Oklahoma made the news again this week. Somehow, this is rarely a good thing, especially when education is the issue at hand. On Thursday (6/27), at the regular meeting of the Oklahoma State Board of Education, State Superintendent Ryan Walters said that effective immediately, all public school teachers in Oklahoma who teach 5th through 12th grade will be required to have and teach from the Bible in their classrooms. In multiple interviews afterwards, he said that any teacher who refuses could risk losing their teaching certification. As a Baptist, and one who knows her Baptist history, I cannot in good conscience comply with such an edict. It violates every principle I have about the importance of religious liberty, soul freedom, and the separation of church and state.
The quote in the title of this blog post is from Martin Luther’s famous speech at the Diet of Worms where he was called to account for his break with the Catholic Church on a number of doctrinal issues including, but not limited to, the sale of indulgences and lay access to Scripture. The Diet of Worms occurred a few months after Pope Leo X had excommunicated Luther, and his very life was at stake as the princes of the Holy Roman Empire were poised to execute the man they declared to be an outlaw. The full quote is even more instructive: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.” This defiant statement in favor of freedom of conscience set the stage for one of the most important and far-reaching religious reform movements in the world. While Luther is not without his problems (his rampant antisemitism, for example), his legacy and inspiration would echo through the years and inspire even more religious change.
While Luther supported freedom from Catholic oversight, he was not a full-fledged supporter of religious freedom: he allowed harsh punishment of heretics and had no patience for Judaism in public life. However, in the years after the Protestant Reformation began, there were groups who would pick up the mantle of religious freedom and freedom of conscience and broaden its scope beyond the “right” type of Christians and move to include all people of all faiths (or no faith at all). The two denominational tracks this unfettered freedom of conscience took are the Anabaptists of Continental Europe and the Baptist separatists in England.
Even as the Reformation moved full steam ahead in Continental Europe, church and state were still deeply enmeshed. To be fair, there were some practical reasons for this. Birth records were most consistently kept in church offices, so baptizing new members of the community early in life was one of the most surefire ways to keep track of who was born when and therefore who was eligible for marriage (mostly the girls) and military service (the boys). Of course, the Calvinist doctrine of original sin which closely mirrored Catholic doctrine also played a role in this.
A group of Protestants disagreed with both the close intermingling of church and state and the practice of infant baptism. The Anabaptists (or “re-baptizers”) as their opponents called them believed strongly that Scripture said only those who could repent of their sin could be baptized; therefore, infant baptism was null and void. The Anabaptists were and are also pacifists who believe that the wars of the secular world are not the purview of the church and that believers should not participate in them. Today, the Amish and Mennonites are the most well-known of the Anabaptist tradition. Both groups, as well as other Anabaptists, were heavily persecuted in the aftermath of the Reformation by Protestant and Catholic officials alike with many of them being imprisoned, tortured, and executed (often by drowning since they advocated for adult baptism by immersion).
Meanwhile, in England, the Reformation took a slightly different path. Beginning with Henry VIII and his marital problems (an oversimplification, I know, but also not the most important part of this story), the Church of England sought to reject that which it disliked about Roman Catholicism (like…no divorce), but keep the parts of the Catholic Church it saw as acceptable (there is a reason that Anglicanism is often called “Catholic-lite” or Catholicism without the guilt). Of course, this reformation was not without its problems: “Bloody” Mary, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, etc. While the Catholic vs. Anglican battle was raging, two other groups emerged–Dissenters and Separatists. These two groups thought there was still too much Catholic influence in Anglican theology, though the way they combatted it was different. The Dissenters sought to effect change from the inside. The Puritans were a Dissenter group, for example, who sought to further “purify” the Church. Separatists, however, saw the Anglican Church as wholly unredeemable and sought to break away and do their own thing. Both groups were persecuted until William and Mary’s Act of Toleration in 1689.
From amongst the Separatists emerged the Baptist tradition. John Smyth and Thomas Helwys were early Baptist pioneers, often regarded as the founders of the first Baptist congregation anywhere in the world. Their small Separatist congregation in England eventually had to relocate to the Netherlands (an Anabaptist haven). In 1609, they formed the first Baptist church, which split when they went their separate ways in 1611 (and Baptist churches have been splitting ever since…but that’s a different story for a different day). While Smyth’s theology evolved to be more Mennonite than Baptist, Helwys would continue to advocate for Baptist beliefs, including the necessity of adult baptism and religious liberty. In 1612, Helwys published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, one of the earliest and most important declarations of universal religious liberty. In it, he says,
Christ is the head of his Church….Let it suffice the King to have all rule over his peoples, bodies, and goods; and let not our lord King give his power to be exercised over the spirits of his people…. For men’s religion to God, is betwixt God and themselves; the king shall not answer for it, neither may the king be judged between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the last measure.
