Baptist Theology – A Free Church In A Free State

GENEALOGY · CONSCIENCE AND CONSENT

The liberal presuppositions of Baptist theology

Baptists did not learn religious liberty from a philosopher. They paid for it. Thomas Helwys died in an English prison for it, Obadiah Holmes was whipped in Boston for it, and Virginia jailed Baptist preachers for it on the eve of the Revolution. This paper honors the courage in that record and asks a question the record cannot settle: what do the Baptist distinctives assume about a man, his church, and his ruler? They assume what liberalism assumes, that no earthly authority binds a man in the things of God without his consent. A Southern Baptist seminary president said so himself in 1908 and counted it to the Baptists’ glory. We argue that this shared premise is why Baptists cannot answer the liberal order from their own distinctives, since that order is the same premise carried into the rest of life.

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01

The question

This is not a paper about theological liberalism. Southern Baptists spent the 1980s in a long fight over the authority of Scripture, and the conservatives won it. Baptists confess the Trinity, the deity of Christ, his atoning death and bodily resurrection, and the authority of the Bible, and on each of those points we stand with them. A church can be orthodox in its creed and still carry assumptions about authority it has never examined. Those assumptions are the subject here.

By liberal we do not mean Democrat, progressive, or the left. We mean the assumption both American parties share, that legitimate authority over a man rests on his consent. John Locke gave it its classic form in 1689: men being “by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent” (Second Treatise §95). The Declaration of Independence wrote it into the nation’s founding, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Conservatives and progressives argue about what to do with that principle. Neither of them questions it.

A presupposition is what an argument assumes without arguing for it. We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth was twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Here we put them to the Baptist distinctives, which are believer’s baptism, a church of professing members, congregational government, the competency of the soul, and liberty of conscience. We state each one first as Baptists state it, from their own confessions and their own fathers.

02

The Baptist case

The Baptist distinctives begin with what the gospel asks of the man who hears it. The Second London Confession of 1689, the confession of the Particular Baptists, states the first of them plainly: “Those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ, are the only proper subjects of this ordinance” (29.2). Its proof texts follow the order of the New Testament. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved” (Mark 16:16). “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized” (Acts 2:41). Belief comes first in every account, and baptism follows.

A church of believers follows from believer’s baptism. The Baptist Faith and Message of 1925 defines a church as “a congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel.” Such a church governs itself. Christ told the offended brother to “tell it unto the church” (Matt. 18:17), and Paul told the Corinthians to deal with the guilty man “when ye are gathered together” (1 Cor. 5:4). In 1963 the Southern Baptists added that a church operates “through democratic processes,” and the 2000 revision kept the phrase.

Beneath all of this lies a conviction about the soul. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who later chaired the committee that wrote the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message, named it the soul’s competency in religion and made it the key to the whole Baptist position in The Axioms of Religion (1908). “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), so no priest, no church, and no parent stands between a soul and its Savior. Mullins drew the consequence without hesitating. The principle, he wrote, “excludes at once all human interference, such as episcopacy and infant baptism, and every form of religion by proxy. Religion is a personal matter between the soul and God.”

Liberty of conscience follows. If religion is personal, the magistrate has no part in it. Thomas Helwys wrote the principle by hand on the flyleaf of a copy of his book addressed to King James in 1612: “The king is a mortal man and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual lords over them.” The Baptist Faith and Message still says it, in a sentence unchanged since 1925: “A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal.”

The case for these convictions is stronger than its critics usually allow, and it deserves to be heard at its strongest.

Faith cannot be forced. Tertullian told a Roman proconsul around A.D. 212 that “it is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion.” Thomas Aquinas, no friend of heresy, held that unbelievers “are by no means to be compelled to the faith, in order that they may believe, because to believe depends on the will” (Summa Theologiae II-II q. 10 a. 8). A confession extracted by force is not faith, and every Christian tradition admits it.

