U. S. Baptists and modernity: great dissenters, lousy conformists: Baptists had been in North America for only five or six years before it was deemed necessary to pass a law against them.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1644, though it had much else on its mind in the second decade of its existence, took time out to issue a stern warning against Baptists, or "Anabaptists" as the Colony preferred to tag them. That law began in this fashion:

     For as much as experience has plentifully & often proved that since the
   first arising of the Anabaptists, about a hundred years since, they have
   been the incendiaries of commonwealths & the infestors of persons in main
   matters of religion, and the troublers of churches in all places where they
   have been, and that they who have held the baptizing of infants unlawful
   have usually held other errors or heresies together therewith....

That was the introduction. Quickly, the patriarchal authorities moved to a conclusion that did far more than merely express an opinion: it stipulated a stiff punishment.

     It is ordered & agreed, that if any person or persons within this
   jurisdiction shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptism of infants,
   or go about secretly to seduce others from the approbation or use thereof,
   or shall purposely depart the congregation at the administration of the
   ordinance, or shall deny the ordinance of magistracy, or their lawful right
   or authority to make war or to punish the outward breaches of the first
   table, & shall appear in Court willfully and obstinately to continue
   therein after due time & means of conviction, every such person or persons
   shall be sentenced to banishment. (1)

Lovely legal language. (It is hardly necessary to point out that the governor of the Bay Colony, John Winthrop, was a lawyer.)

My point in quoting at some length from this 1644 law against Baptists is to suggest that this may have been the high point of Baptist life in North America. Dissent at its finest and rarest. "Incendiaries of commonwealths?" Not much of that lately. "Infectors of persons in main matters of religion?" Not particularly noticeable these days. "Troublers of churches in all places where they have been?" Well, we may be doing better in that regard. "Deny the lawfulness of magistrates & their inspection into any breach of the first table?" Deny it?!? Modern Baptists beg for it: embrace us, love us, support us, voucher us. The civil magistrate and the civil government appear to modern Baptists as cozy friends and warm allies in public policies, morals, and religion.

Of course, Massachusetts Bay knew about banishment long before it passed this 1644 law. Roger Williams, no mean dissenter himself, was banished nearly ten years before, in 1635 to establish a haven, or cesspool, for dissenters of all breeds and stripes. By 1651, when three Baptists from Rhode Island dared to invade sacred Massachusetts territory, they were arrested, quickly tried, and even more quickly found guilty. But what punishment to mete out to them? To banish them was merely to send them home, to Newport, Rhode Island. That was hardly punishment enough. So, by this careful reasoning, one of their number, Obadiah Holmes, was publicly whipped in Boston market, thirty-two lashes on a bare back, lashes (we are told) "well laid on." Oh, those were the good old days!

To be perfectly honest, of course, it has not all been downhill since the middle of the seventeenth century. Other Baptist itinerants up and down the Atlantic coast proved themselves to be "troublers of churches in all places where they have been." Some 120 years after Holmes was whipped in Boston, four Baptist preachers were jailed in Middlesex County, Virginia, in 1771 for unauthorized assembling and unauthorized proclaiming of the gospel. As the justice of the peace patiently explained, these four (John Waller, Robert Ware, James Greenwood, and William Webber) taught or preached "under the pretense of the exercise of Religion in other manner than according to the Liturgy of the Church of England, they not having Episcopal Ordination."

The four men admitted they did not possess Episcopal ordination, but on the contrary their authority came directly from above. This did not impress the local justice of the peace who ordered the county sheriff "to receive them into your Custody and them safely keep in the Gaol of the said County until they be discharged by due course of law." (2)

This minor episode hardly deserves notice except for its major impact: it transformed a twenty-two-year-old James Madison into a life-long advocate of religious liberty. Offended by the jailing of these men near his own home, he wrote to a college chum from Princeton days that he had lost patience with Anglican pretensions and with that "diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution." "Pity me," he concluded his letter, "and pray for liberty of conscience to all." (3)

Not long after this turning point in Madison's youth, another Baptist itinerant wandered into Virginia from Massachusetts: namely, John Leland. Arriving in Virginia just as the fires of revolution were heating up, Leland lost little time in seeing political liberty and religious liberty as the most natural of allies. He also formed an alliance with James Madison, helping to gather signatures of support for Madison's famous and far-reaching, Memorial and Remonstrance, presented to the Virginia Assembly in 1785.

