| August 12, 2007
“Soul Liberty, etc.” J. Stanley Lemons August 12, 2007
Dr. Stanley Aaronson, whose wonderful articles on medicine appear in the Providence Journal each Monday, wrote this past week that neuroscientists say, “We are what we remember.” Aaronson was discussing what he called the “limited virtues of forgetfulness,” which allow individuals to become free of hatreds, bitter memories, and unresolved conflicts that would cripple them if they fully remembered those things. Forgetfulness allows us to get free of stuff that would ruin our lives. But, of course, there is no virtue in forgetting bedrock things. Everybody forgets their car keys from time to time; that’s okay. But, when you forget what the keys are for, that’s serious. If we are to be Baptists, we have to remember who we are. We are what we remember. A favorite Bible verse for me is Isaiah 51:1 which commands: “Hearken to me, you who pursue deliverance, you who seek the LORD; look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged.” If you look to the rock and to the quarry from which Baptists were digged, you will find Soul Liberty, Freedom of Religion, and Separation of Church and State. If you don’t believe in these, you have no grounds to call yourself a Baptist. Baptists have no distinctive theology, but we have bedrock ideas that we can claim to have embraced before anyone else. These are not just civil or political constructs; they are concepts grounded in the scriptures. We Baptists believe that soul liberty came with God’s creation of humanity. And, freedom of religion necessarily follows from soul liberty, and freedom of religion demands separation of church and state. On the back of church bulletin under “Historical Notes,” you will find that it says that in 1638 “Roger Williams and his companions founded the First Baptist Church in America. ‘Soul Liberty’ was and continues to be its watchword.” Let us be clear that Williams did not invent the concepts of soul liberty, freedom of religion, or separation of church and state. These had already been articulated by Baptists at least 25 years earlier! In fact, the idea of “soul liberty” was a concept held by the Puritans in general, but most had a narrow, conservative idea of how it was to be carried out, and it did not lead to freedom of religion or separation of church and state. The Baptists, on the other hand, took soul liberty and carried it to the radical conclusion that it must mean freedom of religion and required separation of church and state. I cannot stress how radical such ideas were at that time! They meant anarchy; they meant the destruction of the Church; they meant the collapse of the government; they meant the end of civilization --- at least that is what everyone else thought. Our Baptist forebears believed that Genesis 1:27 revealed the origin of soul liberty. As our scripture said, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female.” Baptists have taken this to mean that God gave humans a soul, a free, self-determining soul which is capable and competent to deal directly with God. This means that no mediator is required: no preacher, no priest, no prelate, no pope or metropolitan, no angels or saints, no Holy Family. The Baptist historian, William Brackney, stated it simply: “We are free because this was God’s intention for us.” Furthermore, this liberty, soul liberty, is a universal human right: a gift of God, not something granted by any state or government. James Dunn has written, “Human rights are not bestowed by the State, merely recognized.” The necessary corollary to soul liberty is freedom of religion. Baptists believe that faith is voluntary, that the gospel message is voluntary. How many times does “whosoever” appear in the Bible? As in…“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) Or… “Whosoever will, let him drink freely of the water of life.” (Rev. 22:17) Christ invites us to follow, but does not compel. Nobody can choose for us, and nobody can compel or coerce a soul. Roger Williams called the attempt to coerce one’s beliefs as “rape of the soul.” If we have direct access to God, then we have the right to search for God’s truth. Nobody can do that for anyone else. This is why Baptists have from their beginnings in the 17th century rejected ecclesiastical establishments, state religion, and religious creeds. James Dunn is fond of saying, that if the Baptists have a creed, it is simply: “Nobody but Jesus is going to tell me what to believe.” No one can compel belief, but many have tried. Charlemagne once forced baptism on the Saxons one year, only to return the following year to find that they had relapsed into their heathen ways. So he had some 5000 of them put to the sword. King James I, whose name graces the flyleaf of the King James Version of the Bible, was determined to stamp out religious dissenters and enforce religious conformity. He hated the Puritans and promised to “harrie them out of the land” or make them conform. Of course, when some of the Puritans were harried out of the land and came to America, they sought to harry out anyone who dissented from their version of the church and state, and Roger Williams was banished on pain of death from Massachusetts. Some of those harried out of England were our Baptist forebears. A group of Puritan Separatists fled to Holland, and there in 1609 founded the first English Baptist