Christendom filled its churches with the unconverted. Where everyone is baptized at birth and confirmed by custom, the church can become the nation at prayer rather than a people born again. Søren Kierkegaard, a Lutheran, spent the last year of his life attacking a Danish Christendom in which, he argued, everyone was a Christian and almost no one followed Christ. A church of members who have professed faith for themselves aims at a real disease.

The apostolic church had no Christian state. It grew under Nero by preaching alone. “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (2 Cor. 10:4). Christ told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). Roger Williams built much of The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644) on the parable of the tares, in which the householder forbids his servants to root up the tares, “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matt. 13:30), and Christ explains that “the field is the world” (13:38).

Each man answers to God for himself. “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Rom. 14:12). John Leland, who preached for disestablishment in Virginia and later in Massachusetts, rested his case on that verse.

And Baptists suffered for it. Helwys died in Newgate prison by 1616. Holmes was publicly whipped in Boston in 1651 for holding a Baptist service in Lynn. In January 1774 the young James Madison wrote to a friend that the county next to his held “not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men in close [gaol] for publishing their religious Sentiments which in the main are very orthodox.” The men who held these convictions held them at a cost.

This is a serious case. It rests on Scripture, it was sealed in suffering, and much of it is true. The question is not whether it contains truth. The question is what it assumes.

03

Where it came from

The first English Baptist church began with a covenant. In the opening years of the seventeenth century a company of English Separatists around Gainsborough left the Church of England and, in William Bradford’s words, “as the Lord’s free people, joined themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate.” Bradford records that two churches came of it. One was pastored by John Smyth, “a man of able gifts,” whose people afterwards fell “into some errors in the Low Countries.” The errors were Baptist ones. The other, under John Robinson, sent the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and in 1620, before they landed, the passengers of the Mayflower did for civil government what the Separatists had done for the church. They bound themselves “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another” to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.” The church gathered by covenant and the commonwealth gathered by compact have the same parent.

Smyth carried the covenant to its end. If a true church is made when believers covenant together, and the Church of England was no true church, then its baptism was no true baptism, and a true one had to begin again with the believer. In Amsterdam in 1609 Smyth baptized himself and then the rest of his congregation. He came to regret it and sought to join the Mennonites. Thomas Helwys would not follow him. He led a remnant back to England in 1612, founded the first Baptist church on English soil at Spitalfields, and published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, which set down the principle every later Baptist plea for liberty would repeat: “For men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the king shall not answer for it, neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”

Notice the reason Helwys gives. The king may not judge because “the king shall not answer for it.” No man answers to God for another man’s religion, so no man may govern another man’s religion. That premise runs through everything that follows.

Roger Williams brought it to America. He founded the first Baptist church in America at Providence and left it within months, convinced that no true church could exist until God restored one, and he spent the rest of his life defending the liberty of every conscience. The Bloudy Tenent holds that civil states are “essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the Spiritual, or Christian, State and worship,” and that “it is the will and command of God” that “a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences and worship be granted to all men, in all nations and countries.”

The Particular Baptists wrote the principle into their confession by subtraction. The Second London Confession follows the Westminster Confession of 1646 closely, often word for word. Its chapter on the civil magistrate keeps Westminster’s paragraphs on his ordination, his lawful office, and the subject’s duty to obey him and pray for him. It drops the paragraph that charges him to see “that the truth of God be kept pure and entire.” What remains still says that God ordained magistrates “for his own glory and the public good” (24.1). It no longer says what that glory requires of them.

Locke published A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689, the year the Particular Baptists publicly adopted that confession, and he defined the church in terms any of them could have signed: “A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God.” In the next lines he drew the consequence for children.

Nobody is born a member of any church; otherwise the religion of parents would descend unto children by the same right of inheritance as their temporal estates, and everyone would hold his faith by the same tenure he does his lands, than which nothing can be imagined more absurd.

JOHN LOCKE · A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION · 1689

He gave Helwys’s reason for keeping the magistrate out as well: “the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men.” The Baptists did not take any of this from Locke. They had been saying it for nearly eighty years when he wrote. That is the point. When the father of liberalism needed a definition of the church to fit his politics, he wrote down a Baptist one.