If Leland had done nothing more than help secure a place for that document in American jurisprudence, he deserves honor. But he did do much more, both in the South and later back in his native New England. He lobbied for votes to pass Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, and he called Baptists to unswerving loyalty to freedom of the mind and of the soul. He saw no need for creeds if one's heart was already filled with the Spirit of God. "Why this Virgin Mary," he asked, "between the souls of men and the scriptures?" But creeds are useful, many declared, for heretics fear them. "I wish," Leland wryly responded, "I could say as much of tyrants." But creeds must be good, for they are so widespread, supporters pointed out. Well, said Leland, this is like making a case on behalf of sin, because sin is everywhere. (4)

Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, Baptists were no longer being banished or whipped--just taxed. But they were taxed to support the Congregational Church or forced to recognize the right of the state to levy such a tax by having to apply for a certificate of exemption. In 1774, Isaac Backus led the fight against the continued alliance between the state and the church: in this case, the Bay Colony and the Congregational Church. To appreciate the odds against Backus, one must immediately observe that another sixty years would pass before that close connection was finally severed. But Backus was a good PR man (for even dissenters need to understand a thing or two about public relations). Backus spoke to the Massachusetts legislature at a time when passions ran high over the British tea tax and when just a short while before some patriots had dumped several casks of tea into Boston harbor. "That which has made the greatest noise" among us, Backus observed, "is a tax of three pence a pound on tea." But, Backus shrewdly observed, one can avoid that tax by simply not drinking tea.

In the case of Baptists, however, the legislature had levied a similar tax on them, and there was no way to avoid that tax except by going to jail or by violating their consciences. Baptists and other dissenters could not take the simple way out by just not drinking tea. "But these lines are to let you know," Backus concluded, that we refuse to pay your tax "not only upon your principles of not being taxed where we are not represented," but also upon our principle of not paying "homage to any earthly power" that we are "fully convinced belongs only to God." "Here, therefore, we claim charter rights, liberty of conscience." (5)

Powerful dissenters--Leland and Backus. Swimming against the tide, struggling uphill, doing everything but conforming or going with the flow. (The flow, as we all know, is always downhill.) Yet, wonder of wonders, the Baptists continued to expand, to increase and multiply. Why? Taking the First Amendment (adopted in 1791) as their personal Magna Carta, they recognized no barriers, legal or geographical, to their mission of conquest across an expanding America. Their zeal was matched by a simple piety that held that the gospel of Christ was open to all: white or black, male or female, slave or free, rich or poor, young or old, learned or illiterate. "'Whosoever will, may come." So, by the end of the nineteenth century, Baptists in America had more churches than Congregationalists, Disciples, Dutch Reformed, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Roman Catholics--all combined!

Of course, there were those who found other explanations for the phenomenal growth of the Baptists. A Congregational clergyman, Noah Worcester, near the end of the eighteenth century, elucidated the matter as follows:

     Many people are so ignorant, as to be charmed with sound than sense. And
   to them, the want of knowledge in a teacher ... may easily be made up, and
   overbalanced, by great zeal, an affecting tone of voice, and a perpetual
   motion of the tongue. If a speaker can keep his tongue running, in an
   unremitting manner ... and can quote [from memory] a large number of texts
   within the covers of the Bible, it matters not, to many of his hearers,
   whether he speaks sense or nonsense. (6)

Baptists on the frontier were one thing, but Baptists had gained converts even in New England, no small number of them from Noah Worcester's own Congregational communion. So he can be forgiven for a little resentment spilling out in what he called "Impartial Inquiries."

