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3 A Community of Converts Conversion Narratives and Social Experience As the Russian Baptist movement expanded in the early twentieth century , its members were constantly telling one another stories. Preaching by ordinary believers and witnessing to personal conversion experiences played an important part in prayer meetings. Whether in public or private settings, converts sought to interpret and share with fellow believers and with society at large a vision of their religious life and social experience. These stories were not just part of an oral tradition. They permeated Baptists’ personal papers and the poetry, hymns, stories, articles, and letters to the editor of the Russian evangelical press. Above all, they were features of a major literary art form of the Russian Baptists, the conversion narrative. In 1928 the journal Baptist Ukrainy even published instructions on how to write a conversion account .1 This chapter examines the collective story that Russian Baptists developed for their movement, using more than one hundred personal narratives published in books and journals between 1906 and 1928 or written by Bible school applicants in the mid-1920s.2 These accounts demonstrate the importance of the spiritual in the elaboration of new conceptions of the individual and community in an era of revolutions. In the stories of their faith journeys, Russian Baptists chronicled their coming to awareness as individuals , but they also asserted the importance of new kinds of communities to sustain these individuals in a turbulent age. 47 Coleman, Russian Baptists 2/7/05 12:03 PM Page 47 The very process of social and political modernization in Russia transformed the religious playing field. It raised questions about the place of the Orthodox religion in the Russian state and in Russian identity, and, more generally, about the relevance of faith in the modern age. Imperial Russia had long proclaimed itself Holy, and indivisibly Orthodox, but social and political change were giving voice to groups like the Baptists that challenged that self-image. This was a period of rapid economic and social transformation , of war and revolution. Well before the Bolshevik Revolution launched its drive to build a socialist society, the traditional isolation of the village was broken down through rapid expansion of the railway system and intensive state-driven industrialization, creating links to a Russia-wide market. Rising literacy, mass circulation newspapers, and widespread labor migration similarly altered traditional social patterns. These experiences made Russians of diverse walks of life into seekers, looking for ways to draw cultural sense out of the surrounding disorder and dislocation, and to carve out a place for themselves in the new society. Historians are familiar with the many workers who drew revolutionary conclusions from this tumultuous context.3 Other possible new identities competed with the revolutionary model, however. Most accounts of the emergence and fostering of revolutionary consciousness tend to dismiss Orthodoxy as a tool of the imperial regime, of little relevance to the evolution of workers’ identities. New research, however, is showing that a genuine spiritual quest animated Russian popular culture throughout the revolutionary period.4 The secularizing process that made religion an individual choice, rather than a birthright, actually helped to unleash these spiritual forces.5 Russian Baptists’ conversion narratives constitute some of the best sources for examining the role of religion in the evolution of new identities in revolutionary Russia. The Baptists’ preoccupation with stories of their conversions is not surprising . Professing an adult personal conversion is the prerequisite for baptism by full immersion and membership in the church.6 Moreover, as the evangelical movement grew rapidly, it experienced many new conversions and sought to encourage more. Through their conversion narratives, believers set out a model path for becoming a Russian Baptist and presented the Baptist faith as a legitimate spiritual choice for Russians. The Baptist faith was widely perceived as “foreign,” but converts rejected this view, portraying evangelical conversion as a natural outgrowth of broader Russian popular aspirations and, indeed, as the solution to the ignorance, hatred, hierarchy, and spiritual emptiness that they believed plagued Russian society as a whole. Thus Russian Baptists used the stories of their own spiritual development to challenge others to see the world in their terms and to assert a religious solution to the problems of their times. The great majority of Baptists, including those who told their conversion stories, were peasants, artisans, and industrial workers. Like other worker autobiographers , these lower-class Russians sought new means to express their organizing for the russian reformation 48 Coleman, Russian Baptists 2/7/05...

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