Elijah Craig, Baptist Roots, and the Call for Baptists to Become a Merry People Again
Most people today know the name Elijah Craig because it appears on a bourbon bottle. What they do not know is that before the distillery ever gained fame, Elijah Craig was a Baptist preacher. He lived, worked, built, and ministered inside the Baptist world long before he became known for distilling. His story is a powerful reminder that historic Baptists were not sour, suspicious, joyless people. They were rugged men of conviction who loved God, loved community, and gratefully enjoyed the good gifts of creation.
This forgotten history matters because modern Baptists often carry assumptions that do not match their own heritage. One of the clearest examples of this is the question of wine in communion. Many Baptists treat wine as if it is sinful by nature, but Scripture never teaches that. The earliest Baptists never believed that. Elijah Craig certainly never believed that. The shift away from wine is a recent development shaped more by cultural panic than biblical truth.
Elijah Craig and the Baptist Spirit
Elijah Craig was ordained as a Baptist minister in the late seventeen hundreds. He planted churches, trained young preachers, established schools, built mills, and fought for religious liberty in Virginia and Kentucky. He was arrested for preaching the gospel. He endured hardships that would crush most men.
Yet Craig’s life was also marked by gratitude and joy. He is credited with innovations in distilling, not because he was reckless, but because he understood that God’s world is rich and full. Early Baptists like Craig did not fear creation. They feared God. They did not reject God’s gifts. They received them with thanksgiving.
Craig’s life reminds us that the Christian life is not meant to be a cold performance. It is a warm fellowship. It is a joyful community. It is a people who worship with strength, feast with gratitude, and take communion with reverence and delight.
Baptists and Wine before Welch
For most of Baptist history there was no issue with using wine. English Baptists used wine in the Lord’s Supper from the beginning. American Baptists followed the same pattern through the colonial period and into the early American era. Wine was the normal practice of the global church. Baptists included.
The true turning point came in the late eighteen hundreds when Thomas Bramwell Welch created the first pasteurized grape juice. His goal was shaped by the temperance movement. Temperance leaders viewed all alcohol as evil. This cultural pressure pushed churches to abandon wine not because Scripture changed and not because Baptist theology changed but because society changed.
Welch offered churches a way to avoid criticism. Grape juice was not a theological move. It was a cultural compromise, and it spread quickly until it became an assumed tradition. Many Baptists today have no idea that grape juice communion is only about one hundred and fifty years old. It is not ancient. It is not historic. It is not the Baptist way.
Elijah Craig himself lived and preached long before the temperance movement. He ministered in a world where wine in communion was the universal Christian practice. He never treated wine as a threat to holiness. He saw it as part of a created order that God called good.
We must make the distinction clear. Baptists never had a theological problem with wine until the temperance movement and the arrival of Welch’s grape juice. The shift was cultural. The shift was modern. The shift was not biblical.
Why Baptists Need to Become a Merry People Again
Somewhere along the way the Baptist world became known for what it avoids instead of the Savior it adores. Many churches lost the sense of holy feasting. They lost the sense of celebration. They lost the warmth of fellowship. The Lord’s Table was reduced to a sterile ritual. It became grape juice in tiny cups, passed with the seriousness of a courtroom rather than the joy of a covenant meal.
A joyless church cannot produce bold men. A fearful church cannot make strong disciples. A sanitized church cannot build real community. When Baptists removed wine from communion, they unknowingly removed a symbol of gospel joy.
Wine tells the truth about the gospel. It is rich. It is full. It is costly. It warms the heart like grace itself. It proclaims the blood of Christ poured out for his people. It reminds us of the marriage supper of the Lamb that is coming.
Recovering wine is not about embracing worldliness. It is about obeying Scripture. It is about honoring Christ. It is about returning to the practice of the earliest church and the earliest Baptists. It is about remembering that Christianity is a faith of joy.
A Call to Return
The path forward is not complicated. Baptists do not need to invent anything new. They simply need to recover what was normal for nearly eighteen centuries. They need to return to the way Christ instituted his meal. They need to return to the practice of the early church. They need to return to the joyful heritage of men like Elijah Craig.
