Anabaptist

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A member of a 16th-century Protestant movement that rejected infant baptism and advocated for believer's baptism upon confession of faith
2. a member of a radical Protestant sect from the 1500s emphasizing adult baptism through personal faith rather than infant christening
3. a follower of the 16th-century reform movement rejecting childhood baptism and insisting on voluntary immersion based on individual religious conviction

Etymology: Anabaptists were so named by their opponents, not by themselves. The name joins the Greek prefix "ana-", meaning "again" or "re-", to "baptism," so it literally means "one who baptizes again." The sect's members rejected infant baptism as invalid and insisted that only a believer who had made a conscious confession of faith could receive the rite. To their critics, rebaptising an adult who had already been christened as a baby amounted to a second baptism, which was why the label stuck as an insult. The Greek root reached English through New Latin, where the form "anabaptista" was coined to describe these dissenters. The Baptists, who came later, took their own name from the same Greek word "baptizein," which is why the two names are close relatives rather than the same word.