Barbados Spiritual Baptists: Social acceptance enhances opportunities for supporting public health

Abstract

The Spiritual Baptist faith has been present in the Caribbean from about the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. However, the movement only extended to Barbados in 1957 when a Spiritual Baptist preacher, a Barbadian by birth, returned to his native island from Trinidad, where he had been living for several years. The Reverend Granville Williams established the first Spiritual Baptist Church in Barbados and has continued to oversee the church's development since its inception. This article describes the evolution of the church's status over the past 50 years, as seen by both members and non-members of the group, from a marginalized religious group into a settled and accepted denomination. Explication of this transformation phenomenon is also explored through qualitative interviews with Barbadian clergy non-members of the group. The implications of this transformation for the interplay of religion, mental health, and social services in the Caribbean are then discussed.

Keywords:

• Barbados Spiritual Baptists
• social acceptance
• public health

Acknowledgements

We thank Larry Davidson, Ph.D., Madelon Baranoski, Ph.D., and Bishop Rufus Brome for their advice and comments on this paper. We also thank all the subjects who gave so freely of their time for the interviews.