Let the cup be restored. Let communion be a feast again. Let Baptist churches recover their identity as a merry people who take holiness seriously and joy seriously.
The world does not need more bitter Christians. The world needs churches filled with the joy of Christ. Baptists once possessed that joy. It is time to claim it again.
One man wanting to make money and appease the woke mindset of the day decided to capitalize on the lie being told by prudish women with nothing better to do.
The invention: In 1869, a Methodist dentist named Thomas Bramwell Welch created a process to pasteurize grape juice, a method inspired by Louis Pasteur’s work. This prevented the natural fermentation process and created a non-alcoholic “unfermented wine”. The motivation: Welch was a proponent of the Temperance movement, and his invention was an effort to provide a non-alcoholic alternative for communion services, which were sometimes served with wine. Some accounts suggest his work was spurred by seeing members of his congregation appear intoxicated after drinking communion wine. The adoption: Welch began promoting his unfermented grape juice to local churches, calling it “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine”. While not an immediate success, the practice gained traction over time, particularly among Methodist denominations. The shift: The transition from wine to grape juice became a significant part of the practice for many Protestant denominations as the Temperance movement grew in influence. For instance, the Methodist Episcopal Church officially sanctioned the use of unfermented grape juice in its 1916 Discipline."Communion wine began to be replaced with grape juice in the late 19th century, specifically around 1869, after Thomas Bramwell Welch developed a method for pasteurizing grape juice to stop fermentation. This change was largely driven by the Temperance movement, which sought non-alcoholic options for communion, with Methodist churches being some of the first to adopt the practice.
Jim Tweeton your argument is without merit. "Yes, the wine Jesus drank was fermented, as this was the standard practice in his time for both daily consumption and religious ceremonies like the Passover. While some interpretations suggest the “fruit of the vine” could refer to unfermented grape juice, the historical and biblical context points to fermented wine. The master of the feast at Cana even commented on the high quality of the wine Jesus provided, indicating it was potent and intoxicating, a quality associated with fermented wine, not grape juice. "
“In Luke 7:33–34, Jesus said, “For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (emphasis added). In verse 33 Jesus is making a contrast between John the Baptist’s “drinking no wine” and His own practice. Jesus goes on to say the religious leaders accused Him (falsely) of being a drunkard. Jesus was never a drunkard, any more than He was a glutton. He lived a completely sinless life (1 Peter 2:22); however, Luke 7 strongly suggests that Jesus did indeed partake of alcoholic wine.”
My suggestion for you sir is go back and re-read your Bible but this time read it without any epistemological presuppositions.
Nice article! When a friend told me about EC whiskey a couple of years ago, I looked into the “origin” and we amazed by the “Baptist roots”. Now, do an article on baptism (if only Baptists would return to their reformed roots). 😉🤣🤟🏾
Using one man to attempt to sway a whole group of people, nice try. If i simply read my Bible, and have a little bit of knowledge about wine and Bible times, your 1700 year leap becomes a moot point.
Jesus would have used an unfermented wine, which the biblical text calls “the fruit of the vine” So that it is clear that it wasn’t an alcoholic wine.
This is a good article to broach a much larger subject. Wine and scripture have been viewed through lenses that our Messiah and Father never even proposed. Obviously, abuse is a temptation but one not left only for the use of alcohol but more often seen with Scripture, unfortunately. I exhort all those that call on His Name and bow their knees to His authority to pursue a lifestyle that says " Yes!" to all the things Father and Messiah say are important to them and challenge anything, including denominational dogma and church traditions and cultural Christianity. Wines not the problem as much as well intentioned but misinformed men turning their conviction, misunderstanding of His Word or worse yet, deception of the enemy to become what’s taught as God’s actual Word. Just read and do. Wine is a great entry point into that realm of man’s word and tradition vs. The Almightys. Shalom and Maranatha!
High five! I did a deep dive on this topic and I’ll add your post to the research pile.