In 1774 twenty New England Baptist churches, meeting in association at Medfield, sent Isaac Backus to the Continental Congress to ask relief from the Massachusetts church tax. Their memorial gave the reason in one sentence: “As the kingdom of Christ is not of this world, and religion is a concern between God and the soul, with which no human authority can intermeddle,” they claimed “the liberty of worshipping God according to our consciences.”

John Leland opened The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (1791) by naming the four principles men had proposed “as the foundation of civil government, viz., birth, property, grace, and compact.” Birth meant hereditary monarchy, in which the son of a king inherits dominion from his father. Leland set it aside and chose compact, which he called “a just one.” Then he went further than Locke had. Locke refused toleration to atheists, because “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.” Leland asked government to protect a man who worships “either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods,” since “government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men, than it has with the principles of mathematics.” The Baptist preacher was more liberal than the liberal philosopher.

When the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to President Jefferson in October 1801 that “religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals,” and that “the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor,” he answered on New Year’s Day 1802 by agreeing with them. “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions,” he contemplated “with sovereign reverence” the First Amendment, “thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” The most famous sentence in American secularism begins with the words “Believing with you,” and the men it agreed with were Baptists.

04

The same premise

The Baptists saw the resemblance first, and they were proud of it. Mullins gave a chapter of The Axioms of Religion to “The Contribution of the Baptists to American Civilization,” and in it he made this paper’s argument in reverse. “Look into a New Testament church and then at the American government,” he wrote, “and insight discovers that the latter is the projection of the shadow of the former. One might in a certain sense say that the primary election which determined whether or not there should be an American government was held two thousand years ago on the shores of the Mediterranean when the little Baptist democracies assembled to worship.”

He then matched his axioms to American ones. The religious axiom, “All souls have an equal right to direct access to God,” has its counterpart in “All men are created free and equal.” The ecclesiastical axiom has its counterpart in government “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” The moral axiom, “To be responsible, man must be free,” has its counterpart “in the franchise.” In that sense, he concluded, “we may regard American civilization as a Baptist empire, for at the basis of this government lies a great group of Baptist ideals.”

We agree with Mullins about the resemblance. We do not agree that it is a compliment. Set each Baptist distinctive beside the liberal principle it resembles, and the shared premise is plain.

Every row rests on one premise. In the things of God, a man comes under earthly authority only by his own act. He is not born into the church, so his father cannot bring him in. The church binds him because he covenanted with it, and its officers rule because its members elected them. His ruler may not bind him in religion at all, because his conscience answers to God alone, and Leland held that a man could not hand his conscience to the state even if he chose to: “It would be sinful for a man to surrender that to man, which is to be kept sacred for God.”

The Baptist confessions do not make the state itself a creature of consent. The Second London Confession says that God “hath ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people, for his own glory and the public good” (24.1), and that is sound doctrine. But Baptist theology took from the magistrate everything that concerns God, made the church a society of consent, and left the household outside the covenant until each child chooses. The state kept its ordination from God and lost its duty to the God who ordained it. Liberalism finished the work by taking the ordination too, and Leland, choosing compact over birth, had already taken that step.

This is why we call the presuppositions inherent rather than borrowed. The premise is not an opinion some Baptists absorbed from the culture around them. It is the reason Helwys gave the king in 1612, and it is the ground Mullins gave for the whole system, the principle that “excludes at once … infant baptism, and every form of religion by proxy.”

05

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth. The Baptist distinctives are built from six, and each one bends at a single point.

Accountability. “Every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Rom. 14:12). That is true, and Baptists built on it the conclusion that no one may govern another man’s religion, since no one will answer for it. Leland put it as an argument: “Every man must give an 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.” The argument rests on a hidden premise, that no one answers for another, and Scripture denies it. “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account” (Heb. 13:17). God told Samuel he would be avenged on Eli’s house “for the iniquities of his sons, because his sons spoke evil against God, and he did not admonish them” (1 Kingdoms 3:13). Shepherds answer for those in their charge, and fathers answer for their sons.

