Baptists in Russia

From the heart of a country once called godless came a plea for Christians in the U.S. and Great Britain to pray for Russia's victory. If the plea was strange, the source was stranger: it came from 4,000,000 Russian Baptists. The U.S. knew about its own Baptists, but the U.S. had never heard of the Russian Baptist Church, which claimed some two-thirds as many members as the Northern and Southern Baptists combined. Gasped the Roman Catholic Brooklyn Tablet: "This mass production of baptists . . . verges on the incredible."

The Russian Baptists are Biblical fundamentalists; they sprang from German Protestantism. Unlike surviving fragments of the Orthodox Church, the Baptists, a young sect, had no social standing in Tsarist Russia, are consequently not held accountable for Tsarist infamy. According to Russian Theologian George P. Fedotov, Visiting Fellow at Yale, they have made a great appeal to Communist youth, "who have a deep spiritual thirst."

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