"This Eminent Peacemaker"

On February 2, 1773, Isaac Backus recorded in his diary, “Met now with some writings of old Mr. Roger Williams which I was very glad of.”^[1] By this time, Backus was already pressing the case for full religious liberty for the Baptists in New England. The writings of Roger Williams were not the catalyst for Backus becoming a champion for religious liberty. Williams served as a means of refinement for Backus as he articulated his vision for religious liberty. William McLoughlin noted that “Backus was the first person since Williams’s death to use his work to defend the principle of separation of church and state.”^[2] Once Backus discovered the treasure trove of Williams, he found a theological ally to bolster his arguments for disestablishment.

Ironically, McLoughlin penned elsewhere that Backus drew little from Williams.^[3] McLoughlin’s works, while profitable in their historical research, often contain contradictory statements of interpretation depending on the publication. Nevertheless, his analysis of Backus often becomes the de facto view. His statement on Backus not drawing much from Williams was repeated in recent articles to push the idea of Backus being more of an establishmentarian in his political theology.^[4] Now, it is true that it is tricky to prove that one person influenced another person when it comes to historical research. Thomas J. Nettles argued that “Backus’s primary mentor in theological methods leading religious liberty was Roger Williams.”^[5] Backus’s publications proved that the pastor from Middleborough reached out and laid hold of the mantle of the man from Providence.

Backus’s sense of commonality and defense of Williams stood out in his A History of New England Baptists. Backus recounted over several pages the interactions between Williams and John Cotton.^[6] Cotton, an early Congregationalist Puritan leader in Massachusetts, advocated for a type of Christian commonwealth where the magistrate possessed civil and coercive power in matters of religion. If Backus was a type of semi-establishment Baptist, one would expect to find sympathy in his writings with Cotton on these matters. Yet, the record shows Backus wholly in support of Williams. Backus provided quotations from Cotton’s The Bloody Tenet washed, and made white in the Blood of the Lamb and Williams’ response, The Bloody Tenet yet more bloody, by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavor to wash it white. Backus pointed out that Cotton believed that the magistrate possessed the right to enforce both tables of the law. Williams, based on Romans 13:1–7, held that only the second table of the law was enforceable by the magistrate. Backus presented a lengthy quotation from Williams defending this second table view.^[7] Williams also exposed how Cotton took charges given to Christ’s ministers of the gospel and applied them to the civil magistrate. Cotton denied that charge, but Backus provided evidence that supported Williams’s criticism of Cotton. Backus summarized this section with these words: “This is a clear proof that great men cannot go straight in a crooked path.”^[8] Backus was not siding with Cotton’s view that the magistrate possessed the authority to use coercive power in matters of religion.

When Backus concluded the section on Cotton and Williams, he wrote, “I have laid before the reader some of the most material points of that controversy in their own words, that he may see what those principles were which New England writers have often reproached, under the name of rigid separation and anabaptism; and also how the ruling party with all their boast of orthodoxy, could confound Jewish types with Christ’s institutions, in order to keep up paedobaptism, and the use of secular force in religious affairs; and could separate from the common rights of humanity, good Christians, and some of their own best friends, only for testifying against such confusion.”^[9] In Williams, Backus found someone a century earlier that exposed the paedobaptists for blurring type and antitype, law and gospel, and jumbling the covenants together. When the Congregationalists passed laws against Baptists in Massachusetts in 1644, Backus explained that it was to oppress those who “refused to countenance infant baptism, and the use of secular force in religious affairs; which the Baptists have ever done from that day to this.”^[10] Backus saw the cause he was fighting for linked to those earlier Baptists including Williams from the middle of the seventeenth century.

This defense of Williams against Cotton showed a pattern in Backus’s writings of seeing Williams as a forerunner to the cause of New England Baptists in the 1770s and 1780s. He praised the writings of Williams on religious liberty as being the earliest of its kind and preceding the letters of John Locke by forty years.^[11] The utilization of Williams appears in Backus’s writings wherein he argued for full religious liberty for the Baptists. As noted earlier, Backus’s diary in February 1773 recorded his first interactions with Williams. In his 1773 work, An Appeal to the Public, Backus included several lengthy quotes from Williams’s disputation with Cotton. After quoting Williams, Backus remarked, “How weighty are these arguments against confounding church and state together? Yet this author’s appearing against such confusion was the chief cause for which he was banished out of the Massachusetts colony.”^[12] In his 1778 work, Government and Liberty Described, he launched into a defense and praise of Williams for rejecting laws that provided the magistrate with power to meddle in religion and worship. Backus went on to extol Williams as the one who “founded the first civil government that ever established equal religious liberty since the rise of Antichrist. And soon after gathered the first Baptist church in America…Thus he overcame evil with good, while the advocates for the use of secular force in religion have requited him and his friends evil for good since.”^[13] For Backus, Williams represented a kindred spirit from the past whose writings could be used to make a case for religious liberty in his present moment.

