Quotes & Sayings About Baptists

Know that no one can have indulged in the Holy Writers sufficiently, unless he has governed churches for a hundred years with the prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha, John the Baptist, Christ and the apostles ... We are beggars: this is true. — Martin Luther

The truth is that family values, as used by the American Family Association, Dan Quayle, and the southern Baptists, has nothing to do with either family or values, nor does it really have anything to do with homosexuals, abortionists, or pornographers. Those groups actually only serve as windmills to tilt at. The true agenda is power - power over the intellectually weak, emotionally immature, and ethically deficient Americans who are incapable of critical thinking and independent decision-making, and who are easily manipulated by the basest of human emotions - fear and the desire for revenge. — Morris Sullivan

Some men are Baptists, others Catholics. My father was an Oldsmobile man. — Jean Shepherd

My family are very, very religious in Texas. They're Southern Baptists. I left to go to New York when I was 17 and I realised I wasn't Southern Baptist. That's not how I am inclined. — Lynn Collins

[On refusing to be silenced:] I do not pretend to be John the Baptist rebuking the Pharisees. I do not claim to be Nathan upbraiding David. I aspire only to be Balaam's ass, castigating his master. — Katharina Zell

Hit don't make no difference what a man perfesses. I been in a heap o' churches. There's the Nazarene Church and the Pentecost and the Holy Rollers and the Baptists and I don't know what-all. I cain't see much difference to nary one of 'em. There's a good to all of 'em and there's a bad. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The truth is this: I am a Southern Baptist, and the great majority of Southern Baptists are lost. — Paul Washer

The temptation for a new generation, however, could be to see Baptist identity as a nuisance in the quest for converts. The effort to minimize an offensive "denominational brand name" will be counterproductive if we produce a generation of "anonymous Baptists," those whom we believe cannot handle the truth about Christ's design for His church. It will be tragic indeed if a future Broadman and Holman catalog includes a book titled, "Why I Am a Community Church (SBC) member."
But it will be equally tragic if the volume is titled, "Why I Want to Be a Presbyterian, but the Bible Won't Let Me. — Russell D. Moore

There are more Baptist preachers in Texas than Baptist missionaries in all the world. — Ray Thompson

This is going to be an old fashioned Baptist camp meeting with old fashioned singing, preaching and testifying. — Brandon Marshall

Psychologically, I'm a Roman Baptist. — Samuel Bowers

You know it's a real salvation when Baptists use cold water. — Jared Brock

I say to you Baptists, "Go on being good Baptists, thinking that you are more right than anybody else." Unless you think it, I have no use for you at all. The Church of England does precisely the same itself. — Geoffrey Fisher

When you transgress or sin, you must return to your personal religion for forgiveness. Catholics do not confess their sins to Baptist ministers. Baptists don't ask forgiveness from Muslim clerics. You must seek forgiveness from the place where you learned about sin. It is as if the religion infects you with the disease and then gives you a fake cure. — Darrel Ray

Baptists don't spend their time thinking about reality. — Lisa Kleypas

I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist. — Flannery O'Connor

Today it's something about hallucinogenic tea, but tomorrow it could be something that Roman Catholics or Southern Baptists or a number of groups need some accommodation in relation to a federal law. — Charles Haynes

Bob and I talked occasionally about the Church and religion, and once both expressed our amazement that we had somehow been born into the one group of people who were living as true Christians should. After all, we could just as easily have been born into a family that watched TV or, heaven forbid, into a family of Baptists! — Craig A. Hart

Because I was a Wheelwright-and, therefore, a New England snob-I'd assumed that Phoenix was largely composed of Mormons and Baptists and Republicans; — John Irving

The trouble with Texas Baptists is that we do not hold them under water long enough. — William Cowper Brann

Ordained Baptist minister; I make no apology for my faith. — Mike Huckabee

And you know, we'd go to church. We were Baptists. And every now and then there'd be a tent would set up, and it was the Holiness folks. And we liked their music. — Mel Tillis

I would not cross the street to make a Baptist, but I would go round the world to make a Christian. — James Sharp

I enjoy being Jewish, but I'm an atheist ... I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world. — Warren Mitchell

it's going great. Two months in, and I've created three apps."

