If you're a Baptist . . . or if you're not

If you're a Baptist, you might be interested in knowing more about your Baptist background.  

If you're not a Baptist, you should be interested in how Baptists were pioneers in the struggle for religious freedom and church-state separation.

You may not know what brought Baptists into existence in the first place.  We are just over four hundred years old, beginning 1608 or 1609.  Two men in England and Holland are considered the first Baptists: John Smyth (or Smith) and Thomas Helwys.   They resisted the required Church of England because it was required.  People were punished -- fined, jailed, or worse -- if they refused to be Anglicans.  To be born British was to be born Anglican.  The name Baptist was a criticism of their insistence on baptism by choice.

Smyth and Helwys with some forty dissenters fled England for Holland and found problems of religious freedom there as well and later returned to England. Their two main concerns were (1) baptism and church membership for people old enough to decide for themselves and (2) church-state separation.  The two issues were intertwined. People did not have a choice because the king’s religion was the religion of the nation.  Helwys died in prison as a dissenter under King James I.  

A kindred spirit was Roger Williams, who took courageous stands, first in England and later in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He started the first Baptist church on this continent in Providence, Rhode Island, after he fled Massachusetts under threat of his life.  

Neither Williams nor Smyth remained Baptist for long.  They were “Seekers,” always seeking new free expression of faith. But they laid a foundation for religious freedom.

Here are some excerpts from Williams’s “A Plea for Religious Liberty,” showing his determination for freedom of religion and freedom from religion.  I am including the statements which seem most pertinent (http://www.constitution.org/bcp/religlib.htm).  His “Sixthly” is especially significant:

First, that the blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace. .  .  .

Fifthly, all civil states with their officers of justice in their respective constitutions and administrations are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual or Christian state and worship.

Sixthly, it is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God's Spirit, the Word of God. .  .  .

Eighthly, God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls. .  .  .

Tenthly, an enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.

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I recently bought two books which gave me more depth perspective regarding Williams and also the impact Baptists had in getting the First Amendment passed:

Nicholas P. Miller, The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State,  Oxford University Press, 2012.

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul, Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, Viking Press, 2012.

Barry gives great details of Williams’s struggle against established religion, first in England and then in the American colonies.

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Sad to say, the dominant Baptist group in the U. S., the Southern Baptist Convention, my framework for roughly the first fifty years of my life, has done a one-hundred-eighty degree turn.  SBC leaders were the main instigators in establishing the group now known as American United for Separation of Church and State. But now they frequently abuse the whole separation concept.

I no longer consider myself Southern Baptist.  I identify with the newer Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF).  It’s too small to call a splinter group.  It’s more like a sliver group.