Paul’s verse also has a setting. Romans 14 concerns meats and holy days among believers who disagree about them (14:2–6), and it asks, “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant?” (14:4). It forbids Christians to condemn one another over things indifferent. It does not tell rulers to ignore what is taught in public. In 1988 the Southern Baptist Convention reached for Hebrews 13:17 itself, when it resolved that the priesthood of the believer had been used to justify the attitude “that a Christian may believe whatever he so chooses.” The verse that answers that error answers Leland.

Conscience. Faith cannot be compelled, and the older tradition agreed. But Aquinas, in the same article, drew a line the Baptist argument erases. Unbelievers may not be compelled “in order that they may believe,” yet they “should be compelled by the faithful, if it be possible to do so, so that they do not hinder the faith, by their blasphemies, or by their evil persuasions.” Forcing a man to believe and restraining him from teaching against the faith in public are different acts. The Baptist case proves the first wrong and treats the proof as settling the second. The same reasoning would empty the criminal law. The magistrate cannot make a man love his neighbor, and no Baptist concludes that he may not punish murder. Law restrains and teaches. It was never asked to regenerate anyone.

Williams’s parable proves too much in the same way. If “let both grow together” forbids the magistrate to touch the tares, it forbids him to touch thieves and murderers, because the tares are “the children of the wicked one” (Matt. 13:38), and Paul says the magistrate “beareth not the sword in vain” (Rom. 13:4). Williams answered that the sword reaches only civil offenses, which assumes what the parable was supposed to prove.

Holiness. The church should be a people of real faith, and the Baptist complaint against nominal Christendom is often just. The Baptist cure was to take the household out of the covenant, but the covenant has had households in it from the beginning. “I will establish my covenant between thee and thy seed after thee, to their generations” (Gen. 17:7), and the Lord said of Abraham, “For I know that he will order his sons, and his house after him, and they will keep the ways of the Lord” (Gen. 18:19). The apostles preached the same promise, “unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:39). Lydia “was baptized, and her household” (Acts 16:15), the jailer “was baptized, he and all his, straightway” (16:33), and Paul baptized “the household of Stephanas” (1 Cor. 1:16). The children of a believer are “holy” (1 Cor. 7:14). Baptist doctrine makes the child a stranger to the covenant until he chooses it, which is the liberal account of every obligation, that it begins when a man agrees to it. Many Baptist parents bring their children up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4) with great care. The question is not what Baptist parents do. It is what Baptist doctrine says the child is.

The congregation. The congregation has a real part in the church. It looked out the seven in Acts 6, it hears the case against an unrepentant brother (Matt. 18:17), and it acts in discipline “when ye are gathered together” (1 Cor. 5:4). But in each case it acts under an authority it did not create. The apostles told the church, “look ye out among you seven men … whom we may appoint over this business” (Acts 6:3). The people selected, and the apostles appointed. Paul and Barnabas “ordained them elders in every church” (Acts 14:23), and Paul left Titus in Crete to “ordain elders in every city” (Titus 1:5). Mullins turned the congregation’s part into its sovereignty. The New Testament churches, he wrote, “were pure democracies,” and “democracy alone accords with the nature of the kingdom of God.” A congregation that confers authority by vote does in the church what the voter does in the republic. Our paper None Gives What He Has Not draws the same distinction for the state.

The kingdom. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Christ said, and the verse ends, “but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:36). The words say where his kingdom comes from, not how far it reaches. It does not arise from the world, and it rules the world. “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matt. 28:18). He is “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5), and the second Psalm tells those kings what they owe him: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice in him with trembling” (Ps. 2:10–11). Isaiah promised that when the nations bring Zion’s sons and daughters to her, “kings shall be thy nursing-fathers, and their princesses thy nurses” (Isa. 49:22–23).

There is a true distinction between the offices. The magistrate may not preach, administer the sacraments, or rule the church, and when King Ozias burned incense in the temple the priests withstood him: “It is not for thee, Ozias, to burn incense to the Lord” (2 Chr. 26:18). But distinct is not neutral. Paul calls the ruler “the minister of God” twice in one verse (Rom. 13:4). A minister of God who may not know which God he serves is a contradiction in terms.