"Apps?"

"For people who buy my book as an e-book --which will be everybody. The first is called Don't Look. It's for the overly sensitive. It blurs and turns the type red when a dog dies or a baby is born with a birth defect. Stuff like that. My second is It's Not Okay When You Say It, and it delivers an electrical zap if the reader laughs at a racial slur. My third is Jesus Thesaurus, which replaces explicit sexual language with church words. So, when one of my characters 'saints' a guy's 'disciple', He'll beg her to 'cavalry' his 'Baptists' and 'shout amen'. — Helen Ellis

I'd heard about the Baptists from Jacob Henry's mother. According to her, Baptists were a strange lot. They put you in water to see how holy you were. Then they ducked you under the water three times. Didn't matter a whit if you could swim or no. If you didn't come up, you got dead and your mortal soul went to Hell. But if you did come up, it was even worse. You had to be a Baptist. — Robert Newton Peck

And all the ministers of the various types of local Baptists had declined to participate in retribution for Monroe's failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy. — Charles Frazier

We'd rather have faithful Jews, Baptists or Buddhists than some of the Catholics who nearly run you over in the parking lot after Mass. — George Patterson

We sang a lot of church music. We were very active Baptists. Supposedly, I started singing when I was being given a bath - at 14 months or something like that. My mother and dad both swore that was true, but I'm sure it wasn't very good ... We always had the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons. — Jim Foglesong

All would wish to be saved and to enjoy the glory of paradise; but to gain heaven, it is necessary to walk in the straight road that leads to eternal bliss. This road is the observance of the divine commandments. Hence, in his preaching, the Baptist exclaimed: Make straight the way of the Lord. — Alphonsus Liguori

I heard this album as finished, I heard it in dreams ... It was like the revelations of John the Baptist or something. — Marilyn Manson

The Baptists believe in The Right to Life before you're born. They also believe in Life After Death, but that is a privilege and you have to earn it by spending the interim in guilt-ridden misery. At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end. — A. Whitney Brown

And, for instance, Baptists, Adventists, Lutherans, Pentecostals - let them exist on line with others. — Vladimir Zhirinovsky

I'm a member of the Primitive Baptist Church, and they will buy every CD that I have released, but they don't me just to bring the instruments much into the church. — Ralph Stanley

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. — Garrison Keillor

John Wesley tells of a dream he had. In the dream, he was ushered to the gates of Hell. There he asked, "Are there any Presbyterians here?" "Yes!", came the answer. Then he asked, "Are there any Baptists? Any Episcopalians? Any Methodists?" The answer was Yes! each time. Much distressed, Wesley was then ushered to the gates of Heaven. There he asked the same question, and the answer was No! "No?" To this, Wesley asked, "Who then is inside?" The answer came back, "There are only Christians here." — John Wesley

Pastor Russell lived in nearby Pittsburgh and said that there was no hell. This was terrible for we all knew that everyone but the Baptists were going there, so to believe there was no hell upset all the countryside theology. — Ammon Hennacy

If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers. — Richard Dawkins

You remember Ernest Angley? TV healer. He'd slap people's foreheads - whap! - and they'd flop over, quivering like fish." She hooted in laughter. "I used to love watching him. It was like professional wrestling for Baptists. — Daryl Gregory

I have never been brought up a Catholic - I mean, a Roman Catholic - we're all Catholics, aren't we? We're Protestant Catholics, whether we're from Methodist or Baptist or what. — Aimee Semple McPherson

What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don't come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don't catch hell 'cause you're a Baptist, and you don't catch hell 'cause you're a Methodist ... You don't catch hell because you're a Democrat or a Republican. You don't catch hell because you're a Mason or an Elk. And you sure don't catch hell 'cause you're an American; 'cause if you was an American, you wouldn't catch no hell. You catch hell 'cause you're a Black man. You catch hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason. — Malcolm X

It is very curious that the United States and Canada both assume that diversity means only race and ethnicity. They never assume it might mean more Nazis, or more Southern Baptists. That's diversity too, you know. — Richard Rodriguez

