I don’t usually include “recent” Baptist history in these little vignettes, but today I’ll make an exception.
On this day in 1870 Edward Pierce was born into a godly home in Gates County, North Carolina. At the age of sixteen, after the Lord saved him, Edward felt the call of God to go into the ministry. Finishing his studies at a Baptist college and seminary, he entered the ministry, eventually pastoring a Baptist church in Cumberland County, Virginia. When, during the 1920s, Pastor Pierce had been forcefully preaching against alcohol, he began drawing much attention – both good and bad. With the eighteenth amendment to the constitution in effect, organized crime stepped in to buy and sell illegal liquor. And Baptist preachers declared war on the bootleggers and their friends.
On the 5th of June, 1923, two men approached the Pierce home early in the morning. Mrs. Pierce, who was tending to her six-week baby girl, answered the door and was told to produce her husband. When the visitors saw the pastor, they dragged him into the yard and began to beat him, breaking his nose and several ribs, closing one eye and inflicting other injuries. When Mrs. Pierce tried to intervene, she and her baby were knocked to the ground, but her husband managed to drag himself into the house, leaving a trail of blood. Seeming to be in a daze he came back to order the intruders from his property, but he was shot down and repeated shot after he was dead. In 1923 this murder was published in screaming headlines across the country.
The subject of liquor and prohibition are not the issues today that they have been, but there are plenty of other hot subjects to replace them – abortion, drugs, immorality, etc. But the news accounts are very different. When a preacher and some of his members are shot down today, the a great cry is for gun control, but there is hardly a word against the sins which prompted the attack in the first place.