The neighbor. The Danbury Baptists limited the state’s power to punishing “the man who works ill to his neighbor.” The words are Paul’s: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:10). Read that way, the verses that follow Paul’s teaching on the ruler become the limit of the ruler’s sword, as if his whole jurisdiction were the second table of the law. But Paul has turned from the ruler to the believer, “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another” (13:8), and he is describing what love owes, not drawing the border of the magistrate’s office. The second table cannot stand on its own anyway. A court that punishes perjury enforces an oath sworn before God, which is why Locke would not tolerate the atheist. The principle the Danbury Baptists stated in Paul’s words is the one John Stuart Mill made famous in 1859, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

06

Where it leads

The premise does not stay in the church. It goes three places, and each is visible now.

It reaches the schools and the courts. From the Danbury reply the line runs straight to the bench.

Baptists were not inconsistent when the Court applied their principle. They were consistent. Two decades after Engel, the Congressional Research Service listed the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the American Baptist Churches, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention among the religious bodies opposed to state-sponsored prayer in public schools. When the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed a prayer amendment in 1982, it attached the condition that no government write the prayers, and a year later it affirmed its opposition to any change in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The Regents’ prayer was a prayer written by a government. By the Danbury principle the Court was right to strike it.

It moves from worship to morals. Casey is the plainest case. The Court’s reasoning in 1992 did not merely resemble the Baptist argument for liberty of conscience. It was that argument: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” Baptists answer that abortion is an act and not a belief, and that the magistrate punishes acts. Jefferson drew that line in the Danbury reply, “actions only, & not opinions.” But every act the magistrate punishes is defined by a belief about who counts. Whether abortion “works ill to his neighbor” depends on whether the child is a neighbor, and that is a belief about “the mystery of human life.” A state forbidden to know the God who made the child has no way to settle whether the child is a person except by asking what the people believe. The harm principle does not escape the question of God. It hands the question to the majority. Dobbs overruled Casey on abortion in 2022 and returned the question to the people and their elected representatives, which is where the harm principle had already put it.

It reaches the home. The household is where the premise arrived first, because Baptist theology had already taken it out of the covenant. Leland drew the conclusion himself, in an essay called “The Rights and Bonds of Conscience”: “For a man to contend for religious liberty on the court-house green, and deny his wife, children and servants, the liberty of conscience at home, is a paradox not easily reconciled. If a head of a family could answer for all his house in the day of judgment, there would be a degree of justice in his controlling them in the mode of worship, and joining society; but answer for them he cannot.” “None but cruel tyrants,” he went on, “will prevent their wives, children or servants, either directly or indirectly, from worshipping God according to the dictates of their consciences, and joining the society they choose.” Joshua put a choice to Israel, “choose to yourselves this day whom ye will serve,” and then answered for his own house without putting it to them: “but I and my house will serve the Lord, for he is holy” (Josh. 24:15). Leland would have had him ask the house first.

Liberalism finished what Leland began. Locke made a parent’s rule “but a temporary one,” and Obergefell made marriage itself a “personal choice … inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.” A family that exists by the choice of its members is a voluntary society, and the Baptist church has been one from the start. When the culture tells a Baptist that marriage is whatever the parties consent to, it is telling him about the family what his own doctrine told him about the church, that no one belongs to it by birth.

None of this says Baptists caused Casey or Obergefell. Many hands made them. It says Baptists cannot answer them from their own first principle, because that principle is the one the Court used.

07

Six objections

“Baptists held these views before Locke, so they did not get them from liberalism.” True, and the argument depends on it. We have not claimed the Baptists borrowed their principle. We have claimed it is the same principle, held first in the church. Priority settles who said it first. It does not settle whether it is true, and a principle does not become biblical because a Baptist stated it before a philosopher did.