Baptists have long upheld the ideal of a free church in a free state. And from the beginning, they believed that forcing a person to worship against his will violated the principles of both Christianity and civility. — George W. Bush

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I am somebody who - my path to my faith is very kind of individual, and I don't want to be lumped into the category of those Westboro Baptists. — Jim Gaffigan

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! — Ray Bradbury

It's not about being a Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, or 5-Point Calvinist. God has only one family and, as Christians, we're in it! — Jim Cymbala

I guess I'm like Grandfather Street was in his religion. He thought the Baptists were wonderful until he joined them and then the Presbyterians looked more interesting to him. After he'd been with them a while he couldn't see how anybody could be a Presbyterian, so he joined the Unitarians. People thought he was a turncoat, but he wasn't - he was just a sort of religious Mormon. One church wasn't enough for him. — Jarvis Hall

Our religion seems foolish to you, but so does yours to me. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and the Catholics all have a different God. Why cannot we have one of our own? — Sitting Bull

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

One cannot help asking sadly, why is love of gold more potent than love of souls? The number of men mining and prospecting for gold in Shantung is more than double the number of men representing Southern Baptists! What a lesson for Southern Baptists to ponder! — Lottie Moon

You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics — Jeri Massi

Another way of putting this is that black Baptists were outsiders to the dominant white/European way of doing church. Instead, they forged a history of their own, and even their own distinct form of sacred music. — Thomas S. Kidd

Baptists have always strenuously contended for the acknowledgment of this principle, and have labored to propagate it. Nowhere, on the page of history, can an instance be found of Baptists depriving others of their religious liberties, or aiming to do so; but, wherever they ave found, even in tlie darkest ages of intolerance and persecution, they appear to be far in advance of those who surround them, on this important subject. This is simply owing to their adherence to the Gospel of Christ in its purity. Here religious liberty is taught in its fullest extent; and it was only when the Christian church departed from God's Word, that she sought to crush the rights of conscience; and only when she fully returns to it again, will she cease to cherish a desire to do so. — John Quincy Adams

Let us forget that we are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Free-thinkers, and remember only that we are men and women. After all, man and woman are the highest possible titles. All other names belittle us, and show that we have, to a certain extent, given up our individuality, and have consented to wear the collar of authority - that we are followers. Throwing away these names, let us examine these questions not as partisans, but as human beings with hopes and fears in common. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Baptists burn more slowly. — Billy Bragg

John the Baptist never performed any miracles. Yet, he was greater than any of the Old Testament prophets. — Leonard Ravenhill

For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations - not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned sects. — Hanna Rosin

Cats are like Baptists. You know they raise hell, but you can never catch them at it. — James Patterson

Mormons can testify whether I am willing to lay down my life for a Mormon; If it has been demonstrated that I have been willing to die for a Mormon I am bold to declare before heaven that I am just as ready to die for a Presbyterian, a baptist or any other denomination. — Joseph Smith Jr.

Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin? — Mark Twain

When we lose the contemplative mind, or non-dual consciousness, we invariably create violent people. The dualistic mind is endlessly argumentative, and we created an argumentative continent, which we also exported to North and South America. We see it in our politics; we see it in our Church's inability to create any sincere interfaith dialogue - or even intra-faith dialogue. The Baptists are still fighting the Anglicans as "lost" and the Evangelicals are dismissing the Catholics as the "Whore of Babylon," and we Catholics are demeaning everybody else as heretics, and each of us is hiding in our small, smug circles. What a waste of time and good God-energy, while the world suffers and declines. We have divided Jesus. — Richard Rohr

It is not the business of religion in these days to isolate herself from the world like John the Baptist. She must go down into the world like Jesus Christ. — Hugh Reginald Haweis

And the leftist bullies use that nonconstitutional phrase as a baton with which to club their opponents into submission. Jefferson's "wall of separation between Church & State," a phrase from his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, was meant not to prevent people from expressing religion in the public square but to prevent government from infringing on religious freedom. — Ben Shapiro

