How did the Baptist Church come to be the largest Protestant church in the United States and the largest independent church in Germany? This volume is the first German work to provide an answer to this question. It recounts the early development of the Baptist movement in Europe, the United States and Germany, and addresses in particular the historical and social background as well as the specific theological focus this movement assumed. Themes such as freedom of belief and conscience, the separation of church and state, and a direct democratic understanding of church structure are also treated as well as the development of the Baptist Church among the Blacks, which presented the spiritual and organizational background for the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King.