church. One of the leaders of that church was Thomas Helwys. Let me tell you some of his story. He was born to wealth and privilege, studied law at Gray’s Inn in London, married well, and settled down as the squire of Broxtowe Hall, his ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. He was a committed member of the Anglican church until he fell in with a group of Puritan Separatists in Gainsborough in the Midlands. These included John Smyth, a former Anglican priest, and John Robinson, William Brewster, and William Bradford. You may recognize those last three names as being associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620. The Separatists were treated like criminals, so they divided into two groups and all fled to Holland. Helwys paid for the relocation of the Smyth-Helwys contingent and provided the ships to carry the congregation to safety. In July 1607, while Helwys was away from his home attending to the details of the removal, King James issued a warrant for his arrest and raided Broxtowe Hall. The soldiers seized the Hall and imprisoned his wife at York Castle. His children were parceled out to relatives, and King James gave the Hall to one of his lackeys. When the authorities concluded that Helwys was not returning, they released his wife. The group headed by John Smyth, came into contact with Mennonites in Holland and adopted the Mennonite practice of believer’s baptism. In 1609 they created the first English Baptist church, a voluntary church of members joined by believer’s baptism. In 1611 Thomas Helwys returned to England with a group and founded the first Baptist church in England just outside of London. Though he knew that it might cost him his life, Helwys concluded that it was his duty to bear witness to the truth. In 1612 Helwys penned the first defense of religious freedom in England. It was not a promising time to write such a thing, as the state burned two men at the stake for heresy that year. He tried to present a copy of the tract to the king, and failing that, sent it to King James with a personal note on the flyleaf so James would know it was meant for him. Helwys said that true Christianity did not need the help of the state; that compulsion simply created hypocrites, hatred, malice, and evil. The tract argued that the religious freedom was for everyone. Helwys criticized the king for persecuting Roman Catholics, whom all Protestants, including Helwys himself, regarded as the Anti-Christ. Nevertheless, he wrote:
King James thought otherwise and had Helwys arrested and thrown into Newgate Prison where he was allowed to rot away until he died in 1616. He died for writing a tract that argued that religious freedom was a God-given right and that the king had no role in religious beliefs. Helwys’ successor as pastor of the English Baptist church, John Murton, later wrote “. . . no man ought to be persecuted for his religion, be it true or false.” Such sentiments landed him in jail where he also died in 1626. English Baptists wrote a number of defenses of religious freedom between 1612 and the 1620s, and we know for a fact that Roger Williams read some of these. It would be Roger Williams who would create the first community that separated church and state. He was one of those Puritans that was “harried” out of England. But, he got into instant trouble in Massachusetts after arriving in 1631 by calling for separation of church and state. He left Massachusetts and lived a couple of years in the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth He returned to Salem, where he was elected their minister in 1634. He denounced the political-religious establishment in forceful, colorful terms. “Forced religion stinks in the nostrils of God.” In late 1635 he was tried and convicted of sedition and heresy and ordered to be banished, to face death if he ever returned. Before they could ship him back to England, he fled into the February snows of 1636 and made his way to Narragansett Bay where he was sheltered by the Wampanoags. In June he crossed the Seekonk and founded Providence, a place to be “a refuge for those distressed of conscience.” He settled on land acquired from his friends, the Narragansetts. Williams was joined by a number of his former parishioners from Salem, and he got them to agree that “no man should be molested for his conscience.” Then in August they drew up a compact in which they pledged to subject themselves to such “orders and agreements as shall be made for the public good” by a majority vote of the heads of households, but “only in civil things.” “. . . only in civil things.” They had started the first state in the modern world where citizenship and religion were separated. Senator Claiborne Pell, speaking at dedication of the Roger Williams National Memorial on October 22, 1984, said that the Providence community under the leadership of Williams had “formed the first genuine democracy. . . in modern history.” The neighboring colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut spent the next 100 years trying to stamp out this “hive of heretics,” this “sewer of New England,” this “licentious republic.” While Williams’ ideas and his colony were reviled and attacked in the 17th century, they became fundamental to the Constitution of the United States in the late 18th century. Historians regard separation of church and state to be America’s one great