The first Baptist convert among the Danes was Julius Kobner, a Jew baptized in Hamburg, Germany, in 1836. When he returned to Copenhagen in 1839, he began fellowshipping with a group of believers who, through independent study, had come to accept the Baptist position of faith. Baptists were persecuted, ordered to leave Denmark, and imprisoned if they didn’t leave. When believers could no longer pay the fines, the government seized their household goods and sold them.
According to estimates, during the first thirty-five years Baptists were in Denmark, one out of every six or seven baptized believers migrated to the United States. Although the cradle of Danish Baptists in America is Wisconsin, many were attracted to the fertile plains of Minnesota. Danish people were primarily agricultural people, and farming interests led some of these people to Clarks Grove, Minnesota.
Steven Keillor elaborates on Minnesota’s Danish Baptists in his book about Minnesota rural co-operatives. His discussion of Danish cooperative creameries and the first such creamery in Minnesota at Clarks Grove also acquaints us with Danish Baptists.
The Baptist faith of farmers in Clarks Grove caused Norwegian-American Lutherans and Irish Catholics to form their own creameries rather than join the one in Clarks Grove. Keillor puts it this way: “The economic cooperative was formed in the church’s social community. Led by the church’s leaders who became its early officers, its organizational meetings were held at the church. The same men oversaw both the Sunday schedule and the cow-feeding schedule. Mutual accountability aided both church and creamery. The Baptist church was the de facto sponsor of the creamery, and to this unofficial sponsor went many of the benefits.”
Unlike their Swedish counterparts, Danish believers in Clarks Grove did not maintain ethnic ties with their European ancestors. In fact, Keillor tells his readers that the community didn’t strive to maintain its Danish heritage. There were no schools to teach Danish, Sunday school was conducted in English, and the older folks often spoke English. “Its Baptist heritage took precedence over its Danish one,” remarked Keillor. If Danish-American farmers wanted to use Danish models, they could have moved to a Danish Lutheran community like Tyler in Lincoln County where the Danish culture was practiced and taught. That’s not to say that there were no Danish-speaking Baptist churches in Minnesota. Your Baptist history writer has been a member of two Minnesota Baptist churches that began in the early 1900s as Danish-speaking churches.
Cooperative Commonwealth: Co-Operatives in Rural Minnesota 1859-1939 by Steven Keillor, Minnesota Historical Society, 2000.
Seventy-five Years of Danish Baptist Missionary Work in America published by the Danish Baptist General Conference of America, 1931
