Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists

The primary centers of Two-Seedism were in Northern Alabama, Arkansas, Eastern Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, and Texas.

Parker was a strict predestinarian, but his chief objections in the booklet are based on ecclesiology - for example, "They have violated the right or government of the Church of Christ in forming themselves into a body and acting without of the union."

Several important preachers on the east coast led in the "anti-missions" movement, but Elder Parker was the leader on the frontier, and probably spoke best to the common man.

Therefore mission activity was not only unbiblical, but as a practical matter useless, since the "decision" was already made prior to birth.

It seems that Parker spread his "two seeds" far and wide, and a goodly number of the "anti-missions" movement accepted his doctrine, though it never achieved anything near majority status.

Daniel Parker's name is almost synonymous with "anti-missions", but he was one of the important frontier preachers in Texas, leading in the organization of about nine churches in the eastern part of the state.

However, in southern Georgia, at least, according to historian John G. Crowley, one may still find Two-Seed doctrines expounded by Primitive Baptists "if one knows where to go and what to listen for.

Central Kentucky's Elder Thomas P. Dudley, a member of a church of the Licking Creek Association, produced a work on "Two Souls" to supplement Parker's on the two seeds.

"[11] The 1906 Census of Religious Bodies, there were nineteen churches in Tennessee, ten in Arkansas, nine in Kentucky, five in Georgia, four in Indiana, three in Florida, two each in Alabama and Texas, and one in Missouri with a total membership of 781.

In 2003, there appeared to be four remaining churches of the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists (two in Texas, and one each in Indiana and Tennessee) with approximately 80 members.

The fourth congregation is the Concord Church in the Highland District near McMinnville, Tennessee, with ten members and an average attendance each Sunday from twelve to fifteen.

[16]In 2011, Valdosta State University announced that Dr. John G. Crowley, an assistant professor of history there, was writing the first comprehensive history of the Two-Seed movement[17] In his 1945 supplement to The American Language, H. L. Mencken singled out the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist Church as an example of the proliferation of "dissenting" Christian denominations in the United States.

[18] American novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. refers to the sect in his early novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), when the title character claims that he is a member.