When thinking about the Constitution of the United States, names like James Madison usually come to mind. But a friend of the great "architect of the Constitution," John Leland, a Baptist minister, had much to do with Madison's giant accomplishments. In fact, without Mr. Leland's influence the establishment clause in the First Amendment may not exist as we know it. In this series of articles we will explore the critical but little-known role played by the Baptists in helping to secure America’s cherished religious freedoms. Our story begins by focusing on the persecution suffered by Baptists in 17thcentury America – and a hot New England summer.
Victor Gamma explains.
An engraving of the 1651 whipping of Obadiah Holmes.
In July 1651 the Newport Baptist Church received a request from a house-bound member in Lynn, Massachusetts named William Witter. Witter was desirous of hearing the Word of God preached. Being blind and quite elderly, he requested a pastoral visit from Baptist minister and physician John Clarke along with co-religionists Obadiah Holmes and John Crandall. The three men made the eighty-mile journey to Lynn, where Witter lived. While in Massachusetts they baptized Witter in accordance with 'believer's baptism'. Clarke and Holmes were known to the Massachusetts authorities. The Bay Colony required that any who denied infant baptism or taught this to others, or who denied the right of the state to make war should be arrested and banished from the colony. Witter was no stranger to the authorities as well, being bold to the point of insolence. Salem court records have preserved some of his statements made during his earlier trial;
“The baptism of infants is sinful.”
“Infant baptism is the badge of the whore.”
“They who stay whiles a child is baptized do worship the devil.”
News of Clarke and his associates’ presence at Witter’s home spread quickly. By that very evening a warrant had been issued for their arrest, which action was carried out the following day. The three were forced to attend a congregational service, in which they refused to remove their hats and attempted to preach. They were imprisoned and then taken to Boston for trial. Their prosecutor was John Cotton, who argued that the defendants, whom he called Anabaptists, were worthy of the death penalty for heresy. After a ‘trial’ which consisted merely of charges and sentencing, the three Baptists were given the penalties of paying fines or to be ‘well-whipt.’
Of the three Baptists, Clarke and Holmes refused to pay a fine. Clarke avoided the whipping post when a friend paid his fine while he was being led to his punishment. The steadfast Holmes, however, would brook no aid from friends or sympathizers, saying, “Agreeing to the payment of my fine would constitute admission of wrongdoing.” By refusing to pay a fine and not allowing anyone else to, Holmes was making a statement that the law was completely invalid and unjust by its very nature. The sentence was carried out publically with thirty stripes, which was ten less than the forty considered to be a death sentence, but equal to that given to rapists. The “whipper’s” instrument of torment featured three leather strips, so in reality Holmes received ninety lashes. Holmes chose the opportunity to preach to the crowd while being whipped. An eyewitness, John Spur, described the whipping of Obadiah Holmes. As the 'whipper' removed the clothes from his upper body in order to administer the beatings, Spur records that Holmes declared, "Lord lay not this sin upon their charge." During the whipping Holmes stated, "O Lord I beseech thee to manifest thy power in the weakness of thy creature." According to Spur, Holmes submitted to the whipping, ". . . neither moving nor stirring at all for the strokes, (and) broke out into these expressions, 'Blessed and praised be the Lord,' and this he carried it to the end and went away rejoicingly." Many onlookers were moved to loudly request the beating to stop, and were themselves arrested. As a result of his beating, Holmes was unable to sleep on his back for a month. After recovering, Holmes went on to continue his evangelistic work. His bold stand had also become a symbol in the struggle for religious liberty.
Freedom of conscience
Bold stands such as this led the historian George Bancroft to declare, “Freedom of conscience, unlimited freedom of mind, was from the first a trophy of the Baptists.” In the seventeenth century, freedom of conscience had become such a become such a defining feature of Baptists that the great John Locke was moved to write, “The Baptists were the first and only propounders of absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty.” Ultimately, the measures taken against Baptists would include whipping, imprisonment, fines and banishment. Because America offered such a vast abundance of space, a favorite device of those defending the Standing Order was to exile Baptists and other dissenting groups into the wilderness. As one offended contemporary put it, “All Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts, shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can the sooner the better.”
You will not find names like Isaac Backus or John Leland in a book about the writing of the Constitution, nonetheless, these Baptists, along with their predecessors like Holmes, played a critical role in providing the underpinning attitudes that resulted in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In fighting for their own freedom, they struck a blow for all Americans, articulating a philosophy concerning the relationship between the religious and civil sphere, protecting the rights of the former. Baptists were often well ahead of their colonial brethren in the matter of freedom of conscience.
