Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Baptist tradition began in the year 1609 when a group of English exiles in Amsterdam rejected infant baptism and chose to immerse only those who could personally confess their faith. John Smyth led this congregation, which included Thomas Helwys and John Murton, and they fled to the Dutch Republic to escape persecution from the Church of England.
Thomas Helwys was the first Baptist to articulate the revolutionary political philosophy that the church and state must be kept separate in matters of law. He published the Helwys Declaration of Faith in 1611 and argued that individuals must have liberty of conscience even if they were heretics, which led to his imprisonment and death in the Marshalsea Prison.
Roger Williams established a Baptist church in Providence, Rhode Island, and John Clarke founded another in Newport in the year 1638, creating the earliest Baptist congregations in North America. The exact records for both congregations are lacking, leading to centuries of debate over which church deserved the title of first Baptist congregation in America.
In 2020, the Baptist movement had around 170 million believers in the world. The Baptist World Alliance census released in 2025 showed 283 participating Baptist fellowships in 138 countries, 178,000 churches, and 53,000,000 baptized members.
The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1995 that recognized the failure of their ancestors to protect the civil rights of African Americans. The resolution declared that messengers unwaveringly denounced racism in all its forms as deplorable sin and offered an apology to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism.
General Baptists uphold Arminian theology which believes that Christ's atonement extends to all people, while Particular Baptists uphold Reformed theology or Calvinism which believes it extends only to the elect. The Particular Baptists emerged in the 1630s and adopted the First London Confession of Faith in 1644, which became a foundational document for Reformed Baptists.