Jesus said his Father's House has many rooms. In this metaphor I like to imagine the Presbyterians hanging out in the library, the Baptists running the kitchen, the Anglicans setting the table, the Anabaptists washing feet with the hose in the backyard, the Lutherans making liturgy for the laundry, the Methodists stocking the fire in the hearth, the Catholics keeping the family history, the Pentecostals throwing open all the windows and doors to let more people in. — Rachel Held Evans

Baptists:
I'm a pious guy, but even I have my limits. I draw the line right around spending 8 hours in church every Sunday. Church should be a solemn 45 minutes to sit quietly and feel guilty, with donuts at the end to make you feel better. I don't go in for a full day of singing and dancing and rejoicing, no matter how nice the hats are. I prefer my Gospel monotonously droned to me from a pulpit, thank you very much. — Stephen Colbert

The Baptist found him far too deep; The Deist sighed with saving sorrow; And the lean Levite went to sleep, And dreamed of tasting pork to-morrow. — Winthrop Mackworth Praed

In fact she's a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder. — Orson Scott Card

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all. — Toni Morrison

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men. — Harold Bloom

In Indian civilization I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked. — Richard Henry Pratt

Baptists are very strong believers that the civil magistrate is ordained by God to punish those who do evil. — Richard Land

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack. — H.L. Mencken

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God's eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews - everybody is created equally in the eyes of God. — Jimmy Carter

People were born and raised Democrats as they were born and raised Baptists or Catholics. It was not something you questioned. As one said, "You were a Democrat come hell or high water. Or you were a Republican." In — David McCullough

And they would ask, well, now, are you one of those narrow-minded Baptists who think only Baptists are going to heaven? To which I enjoy replying, now actually I'm more narrow than that, I don't think all the Baptists are going to make it. — Mike Huckabee

In the history of the United States, we find that women were regularly preachers on the American frontier. Ironically, Baptists, who in some fundamentalist churches now bar women ministers, had more female preachers than any other denomination. Women pastored almost half of all Baptist churches in the state of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also the case in almost half of the Baptist churches in Michigan and Wisconsin. — Alan F. Johnson

The world's full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry - every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them. — Hanif Kureishi

Gatlin was full of God-fearing Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, but they couldn't resist the lure of the cards, the possibility of changing the course of their own destiny. — Kami Garcia

Of all persecuted sects, the Baptists stand forth as most prominent, simply and only because they aim at a more complete and thorough reform than any others ever attempted. They teach that Christ's kingdom is not of this world; that the church is not a national, political, or provincial establishment; but a congregation of holy men, separated from the world by the receiving of the Holy Spirit. — John Quincy Adams

Religion was quite a thing in our house - we were Baptists. Some Sundays I went to church three times. If there was a talk on missionary work in the afternoon, I could be there all bloody day. But religion took its first big knock after Dad died. — Philip Kerr

Baptists never make love standing up. They're afraid someone might see them and think they're dancing. — Lewis Grizzard

It is the obligation of Westboro Baptist Church to put the cup of God's fury to America's lips, and cause America to drink it. And you will drink it! — Fred Phelps

I've been an evangelistic Baptist all my life and still am to some degree. — Jimmy Carter

I am perhaps being a bit facetious but if some of my good Baptist brethren in Georgia had done a little preaching from the pulpitagainst the K.K.K. in the '20s, I would have a little more genuine American respect for their Christianity! — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Boring. Total downer. Again - you have to remember the audience. This isn't some anti-abortion group. You've got to dig deeper. Remember who you're talking to." "Governor, I can guarantee you these people are anti-abortion." "You don't know that." I did know that, and so did he. "They're celebrating traditional motherhood, they're independent Baptists, and they're from Florence." Now it would become an argument about something else. He'd get impatient and say, "Never mind, I'll think of something," and walk into the event. It didn't matter what he said. At the Mother of the Year ceremony, middle-aged women cackled and cooed at anything the governor — Barton Swaim

The Baptists' basic theology is that if you hold someone under water long enough, he'll come around to your way of thinking. It's a ritual known as 'Bobbing for Baptists.' — A. Whitney Brown