The Collaborative International Dictionary
Donatist \Don"a*tist\, n. [LL. Donatista: cf. F. Donatiste.] (Eccl. Hist.) A follower of Donatus, the leader of a body of North African schismatics and purists, who greatly disturbed the church in the 4th century. They claimed to be the true church.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mid-15c., adherent of a Christian sect in 4c. North Africa, from Medieval Latin Donatista, from Donatus name of two of the principal men in it. The schism had more to do with episcopal succession in Carthage than with doctrine. The name is literally "bestowed, given."
Wiktionary
n. (context Christianity English) A follower of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donatus%20Magnus or one who supports the belief of donatism.
Usage examples of "donatist".
The honors and estates of the church were attributed to his suffragan bishops, and it was not without difficulty, that Constantine was satisfied with inflicting the punishment of exile on the principal leaders of the Donatist faction.
The Donatist controversy was known to me for some years, as I have instanced above.
It arose in the first instance from the Monophysite and Donatist controversies, the former of which I was engaged with in the course of theological study to which I had given myself.
A fourth part of the Donatist bishops followed the independent standard of the Maximianists.
According to Catholic historians, the Donatist cause became increasingly identified with active resistance to authority, including outbreaks of violence.
This was in effect a revival of the so-called Donatist doctrine, that the laity had a right to judge the priesthood.
The inflexible zeal of freedom and fanaticism animated the Donatists to refuse obedience to the usurpers, whose election they disputed, and whose spiritual powers they denied.
The schism of the Donatists was confined to Africa: the more diffusive mischief of the Trinitarian controversy successively penetrated into every part of the Christian world.
The Donatists who were taken in arms, received, and they soon deserved, the same treatment which might have been shown to the wild beasts of the desert.
The persecution of the Donatists was an event not less favorable to the designs of Genseric.
Under these circumstances, Genseric, a Christian, but an enemy of the orthodox communion, showed himself to the Donatists as a powerful deliverer, from whom they might reasonably expect the repeal of the odious and oppressive edicts of the Roman emperors.
Moors and Germans, the Donatists and Catholics, continually disturbed, or threatened, the unsettled reign of the conqueror.
Yet I strongly suspect that their ignorance of antiquity, the love of the marvellous, and the fashion of extolling the philosophy of Barbarians, has induced them to describe, as one voluntary act, the calamities of three hundred years since the first fury of the Donatists and Vandals.
Five hundred episcopal churches were overturned by the hostile fury of the Donatists, the Vandals, and the Moors.
Augustine had spent more than thirty years battling the Donatists, he was dismayed to confront Christians he called the Pelagians who, despite many differences, as we shall see in Chapter 6, shared with the Donatists both a sectarian view of the church and an insistence on free will.