace for the American Baptist Convention of Rhode Island to ordain women for ministry (428).

Though it does not affect the overall quality and accomplishments of the book, Lemons's use of the phrase “bizarre cults” (105) instead of “new religious movements” to describe Publick Universal Friend's (Jemima Wilkinson's) new Society of Universal Friends was a little jarring and unnecessary. Notwithstanding this critique, the reviewer could not recommend more highly Lemons's Retracing Baptists in Rhode Island for historians of Baptists, Rhode Island historians, historians of American Christianity, and graduate students in those fields. However, the depth and breadth of his work would be difficult for many undergraduate students to digest.