When you look up the term “religious liberty” in anybody’s dictionary, there you will find the collective picture of Baptists.

The insistence on religious liberty by Baptists has resulted in misunderstanding, criticism and even persecution. In the past, governments have punished Baptists as traitors, and some have condemned Baptists as heretics. Pope Pius IX in an 1852 papal encyclical condemned the Baptist notion of separation of church and state as pernicious.

By contrast, listen to the earliest Baptists on this subject of religious liberty. In Article 84 of the English version of the Confession of 1612, John Smyth wrote the often quoted words:

“That the magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, to force or compel men to this or that form of religion, or doctrine: but to handle only civil transgressions (Rom. Xiii), injuries and wrongs of man against man, in murder, adultery, theft, etc., for Christ only is the king, and lawgiver of the church and conscience (James iv. 12).”

The first Baptist preacher of record in England died in Newgate Prison in London. His name was Thomas Helwys. Upon his return to London from exile in Amsterdam, he and a handful of followers established their small congregation at Spitalfields in 1612, just outside the walls of London.

Soon afterwards, Helwys sent a little book to King James I entitled A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, with a handwritten inscription in which he boldly proclaimed:

The king is a mortal man and not God, therefore has no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual lords over them. If the king has authority to make spiritual lords and laws, then he is an immortal God, and not a mortal man. O King, be not seduced by deceivers to sin against God whom you ought to obey, nor against your poor subjects who ought and will obey you in all things with body, life and goods, or else let their lives be taken from the earth. God save the King.

King James was not amused and sent Helwys to prison for the rest of his days.

The leaders of the new colonies left England critical of the state church, the Church of England, and her oppression of dissenters. Ironically, in New England, the formerly oppressed became the oppressors by erecting their own version of a state church.

As Hugh Wamble put it:  

For many decades in England and to the period of the Revolution in America, Baptists were the butt of ridicule and odium emanating from officials of state and church who attacked Baptists as socially insignificant, educationally unlettered, religiously misguided, morally depraved, and politically dangerous. By the 1640’s Baptist persons, beliefs, and practices were stock subjects for the gossipy heresiography of the day.

While the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies denied the rights of conscience to their people and punished those Baptists who dissented from the dominant form of Christianity in vogue at the time, Baptist Roger Williams introduced religious liberty to New England in Rhode Island at a place called “Providence” in 1636. The colony that the Puritans had dubbed “the Garbage Can” of New England became the prototype of a new nation that would be birthed a century and a half later.

Amidst such opprobrium, from the prolific pens of Baptists came books polemical and historical championing the cause of religious liberty. Isaac Backus received this laudatory notation in the Dictionary of American Biography for his stand for religious liberty:

“In the realm of ecclesiastical polity in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, his was perhaps the keenest mind in America. . . . Though many others joined in protest against civil control of religion and there were other leaders in the efforts to secure separation of church and state, no individual in America since Roger Williams stands out so preeminently as the champion of religious liberty as does Isaac Backus.”

As an agent of the Warren Baptist Association of Massachusetts, which was formed to promote religious liberty, Backus eloquently defended complete religious liberty before the Massachusetts Assembly in 1775 and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

Exactly 150 years after Roger Williams planted Providence Plantations, Thomas Jefferson’s bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom in Virginia was passed into law.

On January 1, 1802, Leland showed up at the White House with an enormous cheese to present to President Jefferson. Later that same day, Jefferson wrote a letter to the preachers of the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut referencing the language of the first amendment to the Constitution ratified ten years earlier:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Two days later, on Sunday morning, Thomas Jefferson attended a worship service in the House of Representatives. With about half the members of Congress along with the president of the United States in attendance, John Leland preached a revival sermon from the speaker’s rostrum.

How times have changed.

Happy Fourth of July!