A word from … Raffaele Volpe: Liberty of conscience and emancipation

Baptist and modernity

“Modernity,” like “Baptist,” is a very wide term. In an attempt to restrict them, I will define one term within the limiting framework of the other: modernity within the framework of the Baptist commitment to the liberty of conscience; and Baptist within the framework of the modern commitment to emancipation.

Liberty of conscience and emancipation, therefore, become an antidote to Cartesian atomistic rationalism and to postmodernism, as long as they stay together. I propose cosmopolitanism as a third concept that can incorporate both liberty of conscience and emancipation.

Ulrich Beck, in his book Cosmopolitan Vision, opens with these words: “What is Enlightenment? To have the courage to make use of one’s cosmopolitan vision and to acknowledge one’s multiple identities—to combine forms of life founded on language, skin color, nationality or religion with the awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.” ² Substituting in this quotation the word Baptist instead of Enlightenment does not change the result. Only a Baptist identity that has a cosmopolitan vision, that acknowledes its multiple identities, and that thinks of difference and equality as working hand in hand can be faithful to its own tradition and equipped to face the future. Only a Baptist identity that can keep together, in a dialectic tension, the individual and the community, diversity and unity, particularity and universality, can answer efficaciously to the challenges of our time. It is indisputable that throughout the four hundred years of their life, Baptists have been subjected to centrifugal forces that have menaced their own possibility to be historically relevant. At the same time, however, centripetal forces have worked beneath the surface of fragmentation.

I want to advocate the liaison between modernity and Baptists through two historical reconstructions:

The genealogy of liberty of conscience

Every person is competent in his/her own religious judgment and no civil or ecclesiastical authority can interfere. “The liberty of men’s consciences … is also a part of the Christian religion”; ³ this was the testimony of seven Baptist leaders in a pamphlet from 1661.

Baptist ancestors professed conscience as the only forum to be entrusted with questions of religion: “IT IS NOT ONLY UNMERCIFUL, BUT UNNATURAL AND ABOMINABLE; YEA, MONSTROUS FOR ONE CHRISTIAN TO VEX AND DESTROY ANOTHER FOR DIFFERENCE AND QUESTIONS OF RELIGION.” ⁴

The road to modern democracy began with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, but only with Johannes Althusius, in the seventeenth century, were the political ideas of the covenant theology of Reformed Protestantism systematized in a secular theory of politics. And yet Althusius believed that religion is the principium firmissimum, the foundation of the State, and for this reason must be protected. In his second edition of Politica (1614), Althusius illustrates the task of the magistrate in the field of ecclesiastical administration: “This ecclesiastical administration by the supreme magistrate consists in his inspection, defense, care, and direction of ecclesiastical matters.” ⁵ This is the reason the principle cuius regio, eius religio (Treaty of Westphalia, 1648) was used to deal with religious plurality in Europe, which practically meant the persecution of religious minorities.

In the same period as the publication of Politica, Thomas Helwys wrote A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612), further separating the role of the magistrate and the ecclesiastical administration by formulating a universal religious freedom:

For our lord is but an earthly king, and he has no authority as a king but in earthly causes. And if the king’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws, our lord the king can require no more. For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king judge between God and men. Let them be heretics, Turkish, Jews or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. ⁶

How did Helwys come to this conclusion? The theory that Helwys got these ideas only from the gospel, with no unavoidable interweaving with philosophical and political ideas already circulating at that time, sounds ingenious. Helwys and then Roger William, no less than Isaac Backus and John Leland, were living in the Zeitgeist of modernity, influencing and influenced by its development.

Likewise, John Locke cannot be understood only in the framework of Enlightenment theories of natural rights; one must not forget that for Locke natural rights are founded in the divine law. ⁷ Both Helwys and Locke adopted the same tactic of using rational or biblical arguments to convince their interlocutors. They both believed that knowing the truth did not mean having the authority to impose it on others; this is modernity and these are Baptists!

John Locke opens his A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) quoting the Gospel of Luke:

‘The kings of the gentile exercise lordship over them’, said our Saviour to his disciples, ‘but ye shall not be so’, Luke xxii.25,26. The business of true religion is quite another thing. It is not instituted in order to the erecting an external pomp, nor to the obtaining of ecclesiastical pomp, nor to the exercising of compulsive force; but to the regulating of men’s lives according to the rules of virtue and piety. ⁸

Where did Locke get such ideas if not from the Protestant belief that faith is an inner affair between God and the individual believer? Did not Luther proclaim the birth of a person’s freedom in the inner soul in which faith, as encounter with God, is generated? Based on these assumptions Locke says: “Because the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men … For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. All the life and power of true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; faith is not faith, without believing.” ⁹

The new idea of faith, as a natural consequence, requires that one “distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.” ¹⁰ On the distinction between civil government and religion Locke comes to the same conclusion as many Baptists, which is that such a distinction is a guarantee for peace: “It is not the diversity of opinions, which cannot be avoided, but the refusal of toleration to people of diverse opinions, which could have been granted, that has produced all the bustles and wars.” ¹¹

