A year ago, my blog posting was about Roger Williams, who arrived in Boston Harbor on
Feb. 5, 1631. As you know, Williams became the great champion of religious
liberty in the Colonies and influential in freedom of religion eventually being
included in the U.S. Constitution.
But 113 years after Williams’s arrival in the “new world,”
there still wasn’t religious freedom in the Colonies, at least not in Virginia.
On Feb. 4, 1774, 240 years ago today, David Tinsley was arrested and charged
with “having assembled and preached to the people at sundry times and places”
as a Baptist preacher.
Tinsley ended up serving four and a half months in the
Chesterfield County jail. During that time, though, he “preached to the
assembled crowds through the grates of the prison” (This Day in Baptist History).
Just last year I learned the particulars about the preachers
jailed in the 1770s because they were publicly preaching as Baptists. And I was
especially interested in Tinsley, who was one of several so jailed.
My wife, June, was a Tinsley. So we began to do some
research and found that David’s grandfather was Thomas S. Tinsley, the first
Tinsley to be born in the U.S. (He was born in 1640, two years after his
parents had come to Virginia from England.)
And Thomas S. Tinsley is June’s 7th great
grandfather, so David was her first cousin, seven times removed.
Not being able to assemble a crowd and preach to them seems,
certainly, to be an infringement on religious liberty. Accordingly, some of the
most outspoken advocates of guaranteeing religious liberty were Baptists in
Virginia, such as John Leland, a Baptist preacher who worked with (or worked
on) James Madison in getting the Bill of Rights added to the U.S. Constitution.
But now, in 2013-14, there are Baptists claiming that they,
and other Christians, are suffering from an infringement of their “freedom of
religion.”
Just last week the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious
Liberty Commission (ERLC) told the U.S. Supreme Court, as part of a friend-of-the-court brief, that the Obama administration’s abortion/contraception
mandate (their words) violates a federal law protecting the religious freedom
of for-profit corporations and their owners.
Russell Moore, president of the ERLC, in a Jan. 28 podcast said, “Our Baptist forefather John Leland wasn’t content to
trust politicians with tyranny over the conscience. We are his sons and
daughters, and we will carry the banner of soul freedom to the Supreme Court
and beyond.”
What a difference! Leland was struggling for the freedom of
Baptists in Virginia to preach without being arrested and jailed. But now
Baptists like Moore are struggling for the right of employers not to provide
insurance to their employees who might use that insurance in ways that they (the
employers) do not approve for religious reasons.
Rather than religious freedom for all, it sounds as if these
employers (such as Hobby Lobby’s CEO, who is an evangelical Christian but seems
not to be a Baptist) are seeking to have tyranny over the conscience of other
people. Since they do not believe in the morning after pill, they do not want
to provide insurance that will allow their employees to use such measures, even
if they can do so in good conscience.
David Tinsley suffered in jail because of preaching the
Gospel openly. Hobby Lobby’s CEO and other conservative Christians are now
“suffering” because of being required to provide insurance for their employees.
Somehow
the “infringement” of the latter’s religious freedom just doesn’t seem quite as
great a problem to me.
