Baptist World Alliance
Heritage and Identity Commission
Who are the Baptists?
United
States of America and Canada
USA:
The first Baptist
churches in America were in the New England colonies, to which
many Puritans had emigrated. Soon after arriving in Boston in
1631, Puritan minister Roger Williams adopted Separatist
views. Forced to leave Massachusetts Bay, he founded the colony
of Providence (present-day Rhode Island) in 1636 with complete
freedom in religious matters. Two years later, he was baptized
and formed the first Baptist church in America but remained a
Baptist pastor for only a short time. He is chiefly remembered
for his stirring writings on religious liberty.
Shortly
afterwards, Dr. John Clarke left Boston for Rhode Island,
where he joined Williams in the struggle for religious freedom.
He established a congregation that was clearly Baptist in doctrine
and polity. In 1651, Baptist Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped
in Boston for participating with Clarke in a home prayer meeting,
and Henry Dunster, the second president of Harvard College (now
University), lost his job in 1654 for affirming believer’s
baptism. A Baptist church was formed in Boston in 1665.
Its members were persecuted for several years; they drafted the
first Baptist confession of faith in the American colonies.
By the 1690s,
congregations existed in South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Aided
by the enthusiasm flowing from the first Great Awakening, the
revival that swept the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century,
Baptists soon became more numerous. The Philadelphia Association
was formed in 1707, the Charleston in 1751, and others in New
England, the Middle Colonies, and the South. In 1781, the first
church west of the Appalachian Mountains was organized in Kentucky.
Eighteenth-century Baptists were diverse; the main groups were
the Regular Baptists, the General or Free Will Baptists, the revivalistic
Separate Baptists, and the Seventh-Day Baptists.
Although
some Baptists had misgivings about the War for American Independence
(1775—1783), most saw it as a war for freedom, which for
them meant religious freedom.
Isaac
Backus,
originally a New Light Congregationalist minister, was converted
in the Great Awakening and became a leader of the newly emerging
Separate Baptists. He wrote pamphlets criticizing taxation for
religious purposes and affirming liberty of conscience. The Warren
Baptist Association in Massachusetts sent him to the First Continental
Congress in 1774 to argue the case for ending religious establishments;
and when the War for American Independence broke out, he supported
the American cause. As Backus later said, he and his brethren
fought on two fronts: against British troops for civil liberty
and against Massachusetts legislators for religious liberty. He
helped to secure his state’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution
in 1789, but religious liberty was not achieved until 1833 when
Massachusetts gave up its religious establishment.
In colonial
Virginia, Baptists were frequently jailed for preaching,
and they lobbied the legislature for religious liberty. The grievances
of this “heretical” sect were ignored until their support
for the War for American Independence, and their request to send
chaplains for the soldiers helped to change the public’s
perception of them. They also formed a coalition with Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, and others who also wished to disestablish the
Church of England (now becoming the Protestant Episcopal Church),
and they achieved that in Virginia through the Statute for Establishing
Religious Freedom (1786).
Later, Virginia
Baptists, led by John Leland and others, persuaded Madison
to include a firm guarantee of religious liberty in the amendments
to the U.S. Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. Hence, the
First Amendment opens as follows:
“Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
After becoming
president of the United States, Jefferson clarified the meaning
of this statement in response to a request from the Danbury (Connecticut)
Baptist Association, which had been unable to persuade its state
legislature to end the Congregationalist establishment there and
had asked the president for his opinion. Jefferson replied in
a letter (1802) to them that religion is a matter between man
and God and that government has no power to regulate such matters.
The First Amendment built a wall of separation between church
and state.
Many regard
this principle as the new nation’s greatest contribution
to civilization. It clearly opened the way for unparalleled Baptist
growth in the United States. Unlike Britain, where Baptists consumed
much of their energy in combating discriminatory laws preventing
involvement in public life and requiring monetary support of Anglican
parishes, and unlike other European countries in which the official
churches persecuted Baptists, Americans were unhindered in following
God’s call to preach the gospel. The separation of church
and state enabled them to evangelize freely.
Canada:
From Britain and the United States, the Baptist message was carried
to the British settlement colonies, continental Europe, Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. The first churches in Canada were planted
in Nova Scotia in the 1760s, and the Great Awakening in the Atlantic
provinces fostered the spread of Baptist teachings. Also, some
black Baptists moved northward and formed churches. Scottish Baptists
and U.S. missionaries founded churches in Ontario and Quebec,
but within a few years the Canadians themselves were spreading
the gospel across their vast country. Regionalism, missionary
work within Canada, and immigration from Europe all contributed
to the complexity of Canadian Baptist development. A network of
Baptist denominations grew up over the years, the largest of which
are the Canadian Baptist Federation (now Canadian Baptist Ministries)
and the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada.
From: We
Baptists by Study and Research Division, Baptist World Alliance,
(Franklin Tn, Providence House Pub., 1999) pp 4-6, 10.
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