Martha C. Nussbaum, in her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality, dedicates a long section of her book to Roger Williams, affirming that “American writings about religious liberty were in conversation with similar work in England, and there are striking similarities between the arguments in Williams’s two most influential books … and those used later and more famously by John Locke.” ¹²

This does not mean that Locke read Williams, but that both Locke and Williams breathed the same oxygen of modernity. And if Locke cannot be understood without the background of Luther, in the same manner Williams would be impenetrable without the idea of natural law deriving from Stoic ideas. Nussbaum probably forces the issue in the following quotation, and yet it is a further demonstration of the interweaving of religious ideas and philosophical thoughts:

it is important to bear in mind that Williams received a first-rate classical education, of a sort that emphasized the doctrine of natural law that was becoming increasingly influential in both English and Continental law and philosophy … Williams, writing a century and a half before James Madison, nonetheless shared an intellectual heritage with him through the debt of both men to Stoic ideas. ¹³

The Virginia Bill of Rights and the French Revolution

For the second historical reconstruction I am very grateful to the book by a professor of Law at the University of Heidelberg, Georg Jellinek, who in 1895 wrote Die Erklaerung der Menschen und Buergerrechte. ¹⁴ In his book he affirms that the origin of the French Declaration of Rights of 1789 cannot be found in J. J. Rousseau, who believed that the “individual does not retain one particle of his rights from the moment he enters the state.” ¹⁵ The authors of the French Declaration of Rights got the idea of original rights, “the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man,” ¹⁶ which is a restriction upon the rights of the sovereign, elsewhere.

Jellinek saw the origin in the new constitutions of separate American states:

The French Declaration of Rights is for the most part copied from the American declarations, the “Bill of Rights.” All drafts of the French Declaration, from the cahiers to the twenty-one proposals before the National Assembly, vary more or less from the original, either in conciseness or in breadth, in cleverness or in awkwardness of expression. But so far as substantial additions are concerned they present only doctrinaire statements of a purely theoretical nature or elaborations, which belong to the realm of political metaphysics. ¹⁷

The American declarations draw a boundary line between state and individual. The rights do not rest simply on the supremacy of the law, but are the personal rights of the individual.

The liberty of conscience as “a right not granted by any earthly power and therefore by no earthly to be restrained,” ¹⁸ contributed also by the Baptists of America, together with the Puritan idea of state as social compact, have been essential to the political consciousness of the modern world.

Beside the charters of Connecticut (1662) and Rhode Island (1663), the first constitution introduced with a bill of rights was the Virginian (1776). James Madison is considered the author of its final edition. Mark S. Scarberry, in his article on John Leland and James Madison, ¹⁹ affirms “that concerns of Virginia Baptists about religious liberty … played a substantial role in James Madison’s election to the Virginia ratifying convention in March of 1788 and to the First Congress in February of 1789. Those elections, in turn, were key events in the ratification of the Constitution and in the adoption of the Bill of Rights.” ²⁰ The same Virginia Baptists played an important role in the constitution of Virginia and consequently they influenced the change in the Constitution of the words, “the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” to the phrase “free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience.” ²¹

The American declarations represent a constructive alliance between very different Weltanschauungen (but all part of the same modern spirit) that produced changes in the understanding of the state, the church, and their relationship to one another:

Revolutionary America contained many different strands of thought. Some leading founders (Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson) were Deists, rationalist and highly skeptical of traditional religion. Some (George Washington, Patrick Henry) had inclinations that we might today call “communitarian,” seeing shared religious beliefs and practices as a good thing for the social fabric of a young nation. Some, like James Madison and many Baptists, Quakers, and other dissenters—following the lead of Roger Williams—were personally religious but highly skeptical of any association between religion and government. ²²

The kernel of all these contributions is the centrality of conscience, its dignity, its universality, its competence, its inviolability, and its emancipation. Behind the Constitution emerges a cosmopolitan human being equal in worth and dignity.

A provisional conclusion

How precious and vulnerable is each individual’s conscience and how equally precious and vulnerable it is to live together on terms of mutual respect. Baptists and modernity share the same origin and, consequently, the same destiny. The concept of the modern individual is subject to many objections and corrections, but criticism cannot do away with the past. The historian Harold J. Berman affirms: “The past can illuminate the future. Indeed, in the words of the great historian and prophet Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.’” ²³

At the creation of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), founded in London in 1905, Baptists were aware that the liberty of conscience was the major contribution that the Baptists offered to the world. The proceedings of the Congress recited: “The world must not be permitted to forget what the Baptist doctrine of soul liberty, broadening into the conception of personal liberty and finding expression in the ordinances of civil liberty, has wrought for the political emancipation of mankind.” ²⁴

Emancipation and liberty of conscience find their place again in the encounter of Baptists and modernity. Yet both modernity and Baptists need to go through the blender of globalization, post-industrial capitalism, and postmodernity to test their currency and effectiveness.