Most scholars of American history know that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the fight to disestablish the Episcopal Church in Virginia, that Madison subsequently helped push through what became the federal Bill of Rights in the first congress, and that various state religious establishments did not end until 1833 when Massachusetts finally ended its support for the Congregational Church in that state.
Scholars likely also have a passing familiarity with Isaac Backus and John Leland, two Baptist preachers who were leaders in the movement to disestablish religion.
Jacob Hicks, a professor of religion at Grand Canyon University, adds considerable context to the disestablishment effort in this book that covers the period of 1740 to 1833 and is part of a series on America’s Baptists published by the University of Tennessee Press and edited by Keith Harper at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Although the book is a revision of a dissertation that Hicks wrote at Florida State University, it almost completely avoids the negative elements that sometimes characterize this genre.
Chapters respectively deal with how Baptist leaders acquired leadership skills in this period, how they moved from “tactics” to “strategy” in becoming a political movement, how they engaged in “political ecumenism” during the first party era, and how they worked with other evangelicals to achieve common goals through newly created institutions.
Book recounts how Baptist preachers acquired political skills
The book begins by recounting the well-known story of the mammoth wheel of cheese that Baptist preacher John Leland brought from Cheshire, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., on January 1, 1802, where he gave a speech to Congress lauding Thomas Jefferson as one “greater than Solomon.”
Leland, whose self-proclaimed “contest with the powers of darkness” serves as the title of the book, is, however, but one of many characters that this book describes. Others include Isaac Backus, Samuel Stillman, Noah Alder, Jonathan Going, and Luther Rice.
As the book’s subtitle indicates, the work chiefly focuses on New England, particularly Massachusetts and Connecticut, with Leland being among the figures, largely lacking formal education, who honed skills from itinerate preaching and brought lessons from the fight for religious liberty in Virginia back to this region. New England is known as the home of Puritans who immigrated from England and Holland, and where, after years of persecution that led in part to Roger Williams’ founding of Rhode Island, Baptists and others were tolerated albeit not accorded equal liberty.
Prizing congregational control as much as the Congregationalists, who formed the New England elite, Baptists nonetheless formed associations like the Warren Association for mutual fellowship. It, in turn, created a Grievance Committee, which mirrored organizations that had led to the American Revolution and proved to be a valuable training ground for future political activities.
Working with others, Baptists pleaded for freedom of conscience
When Separatists, concerned that mainline Congregationalists were not exercising due discipline, split from Calvinist Congregationalists, some took the further step of rejecting child baptism and joined Baptists. Other Separatists began to make common cause with the Baptists against New England religious establishments. In doing so, the Baptists had to downplay Calvinist/Arminian and other differences and to work on common causes without establishing the kind of ecclesiastical hierarchies that they thought had deformed Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.
As their tactics evolved into more complex strategies, Baptists were aided by the increasing number of newspapers that developed in the wake of the French and Indian Wars. They also printed numerous pamphlets pleading for freedom of conscience. Although they faced a setback when the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 permitted the re-entrenchment of that state’s establishment, they got some partial relief with the Religious Freedom Act of 1811, and with complete disestablishment.
Political ecumenism
John Leland had worked especially closely with James Madison in fighting first for religious disestablishment in Virginia and then for the adoption of the Bill of Rights with explicit provisions against such a national establishment and for free exercise that were incorporated in the First Amendment. Leland used his pastoral influence to help secure Madison’s election to the Virginia constitutional ratifying convention and to the First Congress.
When Leland moved back to Massachusetts, he continued to ally Baptists and other Separatists with Jeffersonian Republicanism, just as evangelical geographer Jedidiah Morse and Yale President Timothy Dwight continued to ally themselves with Federalists who feared Jefferson and favored state support of religion as a way of strengthening civic virtue. Like Jefferson, Leland believed that free exercise should apply not only to Protestants and Roman Catholics, but also to Jews, Muslims and Deists.
Reconciliation through institutionalism
The ultimate victory over establishmentarians in Massachusetts was partly due to reactions to two state supreme court’s decisions. They were Barnes v. First Parish in Falmouth (1810), which had denied state support to an unincorporated Universalist church, and Baker v. Fales (1820), which decided a property dispute in Dedham in favor of the congregation that stayed with an appointed Unitarian pastor rather than the Trinitarian Separatists who had split.
Over time, Baptists were increasingly regarded as part of what Hicks calls “part of a mainstream, ‘evangelical united front,’” and Trinitarian Congregationalist were becoming dissenters (p. 113). They increasingly joined forces on frontier and foreign mission endeavors, moral reform (Sabbath day laws, abolitionism, dueling, and the like), education and other endeavors that eventually resulted in state disestablishment of tax support for churches, albeit support for laws enforcing moral behaviors. Ironically, John Leland, who believed strongly both in congregational government and in a strict separation of church and state, looked askance at such ecumenical attempts, which he feared would undercut Baptist autonomy.
Hicks’ belief, expressed in a concluding chapter, that preachers exercised considerable influence over their congregations provides some context to modern concerns about evangelical and charismatic support for MAGA Republicanism and Christian nationalism.
The book’s appendix on state exclusions of clergymen from public offices in the revolutionary era and early republic, which have been subsequently ruled unconstitutional in McDaniel v. Paty (1978), both draws upon and supplements an essay on the subject in this First Amendment Encyclopedia.
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University and one of the original editors of The First Amendment Encyclopedia.