Gregory Wills concludes his book Democratic Religion by saying, “Baptists had traditionally understood the democracy of Baptist churches to mean that all church members exercised ecclesiastical authority jointly, including authority over belief and behavior” (emphasis added).[1] But, Wills goes on, “by the [early twentieth century], Baptists began to embrace the idea that a democratic church meant that all were equally free from ecclesiastical authority” (emphasis added).[2] This essay will explore that difference of perspective among many Baptists by focusing on two Baptists in particular, Isaac Backus and John Leland.
While Backus and Leland were both leading advocates for liberty of conscience during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their respective applications of this principle represent contrasting views of individual and ecclesiastical authority. Baptists have always argued for a democratic form of religion and genuine freedom from civil regulation in the practice of it, but among every generation of Baptists there are those who differ with one another about how to practice democratized religion.
Isaac Backus represents the sort of Baptist that Greg Wills calls “church-oriented evangelicalism.”[3] Backus argued strongly for liberty of conscience, but he understood such a liberty should be exercised under the authority of a local church. John Leland, on the other hand, represents a fully individualized sort of Baptist, the kind of evangelical that embraced an amplified form of pietism.[4] He shared Backus’s perspective of a free conscience, but he also believed that neither state nor church should intrude on the “religious opinions of men.”[5] Leland asserted, “religion is a matter between God and individuals.”[6]
This paper will show many similarities and some significant contrasts between these two Baptist heroes, Isaac Backus and John Leland. And we will contend that Backus represents a better Baptist advocate for religious liberty, since his arguments and practices maintain a high view of the local church, while Leland’s arguments and practices lead to the obsolescence of the local church. First, we will provide an introduction of the two men in their historic context. Second, we will compare some of their arguments for liberty of conscience and separation between the governments of church and state. Third, we will document some of the contrasts between their applications of religious liberty, especially regarding their distinct ministries. And finally, we will conclude by tracing some connection with this historic contrast of heroes to an ongoing divergence among some Baptists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Though Isaac Backus was born thirty years before John Leland, and Leland outlived Backus by thirty-five years, their overlapping lives had a good deal in common. They both left the Congregationalist establishment of eighteenth-century New England to form Baptist convictions and to engage in distinctly Baptist ministry. They both embraced and even embodied the personal conversion experiences that became so ubiquitous during the First Great Awakening.[7] And they both stand as historic leaders among a religious movement that affected both religion and politics during the transition from British colonies to an America nation. Backus and Leland argued publicly for freedom of religion (any religion or none at all) without any compelling burden from the state. These men were Baptist leaders of the highest rank, and their pioneering spirit is a treasured heritage of freedom-loving Baptists in America today.
Isaac Backus was “born and raised an ordinary yeoman farmer in Norwich, Connecticut, in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.”[8] From the earliest age, Backus was “a member of the established [church] or Standing Order of New England.” [9] Congregationalist churches were the official religious institutions of New England, and Backus was baptized into membership as an infant, like all other good citizens at that time. However, in 1741, at age seventeen, Backus experienced evangelical conversion influenced by the ministry of itinerants like George Whitefield and James Davenport. Backus wrote of the experience in his diary,
As I was mowing alone in the field, August 24, 1741, all my past life was opened plainly before me, and I saw clearly that it had been filled up with sin… I perceived that I could never make myself better, should I live ever so long. Divine justice appeared clear in my condemnation, and I saw that God had a right to do with me as he would… And while I sat there, I was enabled by divine light to see the perfect righteousness of Christ and the freeness and riches of His grace, with such clearness, that my soul was drawn forth to trust in Him for salvation.[10]
About ten months after his conversion, Backus became a communicant member of the Congregationalist church of Norwich.[11] And yet, not long after, Backus and some of his fellow church members decided that the inclusion of unconverted persons among the church’s membership was an error too significant to abide. Backus had previously decided to “bear those things as a burden and to hope for a reformation,” but the church continued as it had done to intentionally welcome a mixed congregation to the Lord’s table.[12] So, Backus and several others left the parish church in 1745 to gather for “separate” meetings.[13] They soon formed a New Light congregation, and, after a couple of years as a traveling preacher, Backus became their pastor.