A few generations later, impartial inquiring stood a much better chance. In his magisterial two-volume study of Baptists in New England, from 1630 to 1833, William G. McLoughlin gave to his 1,300 pages the title of New England Dissent. And rarely has dissent looked so good. In fighting for themselves, McLoughlin argued, Baptists fought for all, bringing liberty and equality to the masses. McLoughlin concluded:

  As this study has tried to show, the continuous search for liberty and
   equality in religion, politics, and economics owes much more than we have
   realized to the pietistic doctrine of the priesthood of all believers--the
   notion that God, through the Holy Spirit, often employs the weak and
   foolish of this world to confound the learned and powerful. (7)

The "weak and foolish of this world"--dissenting, carping, complaining, protesting, and in the process making American democracy work. To those who would declare that dissent is negative, destructive, and counterproductive, here is powerful testimony to the contrary from a secular historian who studied early Baptist dissent in New England more conscientiously and carefully than anyone before or since. Perhaps McLoughlin is too generous in his conclusions, but at the very least, he offers us good reason not to fear the role of dissent.

Baptists began the nineteenth century on a high note by having a friend in the White House, at least a friend so far as the calls for freedom in religion were concerned. And, of course, Jefferson penned his most famous comment on the First Amendment to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut.

Danbury Baptists continue to attract attention, most recently in a Library of Congress exhibit in 1999 on "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic." The exhibit raised the question whether Jefferson's "wall of separation" comment was a declaration of deep conviction or just a bit of political palaver. (8) Others, to be sure, have also raised that issue, ranging from W. A. Criswell and Pat Robertson-to William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia. So perhaps, in addition to a Roger Williams Fellowship and a Whitsitt Society, we need the resurrection of a Danbury Baptist Association.

To be sure, dissenters are not always right. It is not their role to be right so much as it is to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies (religious or political), to test the boundaries, to question the easy shibboleths and widely received cliches, and in the process-naturally--to irritate. Yet, such irritation in the body politic or the body ecclesiastical is the price of long lasting good health. Without the dissenters, those bodies ossify and die. And without freedom, order becomes only another name for tyranny. Dissenters, if one takes the long view, are preservers not destroyers--but in the heat of any moment, it is most difficult to take the long view Dissenters, also, are often not the innovators, but the traditionalists; often dedicated not to brand-new ideas but to ancient and noble ones.

For example, in the age of the Reformation, the dissenters decried innovation. So much had been introduced under the banner of "tradition" that it was time to call a halt, to reverse engines, and recapture that which had been lost. Dissent called for a return, not a revolution; a return to biblical precedents and New Testament injunctions. Dissent here also called for separation. Dissenters were radicals-but only in the true meaning of the term: returning to the roots. And so in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Baptists continued to fill the important role of dissenters: holding to fundamental insights that brought the denomination into being in the first place.

William Whitsitt was the traditionalist; Landmarkers were the innovators. Whitsitt declared that good Baptists cannot deny, cannot defy, history. Biblical inerrantists are the innovators, defying history, literature, and reason--going against the solid tradition of "I know whom I have believed...." Current patriarchs of the Southern Baptist Convention are the innovators, going against the priesthood of the believers, unless believers be limited to ordained white males. Creeds are the innovation; dissenters, like John Leland, deplored these "Virgin Marys" inserted between the believer and God.

Of course, no one organization or entity has a monopoly on conformity or a monopoly on the suppression of dissent. At the end of the nineteenth century, black Baptists often had to carry the heavier burdens of dissent, as of course they frequently had in the preceding 100 years. In 1896, the Reverend E. K. Love of Savannah, Georgia, explained the necessity for the creation of the National Baptist Convention--a convention that differed from other Baptist entities in neither theology nor polity, only in race. Love who had himself served as an agent for the American Baptist Publication Society concluded, sadly but resolutely, that "it never was true anywhere, and perhaps never will be, that a Negro can enjoy every right in an institution controlled by white men that a white man can enjoy." He added, "It cannot be denied that we can better marshall our forces and develop our people in enterprises manned by us." Love and thousands of others were moved to this dissenting separation when the American Baptist Publication Society decided earlier that black Baptist scholars could no longer write general curriculum materials for the society. Whites could write for whites--and for blacks. But blacks, among them graduates of Brown, Bucknell, Andover-Newton, and Colgate Rochester, could write only for blacks. It was time for dissent--and a time for separation.