The notion that the King had no say AND no sway on the religious lives of individuals was scandalous, as was the fact that Helwys, upon his return to England, sent an autographed copy of The Mystery of Iniquity to King James I. For his trouble, Helwys was imprisoned and died in prison in 1616.
Fast forward now (not much, but some) to 1638 and the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies in what would become the state of Massachusetts. Roger Willliams, a Puritan, later a Separatist, founded the First Baptist Church in America in that year. He did so after several years of his beliefs evolving and changing, particularly regarding the Puritan practice of punishing religious wrongs in civil courts. In particular, Williams detested the Puritan requirement that everyone attend church on Sundays. Forced worship, Williams wrote, “stinks in God’s nostrils.”
Roger Williams, banished from Plymouth for his heretical (to them) beliefs, became the first American voice of Baptist religious liberty. He argued that by inserting themselves in civil matters, the Puritan church had, negatively, “a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world,” which would–inexorably–pollute the Garden and turn it, too, into Wilderness. In his magnum opus, titled The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Williams would further argue that “God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state.”
For Williams, the doctrine of “Soul Liberty” (what we Baptists today call Soul Freedom) was paramount. This means that all people–Christian or not–are made in the image and likeness of God and given by God the power, intellect, and reason to choose for ourselves what to or not to believe. That choice must, by its very nature, be free–free from meddling by those in the Church or those in the State. Civil power, Williams believed, had no dominion over an individual’s soul liberty: “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.” The separation between church and state is at the very heart of Baptist beliefs about soul freedom and religious liberty. Don’t believe me? Let’s keep going.
By the Revolutionary period, most of the colonies (9 of 13) had established churches which meant that those colonies had picked their favorite denomination of Christianity and it received special favors, power, and–most importantly–MONEY from the colony. The flip side of this was that those of minority faiths often lacked civil power, especially in the northern Congregationalist colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts where they couldn’t hold elected office and had to pay tax money to a church they did not attend. Baptists were in the minority in many of the colonies where there were established churches.
Isaac Backus was among the most prominent spokesmen for Baptists during the Revolution. Converted to Christianity in 1741 as a result of the First Great Awakening before becoming Baptist on account of his opposition to infant baptism a decade later, Backus lived in Connecticut and later Massachusetts and experienced life as a holder of minority opinions in places with strict establishment. In 1773, Backus preached a sermon that would be widely distributed afterwards called An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the Oppressions of the Present Day. In it, Backus asked, “Now who can hear Christ declare, that his kingdom is, not of this world, and yet believe that this blending of church and state together can be pleasing to him?” Here, Backus harkened back to Williams’ belief in a distinction between church and state and the need to separate the two.
Two decades later, John Leland, a firebrand Baptist preacher from Massachusetts, would continue this line of thinking in a tract titled The Right of Conscience Inalienable:
Every man must give account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience. If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.
Leland echoes this notion of unrestrained soul freedom as a God-given right that no civil entity can infringe upon. What separates these Baptist ancestors from other religious thinkers of the time is that while others championed religious freedom, it was often for their own beliefs. As Leland made very clear, Baptists saw (and see presently) this as something available and necessary for all people, regardless of belief:
The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever...Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians. (from A Chronicle of His Time in Virginia)
Baptists have one consistent record concerning liberty throughout all their long and eventful history. They have never been a party to oppression of conscience. They have forever been the unwavering champions of liberty, both religious and civil. Their contention now, is, and has been, and, please God, must ever be, that it is the natural and fundamental and indefeasible right of every human being to worship God or not, according to the dictates of his conscience, and, as long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others, he is to be held accountable alone to God for all religious beliefs and practices. Our contention is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty. There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle. Toleration is a gift from man, while liberty is a gift from God. It is the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship, or to pay taxes for the support of a religious organization to which they do not believe. God wants free worshipers and no other kind. (Emphasis added)
One of our great modern Baptist prophets for the cause of Soul Freedom, Dr. James Dunn, said “Soul freedom is the biblical and theological starting point and religious liberty naturally follows. If we all, in some serious way, replicate God, religious liberty is a moral and social inevitability.” He also argued that one could not have soul freedom AND civil powers engaged in religious matters: “Religious freedom and church-state separation are a package deal.” Even the Southern Baptist Convention, which has–I would argue–wandered FAR from the Baptist path laid out for it over the years, recognizes the necessity of religious liberty in the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message: “A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power.”
A free church in a free state. Civil powers that apply to all, not just a few who believe “the right things.” These are hallmarks of Baptist beliefs and doctrine, echoing through the centuries. As a public school teacher, I see students of a variety of faiths and no faith at all in my classroom. I cannot–I WILL not–in good conscience teach from the Bible. I will teach that the Bible is an important scripture to Christians (and the Old Testament to Jews). I will speak of how different people interpret the Bible in different ways. I will talk about different approaches to scriptural interpretation. But I will not teach FROM the Bible. As a Baptist, to do so would go against every fiber of my being. “I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.”
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