It was as the uneducated and unordained pastor of the Titicut Separatist Church that Backus wrestled with the doctrine of baptism and began forming his views on religious liberty.[14] He was baptized as an infant, and he practiced infant baptism during the first years of his pastorate, but on August 7, 1749, two of his church members – Ebenezer Hinds and Jonathan Woods – “began to set forth antipedobaptist views.”[15] For twenty days, Backus prayed and studied on the subject with great anxiety, since he knew that “To deny that God required the baptism of infants was to subvert the whole structure of the Bible Commonwealth.”[16]
Then on August 27, Backus preached that “none had any right to baptism but Believers, and that plunging [seemed] the only right mode.”[17] However, even as he preached the sermon, Backus later wrote in his diary, “I felt my mind entangled, and an awful gloom followed… [and] my mind was turned back to infant baptism.”[18] Indeed, after a time away, making plans for his marriage to Susanna Mason, Backus returned to Titicut and called a church meeting on September 26, wherein he “retracted what [he] had preached against infant baptism.”[19]
For more than a year, Backus continued to struggle with his own convictions, even as he continued to pastor his church and preach as an itinerant. But finally, on July 25, 1751, Backus announced to his church “that he was no longer able to believe that God had commanded infant baptism.”[20] Instead, “none ought to be baptized, and thus have the outward mark of Christ’s disciples put upon them, except those who give evidence of having believed in him.”[21] And Backus was baptized as a conscious believer about a month later, on August 22. Benjamin Pierce pastored a church in Rhode Island, but he was preaching at a church nearby. Pierce gave Backus the “opportunity to practice as [he] now believed was right.”[22] “Therefore,” as Backus himself later wrote, “I told some account of my conversion and then of my experiences as to these things, which gave satisfaction; then I went down into the water with [Pierce] and was baptized.”[23]
This pivotal moment for Isaac Backus did not, however, become the full embrace of Baptist convictions for his church. That did not happen for another four and a half years. Backus sought to “maintain his church and others in [the Separate-Baptist] faction upon an open-communion basis.”[24] He “agreed to conduct dedication services for infants or to let pedobaptists bring in another minister for baptism by sprinkling.”[25] But by January of 1756, Backus “was ready to give up the experiment with open-communion.”[26] He led six members of the Titicut Separate Church to form a new church altogether, one that was consciously and unequivocally Baptist. On January 16, The First Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts, was established on the basis of their shared “confession of faith,” a shared constitution of “church affairs,” and a shared “covenant” of church membership.[27]
Backus would serve and lead as the pastor of First Baptist Middleborough for the next fifty years, until his death. It is here, in the personal wrestling, the pastoral shepherding, and in the ecclesiastical structuring of Backus’s Christian ministry that he differs so significantly from his contemporary, John Leland. Both men believed that religion should not be restrained or managed by civil authorities, but Backus’s argument and practice of religious liberty was unquestionably church-shaped. Leland, on the other hand, seems to have thought that the institution of the church was just as dangerous as the state when it comes to threatening religious liberty.
Thirty years after the birth of Isaac Backus and nearly ten years after Backus left the established church in Norwich to form a new and Separate congregation, on May 14, 1754, John Leland was born. As a man, Leland claimed that his father, James, was “convinced… by reading the Bible, that believers were the only proper subjects of baptism, and immersion the only gospel mode.”[28] Nevertheless, Leland said that his father “sunk from his conviction,” and “invited the [Congregationalist] minister of the town to come to his house on a certain Sunday… and baptize” all his children.[29]
Leland says that he was “something more than three years old” at the time of his baptism, but the church records in Grafton list him at age five.[30] Either way, Leland’s precocious character seems to have been evident quite early. He told the story, “when I found out what the object of the meeting was, I was greatly terrified, and betook myself to flight.”[31] However, his “flight was in vain,” for he was “pursued” and “overtaken” by “the maid,” who “caught” him and delivered him to his father and the minister.[32] Whether this tale is embellished or not, only heaven knows, but Leland’s account of his reluctant baptism epitomizes his uncanny independence in matters of religion. The historian Eric Smith says, “[Leland] instinctively grasped that religious acts must be free and voluntary to be genuine.”[33] At a minimum, the adult Leland wanted everyone to know that he valued this instinct.