In the twentieth century, dissent came from an unlikely source among Baptists: the women in pulpit and pew. Unlikely, because for generations women had been the mainstay of many a congregation, the vision behind the mission movement, and the steadiest defenders and practitioners of family values. Yet, in the last twenty years (including 2000) the Southern Baptist Convention has aimed at pushing women more and more to the margins, if not out of the fellowship entirely. While other denominations--the AME Church, for example--are elevating their women to the exalted rank of bishop, the SBC is resolutely determined to remove its women from all positions of prestige or power. The response, not too surprisingly, has been dissent. Dissent in the form of new organizations (Women in Ministry), new centers for women's resources, new efforts to maintain a degree of independence in such groups as the WMU, and of course, abandonment of the SBC altogether for other entities, including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Alliance of Baptists. Again, a time for dissent, and perhaps also a time for separation.

But dissent, at least in the eyes of some observers, sprang up in surprising places. E. Y. Mullins a dissenter? So it seems. George W. Truett a dissenter? Apparently so. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the innovators from the traditionalists. A quite recent book, carrying the subtitle of "Structures of Deceit," speaks of the growing problems with a patriarchal authoritarianism. The author warns against those who mingle truth "with obvious and shambling falsehoods, historical or scriptural or philosophical. He adds that on the one hand there is a token nod in the direction of truth, but on the other, a resort to "evasions and distortions and cover-ups." One might think that this author has been a careful student of the Southern Baptist Convention in the last twenty or thirty years, but in fact Garry Wills is writing about his own church, the Roman Catholic one, in a book whose main title is Papal Sin. (9)

Wills goes into some detail on the calamity that was Vatican Council I (1870) and its equally calamitous Syllabus of Errors issued by Pope Pius IX some half-dozen years before. In the Syllabus, the pope turned back the clock-or made every effort to do so. What the pope called errors, most of the modern world has called the steady progress of civilization. For example, the pope condemned as an error the notion that "Every man is free to embrace that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true." Error? Baptists beware. Furthermore, it is an error that the church ought to be separated from state, and the state from the church. It is an error to hold that the Catholic religion should not be the only religion of the state. And the culminating error, which says it all, is that "The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." (10) Errors all!! Turn back the clock; stop the world, I want to get off.

These absurdities were difficult to swallow. But in an effort to make certain that they were swallowed, a council was called a few years later to promulgate the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility. For a few, this only heightened the absurdity, so much so that their dissent led to a modest separation. Yet, now a 130 years later, dissent can still be heard, especially with respect to the pope and the holocaust, with respect to women in the ministry, and with respect to many issues involving sexuality and reproduction. Whether it is time for further separation, some insider-not I--might be able to say.

But the point of this little digression is to suggest that Southern Baptists in recent years have issued their own Syllabus of Errors, have summoned their own Vatican Council I. Not in a single edict, to be sure, nor in a single gathering, but in conventions year after tedious and depressing year. Turn the clock back? Yes. Reject modern science and modern scholarship? A double yes. Raise doubts about separation of church and state, and even about the liberty of the soul? Even there, a most disheartening yes. In place of all this, of course, one can assert the inerrancy of Scripture. For priesthood of the believer, substitute inerrancy. For soul liberty, insert in its place inerrancy. For history, science, and scholarship in general, let the slate be wiped clean and let "inerrancy" be written thereon. But for inerrancy to really work, one must accompany it with infallibility. No problem. The Roman Catholic church has only a single infallible spokesman; the Southern Baptist Convention can do far, far better than that, with--in the words of Stan Hastey--its "undisputed ayatollahs of the established church of the South." (11) And so it has.

In the modern world, Baptists have often been cited, perhaps unfairly, for their contributions to the cultural lag. But this is more than "lag." It is a sharp reversal of course: politically, morally, intellectually, spiritually. The papal language of 1864 can be adopted without change, except in the subject of the sentence: It is a grievous error to declare that the Southern Baptist Convention "can, and ought, to reconcile [itself], and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." Errors all!! And to make certain that these "errors" stand out clearly for all to see, infallibility will surely come in handy. A time for dissent--and probably also for separation.

