History matters. It should matter more to Christians, because our faith proclamation is a historical one.
As believers, we confess Jesus Christ was born, lived, suffered and died. We believe God raised this same historical Jesus from the dead, and Christ will return to judge the living and the dead.
As historian Carter Lindberg has noted, “Christian identity is rooted in history not in nature, philosophy or ethics.”
We are a people rooted in history, because we believe Christ entered history in the flesh. Or as the Message translation says: “The Word became Flesh and moved into the neighborhood.” (John 1:14)
Sometimes Christians find it easier to skip from the first century to the 21st as if nothing important has happened to the church since then. When we ignore history, we find ourselves swimming around in an ocean of ideas with no moorings, no landmarks, no direction.
History functions for the community of faith like memory for an individual. Some of us know well the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease. We understand the way memory connects us to one another and to ourselves. Memory anchors us in time. It gives a person meaning and identity.
When a community of faith remains rooted in history, the result is much the same. History tethers us to the past and allows us to weather the storms that threaten us today.
Our collective Baptist memory warns us of the dangers of a state religion. Baptists have suffered at the hands of Christian rulers. Does your church remain anchored to the memory of our Baptist experience in Colonial America?
Baptist outlaws
A glassmaker named Obadiah Holmes settled in New England with his wife Catherine sometime in the year 1638. The family joined the local Puritan church. Over the next decade, Holmes wrestled with his faith, and tensions developed within his local congregation.
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When a group of Baptists settled in the area, Holmes found kinship with them. Their teaching about a “new baptism” and salvation by grace brought him peace.
In his memoir, Holmes noted that after many years in “death and darkness,” this good news of salvation brought “light in my soul.”
Holmes and eight others formed a small Baptist congregation. They stepped away from the Puritan church and left the New England way. Their rebellion put them in conflict with the state, because it was illegal to separate from the official government-approved church. This act of church planting made Holmes and his friends outlaws.
The new Baptists were brought before the Plymouth court twice, charged with being “absent from the Lord’s house,” sentenced and ordered to pay heavy fines.
Holmes ultimately decided to “sell house and lands and to move family and possessions to a colony where courts did not trespass over the boundary that marked a man’s private faith” (Edwin Gaustad, Baptist Piety, 20).
He moved to Newport, R.I.—far away from the oppressive control of the Christian rulers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Unfortunately, Rhode Island “was not far enough” (Gaustad, 21).
Trouble follows
John Clarke was the pastor of the Newport Baptist congregation. On Sunday, July 19, 1651, Clarke invited Holmes and John Crandall to visit an elderly blind church member named William Witter.
Clarke, Holmes and Crandall were visiting to share communion and fellowship with their homebound brother in Christ. Unfortunately, Witter lived inside the boundary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a small town called Lynn.
Other local people joined the worship service inside Witter’s home, where the “word was proclaimed, converts were baptized” and the “elements of the Lord’s Supper were served.”
Puritan authorities heard about the meeting, interrupted the gathering and arrested Crandall, Holmes and Clarke.
Since it was the Lord’s Day, the constables insisted the Baptists join them at the Puritan evening service. Clarke made it clear, if they were forced to attend a Puritan worship service, they would make their displeasure known by “word and gesture.”
The three men took off their hats, then put them back on inside the service as a rude signal they disapproved of the service. They were taken back into custody and transferred to Boston for trial.
The men were charged and found guilty of violating a 1645 law against Anabaptism. The Christian state in Massachusetts Bay only approved the baptism of the Puritan establishment.
Crandall paid his fine and was released. A church member paid Clarke’s fine, and he was set free from prison. Holmes refused on principle to pay a fine, because he felt that would be accepting the guilty verdict. It was a violation of his conscience.
Holmes was sentenced to a public whipping—30 lashes with a three-corded leather whip on his bare back. On the day of his punishment, Holmes begged for the right to speak in his own defense. The magistrate refused, demanded he be silent, then ordered the executioner to proceed.
As the whip cracked through the air and the lash landed on his back, Holmes began to pray. He reported he never had “had such a spiritual manifestation of God’s presence.”
When his hands finally were untied, he turned to the magistrate and said: “You have struck me as with roses” (Gaustad, 29).
Holmes’ knees gave out, and two men stepped forward to help him. The magistrate arrested those who showed compassion and jailed them as well.
Religious intolerance
Baptists have been telling the story of Obadiah Holmes since the day he was beaten more than 373 years ago.
The next year John Clarke published the story of Holmes’ suffering and circulated it around London in a work called Ill Newes from New England. Twenty pages of the essay provided a careful defense of liberty of conscience.
Clarke insisted the New England Puritans needed to repent for the way they treated dissenters. The Puritans’ “false zeal for God … led to what he called ‘soul murdering.’ He said that it is unbiblical, unChristlike, unnatural, and unspiritual to coerce conscience” (Walter Shurden, Turning Points in Baptist History, 27).
Baptists in Colonial America knew firsthand, just because a government called itself “Christian” did not mean it was good. Baptists became convinced their faith would be safest when the government did not “constrain or restrain” the conscience of its citizens.
Puritan ministers like John Cotton howled with outrage. Minister Thomas Cobbet ranted against the Baptists—insisting their brand of freedom would leave the “children of the wicked, seducers, traitors, … blasphemers, professed atheists, etc.” to go unpunished (Gaustad, Baptist Piety, 40).
Puritans accepted without question people should be forced to conform to government-approved religious beliefs. As Perry Miller explained in his classic essay, Puritans believed the government had the primary task of “suppressing heresy,” “getting rid of dissenters—of being, in short, deliberately, vigorously, and consistently intolerant” (“Errand into the Wilderness”). They ruthlessly enforced this vision of Christian nationalism.
The Baptists resisted. Baptists demanded freedom of conscience. Baptists fought for separation of church and state, because they were convinced persecuting people for their faith violated the very heart of the gospel. And the Baptists spoke from experience. It was Baptist blood that stained the ground beneath the Puritan’s whipping post.
For further reading
Gaustad, Edwin, ed. Baptist Piety: The Last Will and Testimony of Obadiah Holmes. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1994.
Lindberg, Carter. A Brief History of Christianity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Miller, Perry. “Errand Into the Wilderness,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan. 1953): 4-32.
Shurden, Walter B. “Baptist Freedom and the Turn Toward a Free Conscience: 1612/1652.” In Turning Points in Baptist History: A Festschrift in Honor of Harry Leon McBeth, edited by Michael Williams and Walter B. Shurden, 22-38. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008.
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Carol Crawford Holcomb is a professor of church history and Baptist studies in University of Mary Hardin-Baylor’s College of Christian Studies. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author and millions of Baptists.
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