During his upbringing, Leland was exposed to both of the clashing religious cultures in New England. The Grafton Congregationalist Church represented the established and traditional culture of the passing generation, and the Nonconformists or Separatists represented the vigorous and innovative culture of the rising generation. Eric Smith writes, “James Leland kept John and his siblings in the regular Sabbath services at the Grafton Congregational Church,” but “at home, James read the Bible aloud, catechized the children, and discussed religion regularly at family meals.”[34] And yet, with all of this exposure to gospel light, John Leland placed the time of his conversion after his teenage years.
Leland was an active and independent young man with a sinful appetite, which (by his own admission) he fed quite well as a teenager. But at one point God impressed on Leland’s mind a sense of impending judgment, and he began to seek for conversion among revivalistic enthusiasts. Leland says that he “heard much preaching and conversation about the change which is essential to salvation,”[35] but he “had never passed through stages of distress… equal to what [he] supposed as essential pre-requisite to conversion.”[36]
Finally, Leland says, “One evening, as I was walking on the road alone… [I] expressed myself thus: ‘I am not a Christian; I have never been convicted and converted like others.”[37] But “soon after this,” Leland went on, “I felt my soul yield up to Christ and trust in him.”[38] It was, as Smith wrote, “a Bible impression that provided [Leland] the assurance he craved.”[39] Smith also points out that Leland was adamant, “at no point did he consult a local minister or involve the church in his spiritual quest.”[40] Leland’s conversion story, Smith says, “is striking for its solitary character.”[41]
Leland was among the New Lights or the “radical evangelicals” who embraced the charismatic and mystical elements of Christianity, which emphasized personal and sensational experience.[42] In his writings and preaching, Leland recounted many occasions of supernatural encounters throughout his life, including “premonitions, visions and dreams, divine healings, and angelic visitations.”[43] This personal access to divine power and even spiritual enlightenment only strengthened Leland’s conviction that he needed nothing but his own mind, the Bible, and a little time and diligence to arrive upon the right understanding of any Christian doctrine or practice.
On June 1, 1774, Leland was baptized by Noah Alden, a Separate Baptist pastor from Bellingham.[44] For his part, when he presented himself for baptism, Leland was hoping that the “preacher” would “discern” that he “was deceived” and “reject” him as a baptismal candidate.[45] But, as Leland told it, Alden had no probing questions to ask and no interest in discerning the true condition of Leland’s soul. Alden merely asked if Leland “believed in the Calvinistical doctrine.”[46] After a brief exchange, wherein Leland claimed some ignorance of such doctrine, Alden “received” Leland for baptism, and Leland “would not give back” his request for it.[47] Leland’s baptism, like his conversion, seems to have been largely a matter of his personal initiative and his own intellectual and emotional consideration.
Leland’s foray into preaching ministry, which came nineteen days after he was baptized, was also a self-initiated and personally confirmed. Even before his baptism, Leland and another man about his age were setting up “evening meetings” where they would “sing, pray, and speak according to our proportion of faith.”[48] But Leland was in a “constant” state of “worry” about “preaching” during that season of his life, since he was still not sure whether he was truly converted.[49] However, on Sunday, June 20, 1744, Leland had his “conscience… arrested” by Scriptures brought to his mind and Bible verses he admittedly read out of their context.[50] Leland became convinced that he “must either… open my mouth and give glory to the name of God, or his curse would fall upon me.”[51] So, Leland preached his first sermon as a man commissioned by God to do so, and the experience was exhilarating for him. He said, “At the beginning, my mind was somewhat bewildered… but continuing, my ideas brightened, and after a while I enjoyed such freedom of thought and utterance of words as I had never before.”[52] Thus, Leland’s personal call from God into the preaching ministry was confirmed.
The significance of Leland’s personal conversion and his personal call to preach was highlighted by Eric Smith in his 2022 biography. Smith wrote, “The self-reliant Leland resolved the two defining issues of his life, his conversion and his call to preach, with God alone, professedly neither seeking nor receiving the assistance of the church.”[53] Indeed, for “more than sixty years, John Leland rode circuit up and down the Atlantic seaboard as a fervent Baptist itinerant evangelist.”[54] From start to finish, Leland was an “independent operator,” and he was only ever “loosely connected to church or denomination.”[55] Leland “insisted on hammering out his own belief system, depending as exclusively as possible on his open Bible and God-given common sense.”[56] And his “private study produced an eclectic and idiosyncratic blend of traditional Calvinism, charismatic New Light spirituality, and Jeffersonian rationalism.”[57]
Leland’s long ministry and public arguments reflected his personal experiences and convictions. The fundamental starting point for Leland’s idea of religious liberty was individual conscience, and from Leland’s perspective, the organized church could be just as stifling to religious freedom as an overstepping state. Leland seems to have gone further than Backus, not only arguing that religion should be free from restraint and management by civil authorities, but that ecclesiastical authorities must also give way to an utterly individualized sense of freedom to believe and behave according to one’s personal conviction.
