The New England
Puritan Isaac Backus was born in
1724 and died 208 years ago today, on November 20, 1806. As an outstanding
advocate of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, he is
well worth remembering, and honoring, on this anniversary of his death.
Backus was the
most influential Baptist in British North America after Roger Williams
(1603-83), founder of the first Baptist church in the “new world” in 1638.
He became a
Christian as a teenager in 1741. Five years later he became a preacher and at
the age of 24 was ordained as a Congregationalist minister. In 1748, however,
he was baptized by immersion and became a Baptist.
In 1756, Backus
started a Baptist church in Middleborough, Mass., where he served as pastor
until his death fifty years later.
Backus joined
with others in 1764 to found the first Baptist institution of higher learning
in the Colonies, the school now known as Brown University. It was the third
college in New England and the first Ivy League school to accept students from
all religious affiliations.
As a Baptist
pastor, Backus became involved in the lengthy battle for separation of church
and state in Massachusetts, opposing the “ecclesiastical tax” that had been
imposed upon all citizens of that state to support the Congregational churches.
Even those who
opposed the beliefs of those churches were required to pay the tax, and those
who refused to do so had their personal property seized. Many people were even imprisoned
because of failure to pay the tax, including several members of Backus’s own
family.
Backus’s strong
advocacy for the freedom of religion is best articulated in his published
sermon of 1773, “An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the
Oppressions of the Present Day.”
Religious
liberty is always a problem for minority groups—such as the Baptists in New
England during Backus’s lifetime and religious groups in the U.S. now, such as American
Muslims.
Thus, being an
advocate of religious liberty today means supporting the freedom of Muslims and
all other minority groups. That liberty includes freedom from the
heavy-handedness of the religious majority.
Those in the
majority usually don’t easily give up their position of privilege.
Massachusetts didn’t amend the state constitution to give religious freedom to
all people until 1833, some 27 years after Backus’s death.
At present,
some religious conservatives, or traditionalists like those in 18th
century Massachusetts, generally don’t like social change when that means
giving up their privileged position. Thus, we hear clamor for upholding the
religious convictions of the nation’s founders.
Without
question, the Massachusetts Bay Colony formed in 1630 was based on Puritan
religious convictions. In a sermon even before landing, John Winthrop, the
colonists’ spiritual leader, proclaimed a vision of a Christian society that
was to be an exceptional “city on the hill.”
Such a society,
however, could not tolerate even the dissident Puritan minister Roger Williams,
who was banished in 1636. Nor could it tolerate the outstanding, but unusual,
Puritan religious leader Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from Boston in
1638.
But it was the
freedom of religion and separation of church and state established in Rhode
Island by Williams and then bravely backed by Backus over 135 years later that
became a part of the U.S. Bill of Rights ratified in 1791.
I am grateful
for Baptists like Backus and their emphasis on religious liberty for all.
Let freedom
ring for all religious groups in the U.S. today!
Some of the material in the
above article is similar to that found on pp. 167-8 of my book “Fed Up with
Fundamentalism” (2007).
Remembering
Stanley Grenz
In doing research for the above
article I used Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz’s “Isaac Backus—Puritan and
Baptist: His Place in History, His Thought, and Their Implications for Modern
Baptist Theology” (1983). This work was originally Grenz’s doctoral
dissertation that was written under the supervision of Wolfhart Pannenberg and submitted
in 1978 to the University of Munich.
So this article was also written
in memory of Grenz (b. 1950) as well as Backus.
In April 2004, mostly through my
efforts, the Department of Theology of Seinan Gakuin University hosted Dr.
Grenz for special lectures. I found him to be “a prince of a fellow,” and I told
him that in a year or two I would like to visit him in Vancouver, Canada, where
he lived and taught at Regent College.
It was a shock and a great grief
when I learned that Grenz had suddenly passed away in March 2005. He was a fine
man and a good scholar; his passing was a great loss to Baptists and the
theological world.
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