Religious liberty

The British newspaper, the Guardian, has a regular Saturday column called "Face to Faith". Today's is very interesting in that it talks about the origins of our ideas on religious liberty:

With civil liberties, anti-terrorism, racial incitement, freedom, toler-ation and liberty now high on the public agenda, this may be the moment to give an airing to Thomas Helwys. He was one of the 17th-century founders of the Baptist denomination, but his relevance today stems from what he wrote in The Mystery of Iniquity, a small work published in 1612 and claimed by Baptists as the first full plea for religious liberty in England and Wales.

In the aftermath of the Reformation, when Dissenters, Catholics and Jews found all kinds of doors closed to them and were frequently persecuted for their faith, the central issue for Helwys was neither rights nor toleration, but liberty. Religious liberty, of course, but what he had to say provided a sound foundation for other kinds of liberty as well. Pleas for toleration too often came only from the persecuted seeking toleration for themselves, and usually with scant toleration for the views of others once they got into ascendancy.

For Helwys, religious liberty was a right for everyone - heretics, Turks and Jews, whoever they were, whatever they did; even for Roman Catholics, when the memory of the Gunpowder Plot was still acute. Anything less was a loss to the community, as well as to the individual. No parliament could legislate against it. No monarch could overrule it. He reminded James I that he too was a mortal, "dust and ashes" like the rest of us, with no power over the immortal souls of his subjects. James responded by putting him in prison, where he remained until his death.

Baptists may not always have lived up to his ideals, but with the exception of the ultra-conservative wing of the Southern Baptists in the US, they still bridle at the slightest threat to religious liberty.

How ironic that Southern Baptists in the U.S. are so willing to deny religious liberty to others. I remember when Southern Baptists still vehemently believed in separation of church and state and there was such a thing as a liberal Southern Baptist. How that has changed since the fundamentalist take over of the Southern Baptist Convention. I'm being very careful here to refer specifically to Southern Baptists in my comments. To my knowledge, the members of American Baptist Churches USA still believe in religious liberty and the primacy of the individual conscience.