Backus and Leland were both strong public advocates for religious freedom. So notable were their similarities on religious liberty that Edwin Gaustad has proposed a “Backus-Leland Tradition.”[58] Gaustad argues that Backus and Leland shared overlapping views of “the individual Christian and his freedom,” “the visible church,” and “the visible churches and the Church.”[59] While Backus and Leland actually differed quite noticeably in their views of the visible church and the relationship of church and state,[60] they did argue similarly for religious freedom during a time when there was hardly such a thing in North America.[61]
Prior to and immediately after the founding of an American nation, Baptists on the North American continent argued for a greater religious freedom than they often enjoyed. Like the Church of England, Congregationalists in the New World were not inclined to allow for religious dissent, and they seemed just as comfortable as their Anglican brethren to use the levers of the state to enforce at least some degree of uniformity. All Baptists wanted freedom from religious taxation and persecution, but not all Baptists had the same goal in mind when it came to religious liberty. “Isaac Backus,” wrote Barry Hankins, “serves as the primary example showing that some Baptists touted religious liberty only within the parameters of a generally Christian culture.”[62] William McLoughlin said that Backus “sought a ‘sweet harmony’ for the new American republic,” a harmony between church and state; “but,” said McLoughlin, “[Backus] helped to produce the cacophony of sectarianism and pluralism.”[63]
The results aside, it is true that Backus saw two distinct jurisdictions – one for the church and the other for the state. Backus believed that the “secular” and “ecclesiastical” governments were intended to be distinct from the time of the New Testament. But, he says, “Constantine” was “moved” in the fourth century to “draw his sword against heretics.”[64] This was the beginning of a church-state merger, according to both Backus and Leland, and they both believed that Christianity was negatively affected by it ever since.[65] Backus argued that England finally did “groan under this hellish tyranny,” and the English “renounced” the Roman “head.”[66] However, Backus pointed out that the Anglicans “set up [their own] king as their head in ecclesiastical as well as civil concernments.”[67] Thus, says Backus, “the high places were not taken away, and the lord of bishops made such work in them, as drove our fathers from thence into America.”[68]
And yet, Backus blamed the descendants of the Puritans, the Congregationalists in North America, for being those who “determined to pick out all that they thought was of universal and moral equity in Moses’s laws, and so to frame a Christian common-wealth here.” [69] In so doing, Backus said, “they strove very hard to have the church govern the world, till they lost their charter; since which they have yielded to have the world govern the church.”[70] From Backus’s perspective, the two jurisdictions – church and state – must be kept distinct, otherwise the state would unavoidably encroach upon the church.