“The Amish baptize adults, and no one calls them liberal.” The Anabaptists kept believer’s baptism and avoided individualism by leaving the world to itself. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527 forbade Christians to serve as magistrates, and the Anabaptist communities that survive hold together by strict discipline and separation from public life. Baptists rejected that path. Their confession holds that “it is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate” (Second London Confession 24.2), and Baptists have held every office in America, the presidency included. They carried believer’s baptism into public life without the Anabaptist wall around it, and nothing stopped the premise from spreading.

“Whose church would you establish? Under the order you want, Baptists would be jailed again.” This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. It assumes a third option, a nation with no established faith, and there is no such nation. The question is never whether, only which. America is the test case, because it was built to have none. Massachusetts, the last state with an established church, ended it in 1833, and the country did not end up neutral. It ended up with a creed in place of a church, the Danbury creed that religion is “a matter between God and individuals,” and its courts enforce it. They struck a prayer from New York’s schools that named no church, no creed, and no Savior, only “Almighty God.” In a 1984 dissent, Justice William Brennan explained what the creed still permits. The national motto and the references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance survive, he wrote, as “ceremonial deism,” “protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.” A justice of the Supreme Court gave the national religion its name, and its one article is that God may be named in public so long as the name means nothing. A state that names no god at all still teaches its people what is ultimately true, as the Soviet Union did when it made atheism its official doctrine. A Baptist who fears an establishment already lives under one.

As for the jail, our principle requires a plain answer. Under a Christian magistrate, a man who publicly taught that the ruler has no charge from God concerning God would be teaching against the faith, and the magistrate would be within his office to restrain him. That is what James did with Helwys. We will not say Helwys was wronged, because the only standard by which he was wronged is the one this paper rejects. James judged that Helwys’s teaching was dangerous, and this paper has argued that he was right about the teaching. A king answers to God for such judgments, and when he punishes the truth he sins, as Nebuchadnezzar did when he threw three faithful men into the furnace (Dan. 3). Which communion confesses Christ rightly is a question Christians have to answer. Refusing to answer it is how the liberal creed got the office.

“The apostles had no Christian magistrate and asked for none.” They had Nero. Paul still taught the church to pray “for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:1–2), and the Psalms had promised a day when “all kings shall worship him; all the Gentiles shall serve him” (Ps. 71:11 [72:11]). The apostolic church’s position under a pagan emperor was its circumstance, not its constitution. The New Testament’s silence about a Christian magistrate neither commands one nor forbids one, and the texts that do speak to kings, from the second Psalm to Isaiah’s nursing-fathers, tell them to serve the Lord.

“Religious liberty protects the church now, when the state is hostile. Give it up and you hand the state a weapon.” The objection is about what is useful rather than what is true, but it can be answered on its own terms. The principle that shelters a church today is the one that took the Regents’ prayer out of the schools and wrote the mystery passage in Casey. A principle that protects truth and error alike protects the church only so long as the church is judged harmless, and the harm principle hands that judgment to whoever holds power. The state already has the weapon. The only question is whose hand holds it, which is the third objection again.

“Every American church is shaped by liberalism, not only the Baptists.” True. American Presbyterians rewrote the Westminster Confession’s chapter on the civil magistrate in 1788 to say much of what the Baptists had said, and every American church breathes the same air. Baptists are addressed here because they are the purest case. For other churches these principles arrived later, laid over confessions that once taught otherwise. For Baptists they are the distinctives themselves. A Presbyterian who wants the older doctrine can find it in the original text of his own confession. A Baptist who wants it has to argue against the founder of his tradition, the confession of his fathers, and the religious-liberty article of his own statement of faith.

08

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It is not a judgment on the faith of Baptists. Their zeal for the gospel, their missions, and their courage under persecution put much of Christendom to shame, and nothing here questions the salvation of anyone who trusts Christ in a Baptist church.

It is not a charge of theological liberalism. Baptist orthodoxy on the Trinity, the person and work of Christ, and the authority of Scripture is not in question.

It does not ask any ruler to compel belief. Tertullian and Aquinas are right that faith cannot be forced. Restraining public teaching against the faith is a different act, and section 05 explains the difference.

It does not claim that Baptists caused the decisions in section 06. It claims that Baptists cannot answer those decisions from their own distinctives.

