Why Weren't Baptists Better Patriots?

Baptist pastor James Manning of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote to English Baptist leader John Ryland in November 1776, apprising him of trouble in the American colonies. Two winters before, Providence’s Baptists had seen a prodigious revival, with perhaps two hundred people experiencing conversion within just a few months. But Manning thought the outbreak of war in Massachusetts in April 1775 brought an abrupt end to the revival: “the fatal 19th of April, the day of the Lexington battle, like an electric stroke put a stop to the progress of the work, as well as in other places as here. Oh horrid war! How contrary to the spirit of Jesus!”