Backus did not, however, believe that the state had absolutely no interest in promoting the Christians religion. He said that “judgment and righteousness are essential to freedom,”[71] and “rulers… ought to improve all their influence in their several stations to promote and support true religion by Gospel means and methods.”[72] Indeed, Barry Hankins claims that Backus “supported the test-oath provision of the Massachusetts state constitution and probably voted in favor of the petition requesting that the U.S. Congress establish a bureau to license publication of Bibles.”[73] This is why Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins both place Backus in the “accommodationist” camp, and not the “separationist.”[74]
Leland, for his part, was a separationist in full, albeit an inconsistent one.[75] Writing his own history of Virginia in 1790, Leland affirmed the need for civil government, saying, “Civil government is certainly a curse to mankind; but it is a necessary curse, in this fallen state, to prevent greater evils.”[76] But Leland said in a sermon at Cheshire in 1801 that “civil rulers… have nothing to do with religion.”[77] And in a pamphlet on Sabbatical Laws, published in 1815, Leland said, “The work of the legislature is to make laws for the security of life, liberty and property, and leave religion to the consciences of individuals.”[78] Then Leland added, “If the sacred code, in the New Testament, is not sufficient to govern Christians in all their religious affairs, either the wisdom or goodness of Christ is insufficient.”[79]
Leland did seem to agree with the notion that there are distinct jurisdictions regarding the church and the state. In a pamphlet published in 1804, he argued that the church is governed by Christ as a “Christocracy.”[80] Leland explained that the government of the church in “some parts” resembles a “monarchy,” while in “other parts” it is like a “democracy,” but it “is different from all other governments” of the world.[81] Specifically, “Christ is absolute legislator,” and “He appoints and commissions all the spiritual officers of his government.”[82] And “liberty and equality, the boast of democracy, is realized in the church” in the lives and relationships of “the saints.”[83] But, said Leland, “Christ’s laws are spiritual, reaching to the hearts, thoughts, and motives of men, and requiring truth in the inward parts.”[84] This sort of legal requirement is impossible for the state, since its laws “take cognizance of actions only.”[85] As Leland saw it, “a man may be a good citizen of state, and at the same time be an enemy to God,” since the two legal jurisdictions are distinguished and must necessarily be so.[86]
Not only did Backus and Leland agree on distinct church-state jurisdictions, but they also argued for religious liberty on the basis on conscience. In fact, Leland’s fundamental argument against the state meddling in religious affairs was not the jurisdictional distinction, but the fundamental nature and function of the individual conscience. Leland spoke of conscience as though it were its own sort of “empire” with its own innate “liberty” and authority.[87] For Leland, it was not only the state that might encroach upon conscience but even the church itself. In a letter to the honorable e said, “Let the church be formed… of living stones, and proceed as the Bible directs, and I will be subject, and not set up my will as a standard for others; but let them not crowd into the empire of conscience.”[88] With regard to both state and church regulations, Leland said, “if laws are made to describe what God I shall adore, how I shall worship him, and what places and times that worship shall be paid; be it known to all that I will not fall down and worship the image that is set up. ‘Where conscience begins, empire ends.’”[89]
Backus, for his part, also affirmed that God has bestowed upon men a “liberty of conscience.”[90] And Backus argued that the “full liberty of conscience” must include both the “inward man” and the “outward man,” not only freedom to believe but also the freedom to worship without the threat of persecution.[91] The main target of Backus’s ire was the taxation of Separates and Baptists in order to support “pedobaptist ministers.”[92] And even when some dissenters were exempted from such a tax, Backus argued that the requirement to “annually… certify” the substance of “our belief” as “the condition of… being exempted” was akin to “adultery” or “whoredom,” since it was effectively requiring Christian churches to “admit a higher ruler in a nation into her husband’s [i.e., Christ’s] place.”[93]
Backus and Leland both believed that the state ought not meddle in the affairs of the church, and they both argued similarly for a new kind of religious freedom on the world stage. They both made public efforts to change the charter and practices of their state with regard to established religion and the persecution of nonconformists. Conscience is the domain of God alone, and Christ is the true king and husband of Christians in the world; therefore, the state must not impose legal demands on religious belief or practices. In the fight for religious freedom during the early days of the American experiment, Backus and Leland were co-belligerents.
All of the similarities and even the evident passions shared by Backus and Leland might lead one to believe that they ought to be virtually identical in their application of religious liberty. And yet, the legacy that each man left behind is dramatically different. These contemporary co-belligerents actually contrast one another quite significantly at the point of their divergent relationships with the local church.
