Loving Ideological Enemies, Dead or Alive

When the fledgling Baptist movement first emerged in the seventeenth century, early General and Particular Baptists had to fend off accusations that they were “anabaptists.” Their opponents saw several doctrinal similarities—most notably their commitment to regenerate church membership and believers’ baptism—and mistakenly assumed that they were social anarchists like the radical anabaptists who led the Munster rebellion in Germany in 1534. Even after they clearly established their submission to government through their confessions, writings, and practice, Baptists’ opponents continued to use the anabaptist label pejoratively to stoke fears of sedition and violence. It became an easy way to dismiss them without due consideration of their arguments and often resulted in their persecution.

Of course, intentional misrepresentation of one’s opponents constitutes a rhetorical strategy that transcends denominational boundaries. Baptists too have employed the strategy to prevail over ideological rivals. Every ecclesial tradition consists of flawed human beings who can’t always be trusted to argue in good faith. But not every caricature derives from ill intention. Sometimes we’re simply lazy. We don’t want to do the hard work required for truly understanding what other people believe and why. It’s easier to present a caricature and dismiss.

I’ve come to expect certain misrepresentations because I’ve encountered them so often. I’m no longer surprised, for example, when I read a non-Calvinist describe Calvinists as fatalists who don’t believe they need to evangelize since God has predestined his elect already. It’s a lazy interpretation that proves the writer hasn’t read the people he’s describing, but it’s also so common that there’s a chance he picked it up in secondary literature. Similarly, I regularly encounter progressive historians pinning the “Christian Nationalist” label on any conservative who believes Christianity ought to influence the public square. If you don’t want to honestly engage your opponents, dismissively labeling them is a tantalizing alternative. The same thing happens when those on the right label any overture toward justice and compassion “woke.”

Similarly, I often brace myself for disappointment when I get to the Baptist chapter of a larger project written by a non-Baptist. For example, in his book Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War, Miles Smith correctly argues that proponents of disestablishment in the early American Republic never intended to remove Christianity’s influence from government. Then he writes, “The push for a more complete separation came from Jeffersonian Deists and Baptists.”^[1] Smith’s lone example of such a Baptist “push” is John Leland. Yet, in his more careful analysis, Philip Hamburger notes that Leland opposed what he called “unnatural connection” between church and state and never contended for a complete separation of influence in his writings. Further, Leland’s opposition to government policies like religious proclamations and Sabbath laws rested on his belief in the limited authority of civil government, not on any assumption of separation.^[2] If Leland didn’t want Christianity to influence government, why did he accept Jefferson’s invitation to preach before Congress?

Of course, if Smith would have looked beyond Leland, he would have discovered scores of Baptists committed to influencing government while still arguing for institutional separation. In David Barrow (1753–1819), he would have even found someone just as committed to Jeffersonianism as Leland. Barrow certainly believed Christianity ought to influence government, for he devoted his life to the cause of antislavery on explicitly Christian grounds even after his Baptist association ousted him because he was meddling with politics.

A little later, Smith writes this puzzling sentence, “Baptists needed disestablishment to mean more than merely disestablishing the Anglican Church. They needed to defang the socio-religious order that regarded their emotionally-charged worship as unusual at best and heretical at worst.”^[3] According to Smith, Baptists sought disestablishment so that their charismatic worship style would be more acceptable in society. This novel interpretation ignores the mountains of theological arguments Baptists had been making for disestablishment in both England and America for 150 years prior.

It ignores the fact that the Separate Baptists who participated in revivals along the James River in 1785 were but one manifestation of a much larger Baptist movement that included the orderly English Particular Baptists, American Regular Baptists, and General Baptists. It ignores the fact that “emotionally-charged worship” was a feature of the Great Awakening revivals and crossed denominational boundaries. It ignores the fact that populist revivalism was prominent among Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, too. In fact, Baptists were notably missing from the Presbyterian- and Methodist-led Cane Ridge revival (1801) in Kentucky, a chaotic scene that helped launch what historians today refer to as the Second Great Awakening.

Did some Baptists pursue disestablishment in pursuit of social acceptance for their “emotionally-charged worship”? Possibly. Was this motive a primary driver of the Baptist pursuit of disestablishment? Hardly. Perhaps these Baptists really believed that the new covenant in Christ was incompatible with a state-sponsored church. Perhaps theological conviction weighed heavier than social acceptance.

Smith’s book is merely one example of presenting caricature as historical fact—of leveling historical complexity in service to a thesis. And, admittedly, as a Baptist, I’m particularly sensitive to my tradition being misrepresented. But I’m guilty of the same. The responsibility to fairly represent our subject should be pursued with extra diligence when our subject is a tradition other than our own. Our desire to interpret fairly should be even greater when our subjects are dead and can no longer speak in their own defense.

My doctoral supervisor, John Wilsey recommended an essay to me early in my studies, and I return to it often to remind myself of the task before me as a historian. I need this reminder because the temptation to create caricatures and misrepresent never goes away. Here’s the key section:

Limited knowledge of the dead is compounded by a second problem, that of the stunning imbalance of power between historian and subject. I can use the people I encounter in the archives without their consent for my own purposes, for my own pleasures, for my own professional gain. The dead can languish without defense in my books; I can even silence them with their own words. My purposes may be honest. But what if they are not? And what if my honest purposes only end by disfiguring my subjects? How can they speak truthfully in my history? How can I be a neighbor to the dead in my books? In history, the call to love one’s neighbor is extended to the dead. For the Christian, knowledge about the past, as any knowledge, should serve the ends of love.^[4]

^[1] Miles Smith, Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War (n.p.: Davenant Press, 2024), 50.

^[2] Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 167.

^[3] Smith, Religion and Republic, 51–52.

^[4] Beth Barton Schweiger, “Seeing Things: Knowledge and Love in History,” in Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, ed. John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 61–62.