Two further examples from Williams’ writings bolster the like-mindedness that Backus found in Williams. First, Backus included Williams’ account of the persecution of John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes to Cotton. In this appendix to Cotton, Williams charged the Congregationalist leaders, including Cotton, as lovers of liberty but only for themselves. The Congregationalists were persecuted in England, came to New England, and then began to persecute others who differed from them. Backus judged that New England would have been a better place if the leaders of Massachusetts listened to Williams. Instead, Backus wrote that “it appeared that the New England Puritans were no better friends to liberty of conscience than their adversaries, and that the question between them was not, whether one party of Christians should have power to oppress another, but who should have that power?”^[14] Second, Backus included Williams’ letter in response that he held to an “indefinite liberty of conscience.” Williams believed that every society was to pursue the good, the virtuous, and the right. He did not believe in a libertarian, anarchist society. It was this letter that Williams likened his views to a ship where “Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks” were together. Each man’s rights and liberty were to be respected but there was a common good that was to be the overriding principle. Backus remarked that “this clear description of the difference between civil and ecclesiastical affairs, and of the difference betwixt good government on the one hand, and tyranny or licentiousness on the other…is more than a sufficient balance to all the slanders that various parties have cast upon this ancient witness and advocate for the rights and liberties of men.”^[15] Backus linked the struggle of his day to the cause that Williams championed.

For those who seek to drive a wedge between Backus and Williams, the historical record demonstrates that Backus found an ally in Williams. Both men rightly pointed out the way that the misreading of the biblical covenants was the source of the trouble with the paedobaptist vision of church and state. Backus was fighting for religious liberty on behalf of the Baptists before he read a word from Williams. Yet, once he became acquainted with the writings of this old saint, Backus saw a brother in arms from the past. When Backus recounted the death of Williams, he described him as an “eminent peacemaker” and as “the first Baptist minister in New England.”^[16] Williams was slandered and mocked in his day with epithets such as “weathercock” and “windmill.” What did Backus think of that? His full defense of Williams is worth sharing:

Now let the curious find out if they can, first, how men of university learning, or of divine inspiration, came to write great volumes against a windmill and a weathercock? secondly, how such a strange creature came to be an overmatch for them all, and to carry his point against the arts of priestcraft, the intrigues of court, the flights of enthusiasm and the power of factions, so as after he had pulled down ruin upon himself and his friends, yet to be able, in the midst of heathen savages, to erect the best form of civil government that the world had seen in sixteen hundred years? thirdly, how he and his ruined friends came to lie under those reproaches for a hundred years, and yet that their plan should then be adopted by thirteen colonies, to whom these despised people could afford senators of principal note, as well as commanders by sea and land? The excellency of this scene above those which many are bewitched with, consists in its being founded upon facts and not fictions; being not the creature of distempered brains, but of an unerring Providence.^[17]

As an heir to Williams, such a tribute would be fitting for Backus. Both men, often scorned and mocked by their contemporaries, spoke and wrote eloquently for the biblical truth that only Christ can compel a man to enter the kingdom of God. The mantle of Williams fell upon a choice servant in Backus. May their legacy be further promoted among Baptists in the twenty-first century.

^[1] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William G. McLoughlin, vol. 2, 1765–1785 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979), 868.

^[2]William G. McLoughlin, editorial comment in Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William G. McLoughlin, vol. 2, 1765–1785 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979), 868.

^[3] William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 257.

^[4] See https://americanreformer.org/2026/03/fs-in-the-chat/ and https://theparticularbaptist.net/2024/08/30/the-particular-baptists-were-against-secular-liberty-a-vindication/. The reader can determine if these essays represent faithful historical methodology and interpretation.

^[5] Thomas J. Nettles, By His Grace and for His Glory: A Historical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Doctrines of Grace in Baptist Life, rev. and expanded 20th anniversary ed. (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2006), 418.

^[6] Isaac Backus, A History of New England, with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians Called Baptists, 2nd ed., with notes by David Weston, 2 vols. (1871; repr., Paris, AR: Baptist Standard Bearer, 2001), 1:125–145.

^[7] Backus, History of New England, 1:140.

^[8] Backus, History of New England, 1:143.

^[9] Backus, History of New England, 1:145.

^[10] Backus, History of New England, 1:127.

^[11] Backus, History of New England, 1:216.

^[12] Isaac Backus, “An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty,” in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 322.

^[13] Isaac Backus, “Government and Liberty Described; and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed,” in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 355–356.

^[14] Backus, History of New England, 1:212.

^[15] Backus, History of New England, 1:237–238.

^[16] Backus, History of New England, 1:414.

^[17] Backus, History of New England, 1:408–409.