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When Baptists set forth a call for religious liberty, they were seeking freedom to hold their religious beliefs as an alternative to the doctrines of the established church. But there was a risk involved. Total freedom of religion could become freedom from religion. For many religious liberty really means the opportunity to choose what form of religion one wants, assuming that biblical Christianity is correct and will in the Providence of God always predominate. It must be asked whether any Christian, most of all the Baptists, could by choice want to live in a society where “secular humanism” is the prevailing world view. A variety of statements by Baptists on religious liberty both historical and contemporary consider the subject area.

Roger Williams fled Massachusetts and founded Rhode Island colony in pursuit of religious liberty.

It is the will and command of God that, since the coming of his Son, the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries: and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only, in soul matters, able to conquer: to wit, the sword of God’s Spirit, the Word of God.

God requires not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity, sooner or later, is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.

The permission of other consciences and worships than a state professeth only can, according to God, procure a firm and lasting peace …

Source: (1644) The Bloudy Tenant of Persecution

Thomas Helwys wrote the first defense of religious liberty in the English language in 1612.

Early Baptist leader Thomas Helwys made the first plea in the English language for religious liberty in his book A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (1612). Shown below is his handwritten preface to King James from this work.

W. A. Criswell is pastor of First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas.

Religious liberty consists of the civil magistrate’s comprehending and acknowledging that it has no rightful authority over a man’s soul. A proper understanding of religious liberty requires the civil authority to understand that a man’s religious beliefs are beyond the purview of the state. Consequently, the state authority does not merely tolerate religious beliefs and activity, nor can it grant the right of religious freedom. All that the state can do legitimately is to acknowledge man’s inherent God-given right to worship God in his own way, as well as the right not to worship at all.

One of the great Baptist gifts to the Reformation Heritage is a full awareness that for individual believer priests (I Pet. 2:5,9) to “work out” their “own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) they must be unhindered by governmental interference. Early in the seventeenth century the great English Baptist, Thomas Helwys, penned the first published plea in the English language for religious liberty in his A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity when he declared in 1612 that the King of England was a mere man and had no authority over men’s souls “for men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves.”

In New England, Roger Williams took up the plea for religious liberty which led to the establishment of a colony, Providence Plantations (later Rhode Island), where men enjoyed complete religious liberty. The Baptist concept of religious liberty was buttressed and fortified by a deep-seated belief in the New Testament, with its lack of church-state entanglement, rather than the Old Testament, as the manual for faith and practice in the New Covenant of Christ and His Church.

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