But the pressures for conformity remain great--throughout our entire culture. Many denominations in America are eager to embrace and bless the powers that be, but I would assume and trust that Baptists are not among them. Historically, Baptists have played the vital role of the outsider, the social critic, the political watchdog. But modernity has resulted in some erosion of this role. Religion has become more the fashion, less the rebuke. Christianity--to the dismay of Roger Williams--is now confused with Christendom.

Writing specifically about the Alliance of Baptists, Alan Neely noted:

  We have made some progress, but we have also learned that racial, gender,
   and cultural prejudice are as widespread and pernicious today as it was
   when our forebears defended racism, legalized segregation, ignored the
   lynchings, and joined in the oppression of women. (12)

A lot of conformity then; a lot of conformity now. His comments, of course, have relevance far beyond the walls of any single religious institution in America. And Glenn Hinson speaks of the "corporate mentality" that has come to dominate the Southern Baptist Convention: a mentality that concerns itself with conformity and would obliterate dissent, a mentality that confuses unity with uniformity. (13)

The conformity that Hinson speaks of is not to cultural cliches, though much of that exists, but to a specific (shall we say, infallible?) party line: Conform or be cast into outer darkness. And many have been so ejected, exiled, and excommunicated. The cost in personal terms is beyond calculation. The cost in intellectual terms also staggers the imagination: not only in what has happened and is happening in the seminaries, but in the brain drain resulting from those who have left the denomination altogether. Since they would not--could not--conform, these dissenters took the step, unhappily, of rejecting the denomination as a whole. We all know that other outlets for dissenting positions exist, but we also know that--for a large number--the very name of "Baptist" can become an offense and a stumbling block.

The current struggle is not so much one of "fundamentalists" versus "moderates" as it is of power brokers and mind managers on the one hand against spirit seekers and freedom lovers on the other; of authoritarians and legalists, against those who refuse to limit or prescribe the operations of the Spirit. Or, another way of identifying the sides, of course, is to set the dissenters against the conformists. Once again, many Baptists find themselves on the outside looking in. Historically, it is a familiar spot, and, spiritually, it is probably a preferred one. Baptists do better with dissent--worse with conformity: great dissenters, lousy conformists.

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, a large body of worshipers were tagged as "nonconformists." This categorization had many legal consequences: no holding of public office, no admission to Oxford or Cambridge, no recognition by the royal court--and so on. But it also had spiritual consequences: no confusion between the sword of the spirit and the sword of steel, no substitution of fashion for faith, no elevation of the public institution above the private encounter with God. Nonconformity could be a badge of shame or a badge of honor. An ancient author gives us a hint--just the barest hint, you realize--of which he preferred when he wrote, "Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed...."

(1.) Nathanael B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), 11, 85.

(2.) From Lewis Peyton Little, Imprisoned Preachers and Religious Liberty in Virginia (Lynchburg, Va., 1938), as printed in William R. Estep, Revolution Within the Revolution (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1990), 182-83.

(3.) Letter to William Bradford, dated January 24, 1774, in W. T. Hutchinson and W. M. Randall, ed., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago, 1962), 1, 106.

(4.) See "The Backus-Leland Tradition" in Winthrop S. Hudson, Baptist Concepts of the Church (Philadelphia, 1959), 106-34.

(5.) Ibid. See also William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston, 1967).

(6.) Noah Worcester, Impartial Inquiries Concerning the Progress of the Baptist Denomination (Worcester, Mass, 1794), 19-20.

(7.) William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). Also, see his more recent collection of essays, Soul Liberty: the Baptists' Struggle in New England (Hanover, N. H., 1991).

(8.) See my brief comments, "Thomas Jefferson, Danbury Baptists, and `Eternal Hostility,'" William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 56, no. 4 (October, 1999): 801-04.

(9.) Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York: Doubleday, 2000), quotations from pp. 8, 9.

(10.) Ibid., 239-40.

(11.) Connections 3, no. 7 (July, 2000): 3.

(12.) Quoted in Walter B. Shurden, ed., The Struggle for the Soul of the SBC (Macon, Ga.: Smyth and Helwys, 1993), 127-28.

(13.) Ibid., 12-13.

Edwin S. Gaustad is professor emeritus of history and religious studies, University of California, Riverside, California.