Nudist Baptists?
When I first saw the following photo sequence, I thought for a moment that Kinkerbelle had somehow fallen in with a schismatic sect of Baptist nudists. I mean, it’s not entirely inconceivable, is it? You take some full immersionists who want to be, like, really sure that your soul has been washed clean of sin, and maybe the idea is, wearing robes isn’t the best way to take the most important bath of your life?
Alas, my flight of fancy was soon punctured. Kinkerbelle “merely” went to a kinky luau party, and writes “It is indeed a rush to have someone’s breath in the palm of your hand.”
Which is fine, and all, but still a let-down. Wouldn’t it be a richer world, that had nudist Baptists in it?
(I am now taking positions in the betting pool for how many minutes it is until somebody makes a comment telling me how wrong wrong WRONG — on the Internetz, ZOMG! — I am due to not knowing about the rich traditions of naked baptism among the [group of people] during the [timeframe] in [state, region, or country]. Side bets will also be accepted on whether such a comment happens before or after someone tries to lecture me about insufficient respect for religion.)
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It *IS* a richer world. While I would safely discount the ‘Calvary Nudist Baptist Church’ as a joke, a significant number of nudists are devout Christians, as a quick google of ‘christian naturist’ will reveal. In fact, AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation) was run for many years by a pastor, and in the 40’s and 50’s was regarded as a Christian organization along the same lines as the YMCA.
Good luck on finding any sexy photos of nudist Baptists, though. In my experience, both nudists and Baptists seem awfully reticent about admitting they even *have* sex lives, much less letting them be photographed.
GalenZ, I have no doubt in my mind that there are plenty of nudist Christians, and wouldn’t be surprised if there were a non-nudist Christian sect somewhere that practiced nude baptism. (Nudity, after all, features in a fair few other religious rites around this big world of ours, and I’m not really aware of any Biblical basis for the nudity taboos that do exist. There’s nobody who can claim a monopoly on the symbolic value of stripping away your earthly garments, in order to stand naked in the sight of whatever deities are being worshipped.)
But Christianity is a very big tent, and Baptists (at least in America) seem to inhabit one of the more culturally conservative corners of it. So, I think it’s fair to observe that “Christian naturists” is likely to be a bigger set than “Baptist naturists”, if indeed the latter class exists.
This discussion needs a Venn diagram!
Something like this you mean?
Not wrong wrong wrong, but please be careful, unlike David Carradine. Like drugs, it’s a high risk behavior.
The ice cream socials would be a lot more fun. But remember, no close dancing.
:-D
Love the Venn diagram – and so does my sweetie :)
BTW, there is a poll on the Naturist Christians site (http://www.natu...old=0 ; sorry I don’t know how to hide the link) that breaks them down by denomination, and Southern Baptists are one of the big three. While they are indeed in a conservative corner of the US, in fact the majority of nudists are conservative anyway, so they fit right in.
In the long long ago I was taught in Sunday school that early Christians practiced fully nude baptism before the whole church. Sadly they had female deacons hold cloths to obscure female baptees (and be ready as a towel), and male deacons for male baptees, all to preserve modesty. :sigh:
I hear from many whose sects practice adult baptism today that these are often performed in cheap white baptismal gowns, and that it can be quite a spectacle. I picture these as something like the cheap flimsy graduation gowns that most of us are familiar with, although someone’s probably making a lot more money on them. After all, not graduating on stage has no consequences on one’s immortal soul.
I believe that the Adamites, an obscure Christian sect dating from the second century, practiced nudism believing that it would return man to innocence. I would assume therefore, that they baptised in the nude…
‘Obscure’ is definitely a correct description of the Adamites – ‘apocryphal’ is more like it, since even the primary historical records always describe it as a sect they’ve heard of, but never actually encountered. (Likewise for the version of the sect that kept getting mentioned in the Protestant upheavals in the 1600s). I’ve been researching a book on the History of Nudity for some time now, and boy, would I love to find good evidence that a real Adamite sect ever actually existed.
However, there have definitely been other Christian sects that have performed fully-nude baptisms through the years, in addition to other forms of public nudity. (For example, Quakers were known to go nude in public as a form of protest in the 1600s.) There is some scholarly debate about how widespread the practice of nude baptism was in the early church, but The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome (http://www.bomb....html), written c 215 CE, is pretty clear that nude baptism was a norm at the time:
’21. … When they come to the water, the water shall be pure and flowing, that is, the water of a spring or a flowing body of water. Then they shall take off all their clothes. The children shall be baptized first. … After this, the men will be baptized. Finally, the women, after they have unbound their hair, and removed their jewelry. No one shall take any foreign object with themselves down into the water. … Afterward, when they have come up out of the water, they shall be anointed by the elder with the Oil of Thanksgiving, saying, “I anoint you with holy oil in the name of Jesus
Christ.” Then, drying themselves, they shall dress and afterwards gather in the church.’
