Faith in Public Live Part 2: Mainstream Baptist on Revisionist History
Dear Randall,
It is truly a delight to be in dialogue with someone who understands real Baptists so well. The chapter on “Where Have All the Baptists Gone?” in your new book Thy Kingdom Come is one of the best summations in print regarding the about face that many Baptists have made toward the First Amendment.
For lifelong Baptists like myself, it is hard to believe that the Baptist legacy as advocates for liberty of conscience and separation of church and state could be so thoroughly disowned by the descendants of those who literally paid with their own blood to give it to later generations.
Few who review the original sources for themselves would disagree with your crediting the Separatist-Puritan-Baptist-Seeker Roger Williams with conceiving the metaphor for a “wall of separation” between church and government. Unfortunately, the writings of the revisionist historians and theocrats within the Religious Right have been so widely disseminated and broadcast over the last quarter century that the facts of history are no longer perceived as valid.
I think the concerted effort by the Religious Right to place Decalogue displays on public property comprises the spearhead of a campaign to establish Christianity as this nation’s official religion. This morning’s newspaper reveals that another Ten Commandments monument is being erected on public property in Oklahoma. A decision is still pending over the monument to American theocracy that was erected on the Haskell County Courthouse lawn in Stigler, Oklahoma.
Eighty percent of the population in Haskell County Oklahoma claims to be Baptist. A Baptist minister solicited funds and erected the monument to “‘battle’ against Satan” and to affirm this nation’s “Christian heritage.” The heritage being affirmed, however, has more to do with the “democratic theocracy” of the Massachusetts Bay Colony than with the constitutional republic of the United States of America. The Stigler monument placed the Ten Commandments on one side and the Mayflower Compact on the other.
If more Baptists knew the history of Massachusetts Bay Colony, surely fewer of them would approve of monuments to that legacy. Under their system of law and jurisprudence, Baptists, Quakers and other religious dissenters were severely persecuted.
Persecutions over matters of faith in Massachusetts just began with the banishment of Roger Williams. It escalated from there. In the summer of 1651, John Clarke, John Crandall, and Obadiah Holmes — all members of the Baptist Church at Newport, Rhode Island — were arrested and imprisoned for holding an unauthorized worship service in the home of a blind Baptist named William Witter who lived at Lynn, Massachusetts outside Boston. They were sentenced to be fined or whipped. Fines for Clarke and Crandall were paid by friends. Holmes refused to let friends pay his fine and was publicly whipped on the streets of Boston on September 6, 1651. In 1653, Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard University, refused to have his fourth child baptized as an infant and proclaimed that only believers should be baptized. He was forced to resign from his position and banished from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1663, John Myles moved an entire Baptist congregation from Wales to escape the religious persecutions authorized by England’s 1662 Act of Uniformity. They first settled in Massachusetts, but by 1667 the authorities forced the congregation to move to the frontier in Rhode Island.
As bad as it was for Baptists, it was worse for Quakers. William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra are listed among the Quaker martyrs in Massachusetts. The last Quaker martyr in Massachusetts, Mary Dyer, was hanged in the Boston Common on June 1, 1660. All died in defiance of a law banning Quakers from Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Why, in God’s name, are Baptists erecting monuments to Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts?
Looking forward to your thoughts,
Bruce
Are such Baptists misinformed or are their politics informing their religious expressions?
Or, would the Baptists you mentioned even care to know their own history?
Or perhaps I am too cynical.
Great blog by the way. I am glad I found it!
U.S. District Judge Ronald White has ruled in favor of Haskell County’s Ten Commandments monument remaining on the courthouse lawn in Stigler, Oklahoma.
Last May, as the Judge was making closing remarks in this case, he ridiculed my expert opinion report quoting this sentence:
then Judge White said, “That is for me to decide.”
Judge White has decided.
Now you decide.
Is the Haskell County Ten Commandments monument Oklahoma’s Monument to American Theocracy?
I’ll have Dr. Randall Balmer, who provided expert testimony against Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument in Alabama as a guest on my radio program Sunday morning. Tune into KREF radio Sunday morning at 11:00 AM CST and see whether he thinks this case will pass constitutional muster under appeal.
Thanks Johnny, glad you found your way to us. I like what I see over at your place too.
I think your questions are good ones, and sort of what I was getting at in my next post. Your cynicism is warrented with the leadership of the Christian Right folks, but I’m not so sure about their congregations. I’m hoping that Randall and Bruce can give their opinions on what can be done (if anything) to revive the voices of moderation within the Baptist tradition.