The writings of John Leland are full of personal stories, preached sermons, polemical arguments, and even political philosophies and speeches. In a pamphlet called “The Bible Baptist,” Leland argued for believer’s baptism by immersion, following many of the typical Baptist arguments.[94] In a recorded speech, dated July 4, 1805, Leland argued for an “elective judiciary” based on “the fundamental principle of republicanism.”[95] Leland even penned poems and hymns. One poem lyricizing his experience says, “Come old, come young, and hear me relate My life and adventures, and my present state.”[96]
Leland was an itinerant preacher who spent his entire adult life (more than sixty years) riding horseback across untold miles of American soil to preach the evangelical way of salvation and promote an American culture marked by republican and democratic ideals. Eric Smith has noted that “Leland embodied the rise of liberal individualism that marked American society in the latter eighteenth century.”[97] Leland “left the Congregational Church of his youth to enter the Baptist fold,” but he remained highly independent even among Baptists.[98] He “repeatedly turned down invitations to settled pastorates… preferring the unfettered lifestyle of a self-supporting itinerant.”[99]
Leland’s individuality was prioritized over his connection to any church. Some extracts from a letter Leland wrote, in response to a question about his views on church discipline and communion, include his statement that “church labor” and the “breaking [of] bread” is not what “the Lord… placed on” him as a regular obligation.[100] Rather, said Leland, “whenever I think I can do good, or get good, I will attend church-meeting and… I will commune.”[101] But, he went on, “if the church cannot bear thus with me, I wish them to give me a letter of dismission,” and “if such a letter cannot be given, consistently with the order and dignity of the church, I suppose excommunication must follow.”[102]
Leland said that a “leading characteristic of the Baptists” is that they are “united in sentiment, respecting the New Testament” despite the fact that they have no “legalized creeds,” no “human coercion in discipline,” and “the Bible is the only confession of faith they dare adopt.”[103] And yet some Baptists actually appreciated both creeds and discipline, and here is where Backus and Leland diverge. While Backus’s strong insistence of religious liberty and voluntary conscience parallel with Leland’s, Backus centered his everyday ministry on one local church.
Like Leland, Backus was a prolific writer and speaker. And his writings also included doctrinal arguments as well as political engagement. William McLoughlin said that Isaac Backus was “clearly a leading figure” among those who “first conceived the idea of calling a general conference to draw up a united petition to the General Court” of Massachusetts in order to persuade civil authorities to ease the “heavy trials and burdens” upon Separates who wanted “liberty” from the “Support of a worship that we can’t in conscience join.”[104] And McLoughlin published a nearly five-hundred-page volume of Backus’s “pamphlets” that included public arguments for a call divine to preach, Christian liberty, and the doctrine of particular election.[105]
But Backus also published a set of documents that Leland seems nearly incapable of producing or even affirming – a church confession, constitution, and covenant.[106] The second appendix of Alvah Hovey’s historical volume on Backus is a record of those foundational documents that Backus prepared and led his fledgling congregation to adopt in 1756. Article fourteen of Backus’s confession is the affirmation that “believers” are not only “united to Jesus Christ” but also “united to each other,” having “communion one with another,” and thus “made partakers of each other’s gifts and graces.”[107] This declaration of the communal nature of Christianity sets Backus apart from Leland, and other features of Backus’s church documents display the contrast even more significantly.
The formatting and structure of the confession, the constitution, and the covenant of the First Baptist Church of Middleborough is distributed in two parts of equal length. The first half consists of seventeen “Articles of Faith,” and part two is the church’s beliefs “Concerning Church Affairs.”[108] One of the most striking statements among those in the church’s constitution is that baptism is affirmed as “the door of the Church,” and “none but saints… [who] give scriptural evidences of their union to Christ by faith” can “rightly partake of [the] ordinances” of the church.[109] Such a practice would starkly contrast Leland’s story of a far more personal and individualized experience of baptism.
Backus also made it clear that his application of liberty of conscience did not preclude an obligation for Christians to “hold communion together in the worship of God… and in the ordinances and discipline of his church.”[110] This is an unambiguous divergence from Leland’s statement that he would “commune” with his church on those occasions “whenever” he believed he might “do good” or “get good.”[111] In fact, the membership covenant of Backus’s church includes the obligation to “give up ourselves to one another,” to “act towards each other as brethren in Christ,” and to “[watch] over one another in the love of God.”[112]
Backus and Leland both toured as itinerant preachers, they both invested themselves in the civil and religious affairs of New England, and they both stand as leading advocates of religious liberty in the New World. And yet, Backus leaves behind a legacy of pastoring the same church for fifty years and forming the experience of Christian living within the context of church membership. Leland, on the other hand, lived independently from the confines of local church obligations. Leland was the Evangelical itinerant, but Backus was the Evangelical pastor.
The historical record shows that Leland was indeed a regular preaching elder at Third Baptist Church in Cheshire, but Leland made it clear that he was just as free from any binding to that congregation as any other. Eric Smith wrote, “the plain truth was that the self-sufficient Leland simply did not share the Baptist reverence for the local church.”[113]Leland “would preach consistently in Third Cheshire for more than fifty years,” said Smith, “but Leland steadily refused the church’s overtures for greater commitment; the most they could get out of him were a few one-year engagements to fill the pulpit in his later years.”[114] And no episode demonstrates Leland’s heightened individualism than his thirteen-year refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper to the members of Third Baptist Church in Cheshire.