Given the fact that public nudity was totally not an issue in pagan Rome c.215, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the ritual need have occurred in any way other than described above. However, as time went on, the Church became rather more prudish, so there is no good way to know how long such practices lasted, or how widespread they were in the first place. But there is little debate over the fact that nude baptism was, at least for a little while, a standard rite of the early Roman Church.
Very interesting, GalenZ. I am enjoying your link. However I would question the assumption that public nudity was OK. It was certainly cool for Romans in context, but it was often a matter of social class. As has been noted in this blog before: low class boobies OK (indigenous peoples), high class boobies bad (Janet Jackson). I think pagans from Hesiod to Ovid all have stories about mortals catching glimpses of goddesses and paying dearly for it. The sexual familiarity that these mortals had accidentally implied was not appropriate for low men to have towards high women. This is also true of Roman baths I believe, they were sexually segregated, although women often accompanied men in the male portions (often slaves).
On the other hand, it is entirely plausible that full public nudity was practiced for a long time. I can see that is might be the kind of perk that draws one to an illegal minority religion. In the same spirit, I hope to make it to Burning Man one of these days.
Even as I posted, I realized that I should have said ‘social’ nudity was not an issue in Rome at the time, rather than ‘public’ nudity. Baths were of course the commonest place for social nudity, and while they were normally segregated by sex, the record is clear that at times they were mixed-gender, and edged dangerously close to being public brothels. Painting and sculptures of nude people having sex were proudly displayed in the finest homes, and it is clear from the discoveries at Pompeii that pagan Romans had very different attitudes towards sex and nudity than modern cultures do, in ways that many modern archeologists are still uncomfortable discussing, and that cannot be easily categorized as ‘low class boobies=ok, high class boobies=bad’.
Unfortunately, I cannot find any evidence of any ‘civilized’ culture where ‘full public nudity’ has been practiced, though the Spartans came damn close (nude athletics for both genders, though perhaps not together, and large amounts of public ritual nudity). The only ‘full public nudity’ cultures that I know of are ‘uncivilized’ tribes in Africa, S.America, etc, and even those cultures have ‘dress codes’ of a sort – while they might not wear clothing, a person without the correct body art or jewelry would feel as naked as an American walking nude down a city street.
GalenZ, it is interesting that you should mention “anointing with oil”. I was just lamenting that I had failed to mention the practice of first anointing with oil the phalli of the statues (whose penes were used to ritually deflower virgins) in my comments in Bacchus’s last blog titled The Restoration of Priapus. I can’t help but wonder if that holy practice was co-opted by the Church from those earlier pagan rites, much as the pagan spring fertility symbols of eggs and rabbits were co-opted by modern society, to celebrate Easter. Perhaps the oil was to symbolize the lubrication of one’s re-birth into his new life.
Also by the way, I personally tend to believe that the Adamians were more than merely apocryphal. It seems perfectly natural to me that a practice that was to have flourished in antiquity, in northern Africa, would not be highly documented by western historians, who had no personal encounters. These Adamians were however written about by Saint Augustine, Saint Epiphanius, Saint Theodoret and Titus Flavius Clemens.
The unconventional practice may have been so pervasively resurrected ten centuries later by the Bohemian Taborite and Brethren of the Free Spirit people, that it’s vestiges may have been what inspired the French to subsequently adopt the term “bohemian” to describe those who practiced “free love”.
Historian Barbara Tuchman writes of the “Free Spirit” sect as feeling “…free to do all things commonly prohibited to ordinary man. Sex and property headed the list. They practised free love and adultery and were accused of indulging in group sex in their communal residences. They encouraged nudity to demonstrate absence of sin and shame.”
Various permutations of the Adamians may have morphed into or inspired the likes of the encouraged nudism within the modern age Oneida Community, the Twin Oaks commune, the Woodstock festival, and the Bohemian Club and Bohemian Grove camp (both of which are known for being frequented by various U.S. Presidents, military industrial complex bigwigs and other influential politicians and banking movers and shakers).
The Adamites have been written about extensively by David Cressy in 1999 and Samoth Yarb in 1641 if you’re curious.