Baptists The Only Thorough Religious Reformers

Baptists, The Only Thorough Religious Reformers is a religious tract attributed in some catalogues to John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), though the attribution is uncertain. Adams was raised Unitarian and remained associated with the Unitarian church through most of his life, and the Baptist position the title suggests is not consistent with his known religious views. The work may belong to a different writer of the same name from the same period.

If the work is by another John Quincy Adams, it would belong to the substantial American Baptist denominational literature that developed across the early nineteenth century as American Baptists were establishing their distinctive theological and ecclesiastical positions against the older established Protestant denominations.

The tract argues, as the title suggests, that the Baptist movement carried the principles of the Protestant Reformation more thoroughly into practice than the other Protestant denominations that had stopped short of full reform. The argument was a common one in nineteenth century American Baptist polemical literature.