Baptists who migrated from England and Wales to the Delaware Valley brought with them conflicting ideas about what it meant to be a Baptist. Doctrinal, cultural, and political differences shaped two competing interpretations of denominational identity, as envisioned by “outsiders” and “insiders.” At the associational level, the contest demanded a certain degree of consensus, and by the early nineteenth century the Philadelphia Baptist Association had committed to an assimilationist path that would make them “reckoned among the nations.”