contribution to religion, and it began with Roger Williams in Providence, RI in 1636. He had learned it through his reading of the Baptists and as a result of his own experience and convictions. Williams later wrote his great defense of religious freedom, The Bloudy Tenent (published in 1644), and it is far more famous than the earlier writings of the English Baptists, but he echoed and expanded their sentiments. Williams demanded an equal, impartial, universal freedom of religion. He said, “it is the will and command of God that . . . a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences and worships be granted to all men of all nations.” Williams argued that church and state must be separate because they were based on incompatible principles. The church was based on the love of God, while the state was based on the power of the sword. When the two were mixed, religion was corrupted. When his opponents argued that the state needed to defend religion against evil-doers, Williams replied that this endangered truth and religious purity because it made the civil power the final arbiter of truth. All of history had shown that the state would be certain to punish and persecute true religion. He said, “. . . ‘tis impossible for any Man or Men to maintain their Christ by their Sword and to worship a true Christ! [‘tis impossible] to fight against all Consciences opposite to theirs and not to fight against God in some of them.” He denounced government interference colorful language, saying it rendered “the garden and spouse of Christ a filthy dunghill and whorehouse of rotten, stinking whores and hypocrites.” He believed that it was absurd to assume that a civil state had the power to discern the mind of God. To give the state a role in religion was “to pull God and Christ and the Spirit out of Heaven, and subject them unto natural inconsistent men, and consequently to Satan himself.” He concluded, “The civil sword may make a nation of hypocrites and anti-Christians but not one Christian.” So, he called for the erection of “a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and wilderness of the World.” As you can see, it wasn’t Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1800 to the Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, that invented the metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state. Roger Williams had said it more than 150 years earlier, and Baptists had advocated such a wall in the Constitution in 1789 and the Bill of Rights in 1791. Let me remind you that Baptists were among the chief proponents and supporters of the First Amendment. Led by the likes of John Leland of Virginia, they campaigned to get an even stronger guarantee of separation than was contained in the original document which specifically barred any religious test for office. Ours was the first national constitution to separate religion from citizenship. John Leland was a wonderful character. A Connecticut Yankee, he was converted in a revival, became a Baptist preacher, and moved to Virginia where he became a great friend of James Madison (whom you all know as the “architect of the US Constitution” and author of the Bill of Rights.) Leland and the Baptists were staunch supporters of the successful effort in 1785 to disestablish the state church in Virginia, and in 1789 they demanded a bill of rights for the Constitution in order to safeguard religious freedom. Leland wrote a pamphlet in which he said,
Like Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams, Leland said that the spiritual kingdom does not need the aid of the state. In fact, Leland regarded government aid as being worse than government hostility. He said that the friends of religion had done more harm than its enemies. “Persecution, like a lion, tears the saints to death, but leaves Christianity pure; state establishments of religion, like a bear, hug the saints but corrupts Christianity.” He observed, “Experience . . . has informed us that the fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity has done it more harm than persecution ever did.” What, then, are we to make of so-called Baptists who want to have prayers in the public schools, who favor taking tax money to support their parochial schools that they call “Christian academies,” who want to feed at the public trough by taking money for “faith-based initiatives?” When the school prayer amendment was last voted on by the U.S. Senate, 55 of the 100 Senators voted for it, including all of the so-called Baptists. Perhaps you will recall that 5 justices of the U.S. Supreme Court signed on to a ruling written by Justice Antone Scalia that said that “full blown freedom of religion is a luxury” that the nation can’t afford any longer. Was the Supreme Court saying that we can’t afford to be free? We believe that the God created us in the image of God, as free, moral beings. God gave us soul liberty, and that means that everyone is entitled to freedom of religion. Freedom of religion is a natural right for everyone and is not something invented by governments. Governments can only recognize it (though most of them have not), but they cannot grant it. Walter Shurden has written, “To deny freedom of conscience to any person is to debase God’s creation. To be authentic, faith must be free.” What our Baptist forebears demanded was a “free church in a free state.” Can we demand any less? Back |