It stands or falls on one premise. God places men under authority in the things of God through their fathers, their shepherds, and their rulers, and each of them answers to him for those in his charge. If Scripture teaches instead that no man answers for another before God, then Helwys and Leland were right and the argument fails. Hebrews 13:17 and 1 Kingdoms 3:13 are where to test it.

09

The plain truth

We have tried to be fair to Baptists because they deserve it. Fairness also requires saying the rest plainly.

The Baptist distinctives are not convictions that happen to sit comfortably beside liberalism. They are liberalism’s first principle, applied first to the church. A man answers to God alone. A church exists by the consent of its members. A father cannot bring his child into the covenant. A ruler has no charge from God concerning God. Grant those four, and the rest of the liberal order follows by the same logic. If no one is born a member of any church, no one is born under any obligation he did not choose. If the state may not know which God is true, it cannot know what marriage is, who counts as a neighbor, or what a man is for, and it settles those questions the only way a neutral state can, by asking what the people want.

Baptists have fought those conclusions for decades with great courage while defending the premise with great pride. That fight cannot be won from where they stand. Every Baptist protest against Casey and Obergefell asks the state to bind consciences that no longer believe in God, which is the one thing Baptist principle says the state may never do, and the courts answer with the Danbury letter.

Mullins pictured the Baptist axioms as a stalactite descending from heaven and American political society as a stalagmite rising from the earth, and he wrote that when the two met, “the kingdom of God will have come among men.” They have met. What they formed is the order we live under now, and no one mistakes it for the kingdom of God.

Liberty of conscience is not the Christian inheritance Baptists believe it to be. It is the first article of the liberal creed, and Baptists carried it into the American order with their own hands. The men who suffered for it were brave, and they were wrong. The way back does not run through a better Baptist argument for liberty. It runs through the truth Baptist theology set aside: that God gives men fathers, shepherds, and rulers, that each of them must give account for the souls in his charge, and that Christ is Lord not only of the conscience but of the kings of the earth.

Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice in him with trembling.

PSALM 2:10–11 · SEPTUAGINT

SOURCES

Texts and editions

SCRIPTURE

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844), for the Old Testament.

BAPTIST SOURCES

Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612), with his inscription to James I in the Bodleian Library copy.

Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (London, 1644).

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677, adopted 1689), chs. 24, 29.

Memorial of the Baptist churches met at Medfield to the Continental Congress (September 1774), from Isaac Backus’s history, in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States (1950), 1:307–9.

John Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (New London, 1791), and “The Rights and Bonds of Conscience,” in The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene (New York, 1845), 122–23, 179–84.

Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson (October 1801), Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908), 54, 73–74, 134, 254, 272–74.

The Baptist Faith and Message (1925, revised 1963 and 2000), arts. VI, XVII.

Southern Baptist Convention, “Resolution on the Priesthood of the Believer” (San Antonio, 1988).

OTHER PRIMARY

Tertullian, To Scapula (c. 212), ch. 2, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q. 10 a. 8, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920).

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), ch. 23.

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (written 1630–1650), bk. 1, ch. 1. The Mayflower Compact (1620).

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), trans. William Popple, and Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§55, 95.

James Madison to William Bradford, 24 January 1774.

Declaration of Independence (1776). James Madison, The Federalist No. 49 (1788).

Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1 January 1802, final letter as sent, Library of Congress.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. 1.

Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom” (1854–55).

COURTS AND GOVERNMENT

Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878).

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984), Brennan, J., dissenting.

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

Congressional Research Service, The School Prayer Controversy: Pro-Con Arguments, Issue Brief IB84081 (updated 26 August 1985).

Published by Beyond Left and Right. The New Testament is quoted from the King James Version. The Old Testament is quoted from Brenton’s Septuagint, under Septuagint book names and numbering, with the English reference in brackets where the numbers differ. Helwys, Bradford, and the Danbury Baptists are quoted in modernized spelling, Williams follows the modernized text in Stokes, and Madison and Jefferson are quoted as written. Kierkegaard is paraphrased. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com

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