Baptists felt the heavy hand of persecution from the moment of their arrival in the English colonies. There were many reasons for this. Both the Puritans of New England and the Anglicans of Virginia believed in the union of church and state to some degree and the necessity of the civil authority to enforce religious conformity. The Protestant churches that broke away from Rome in the fifteenth century maintained the system of state support of churches. In England the government sponsorship of religion was called the ‘nursing father.’ In the English colonies, this system of the civil rulers as nursing fathers continued. Furthermore, the Puritans held that society could not function without establishment of religion, referred to as the “Standing Order.” Without it, they contended, society would crumble into anarchy and moral perversion. The 1689 Act of Toleration, although a milestone in British history, did not establish religious liberty. It extended toleration to a greater number of religious expressions, but maintained England as a protestant state with England under the prelacy of the Church of England and Scotland under the Presbyterian establishment. During the colonial era, most colonists also held the view that residents of a particular colony should properly all belong to the same church, and took it as natural that this church should be financially and legally supported by the state, including non-voluntary taxes and even laws requiring participation in religious services. Even havens of religious toleration like Pennsylvania and Maryland sometimes heard the lament of oppressed minorities.
Baptists in the New World
The Baptists, having already experienced persecution in England, arrived in the New World generally hostile to the idea of civil authorities determining their religious beliefs and practices. The Baptists eventually compiled a large amount of scriptural and historical support for their position. Isaac Backus, later to be the champion of liberty for Baptists during the Revolutionary era, relied on eighteenth-century Lutheran historian Johann Lorenz Von Mosheim to express the common Baptist view of the state of Christendom in his History of New England. Backus' history asserted that the early church's purity was perverted by “. . . an alteration. . . that Christian ministers succeeded to the rights and privileges of the Jewish priesthood. Heathen philosophy was also called in to interpret the scriptures . . . to which they added, in the fourth century, under Constantine, the use of temporal penalties, and corporal tortures, for the same end (to promote of the interests of the church).”
No other issue so horrified the religious establishment, though, as the issue of baptism. The Puritans and Separatists held firmly to the practice of infant baptism as one sign of the covenantal nature of the church. They saw in the ceremony a badge of the covenant a sign as circumcision was for the Jews. As Cotton Matter put it, “They did all agree with their brethren in Plymouth in this point, ‘That the children of the faithful, were church members, with their parents, and that their baptism was a seal of their being so.’ ” In Massachusetts Puritans held to the validity of an established church, and as Anglicans in Virginia they were determined to support the canons of the Church of England including the Thirty Nine Articles. Article 27 stated, “The baptism of young children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institutions of Christ.” Those that refused to comply with this article were spoken of as those who “dare not submit their children to be baptized by their undertaking of god-fathers, and receive the Cross as a dedicating badge of Christianity . . .” This belief conflicted sharply with Baptist convictions. Isaac Backus in hisHistory of New England offers a quote from John Robinson which, citing scripture for each point, summarized the Baptist position on baptism “. . . the sacrament of baptism is to be administered . . . only to such as are . . . taught and made disciples [Matt. xxviii. 19]. . . Baptism administered to any others is so far from investing them with any saintship in that estate, that [as] it makes guilty, both the giver and the receiver, of sacrilege, and is the taking of God’s name in vain.”
The view of Baptists
False perceptions also fanned the flames of suspicion. When the Puritan or Anglican establishment looked at Baptists they often saw not simple dissenters but dangerous incendiaries. The memory of Anabaptist excesses, such as the Munster Rebellion of 1535-6 were still recalled and projected on to the Baptists. In fact, ‘Anabaptist’ was a name that continued to be applied to the Baptists. Regardless of their efforts to distance themselves from the taint of Anabaptist excesses, the Baptists were popularly held to be dangerous subversives or degenerate antinomians. The 1644 law banishing Baptists from Massachusetts Bay Colony stated, “Forasmuch as experience hath plentifully and often proved that since the first arising of the Anabaptists about a hundred years since, they have been the incendiaries of the commonwealths and the infectors of persons in main matters of religion and the troublers of churches . . .” Baptists promptly answered such charges when given the opportunity. In 1680 John Russel, second pastor of the Baptist church in Boston, sought to dispel the irrational opinions of Baptists in a tract entitled Some Considerable Passages Concerning the First Gathering and Further Progress of a Church of Christ in Gospel Order in Boston in New England Commonly (though Falsely) Called By the Name of Anabaptists. Russell’s tract was a point-by-point refutation of the common charges laid at the feet of Baptists using simple logic. For example Russell argues against the contention that Baptists were a threat to the church, “We are charged to be underminers of the Churches. This is also a great mistake: we never designed . . . any such thing, but heartily desire and daily pray for the well-being, flourishing, and Prosperity of all the Churches of Christ.”
Up until now we’ve explored the reasons why Baptists faced persecution in America. In part two (here), Roger Williams and Religious Freedom, we look at the story of Roger Williams and the founding of the first Baptist church in America.
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