In a personal list of various statements, Leland responded to the church’s request that he perform the pastoral duty of administering the Supper with the church. Eric Smith describes Leland’s short response as a “breathtaking declaration of religious autonomy… [wherein] Leland… unmoored himself from every authority outside of his conscience – his own church, eighteen hundred years of Christian tradition, and even the Bible.”[115] Even still, the church preferred to maintain what relationship they had with Leland, so they never did take any action against him. Leland continued his dubious relationship with Third Cheshire until he died, preaching and ministering there according to his own preferences and schedule, and his wide-ranging public ministry (both preaching and writing) extended this type of religious individualism to many other Baptists as well. Smith says, “Over the nineteenth century, Baptists increasingly identified themselves more with their commitment to modern notions of private judgment and ‘soul liberty’ than with the enforcement of ecclesial authority.”[116]
One man who might be credited with making “soul liberty” the chief identifier of Baptists in America is E. Y. Mullins. Edgar Young Mullins (1860-1928) was the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for the first quarter of the twentieth century. Better known as E. Y. Mullins, he published his Axioms of Religion in 1908, in which he asserted that the “conception of the competency of the soul under God in religion… is the distinctive contribution of Baptists to the religious thought of the race [of man]” (emphasis added).[117] Mullins believed the doctrine of “soul competency” is the one that “comprehended all the… particulars… [of the] historical significance of the Baptists.”[118]This doctrine, according to Mullins, is summarized in the statement, “Religion is a personal matter between the soul and God.”[119] And it necessarily includes the “separation of Church and State,” “Justification by faith alone,” and “Regeneration… as a result of the soul’s direct dealing with God.”[120]
John Hammett asserts, “E. Y. Mullins was by no means the creator of individualism.”[121] Hammett admits that there is an “element of it” in the Bible, and he says the Enlightenment promoted individualism throughout Western culture. But Hammett credits “the First Great Awakening,” with “its emphasis on individual, personal conversion” for brining this distinctive into “Baptist life.”[122] Indeed, as the historian Nathan Hatch summarized, “preachers from the periphery of American culture came to reconstruct Christianity,” and Hatch said that the “clarion message that rang out above all their diversity” was “the primacy of the individual conscience.”[123]
Mullins, for his part, does not cite any previous or contemporaneous work in specific support of his concept of “soul competency.”[124] However, one can hardly fail to notice a fundamental similarity between Mullins’s “soul competency” and Leland’s conception of “conscience.”[125] It seems that Leland’s trajectory is well-maintained in Mullins, and many twentieth- and twenty-first-century Baptists carry the torch of individualism. But it is important to note that the individualized practice of Christianity is not essential to the Baptist conviction of religious liberty or the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Greg Wills writes,
From the colonial era until the early twentieth century, Southern Baptists… rejected modernity’s individualism. Baptist piety had individualist characteristics rooted in the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers… but they repulsed the privatizing trend of democratic individualism. The church, they believed, had prerogatives that superseded those of individuals. The redeemed community determined corporately the meaning of the sacred text, the shape of Christian spirituality, and the regulation of virtue.[126]
But Southern Baptist churches, says Wills, “experienced a revolutionary change between 1850 and 1950.”[127]He explains, “In 1850, Southern Baptists understood democracy largely in terms of ecclesiastical authority. In 1950, they understood it primarily in terms of individual freedom.”[128] In summary, “Evangelicals were no longer convinced that there was a divine mandate to establish pure churches as the kingdom of God on earth. The kingdom was within. Individual piety required no mediation of the ecclesiastical institutions.”[129]
The notion of individual freedom or religious individualism is more in line with the substance and practice of John Leland’s philosophy than Isaac Backus’s. Leland traveled as an independent itinerant for sixty years, but Backus pastored the same church in Middleborough for fifty years. Leland wrote dismissively about creeds, excommunication, and the Lord’s Supper, and rejected his responsibility to submit to the authority of a local church and participate in the ordinances. But Backus penned a confession of faith, a church polity, and a membership covenant for his church, and he led his congregation in the consistent implementation of these documents for five decades. Leland settled all authority (both civil and religious) on the individual conscience, but Backus exemplified a Baptist conviction of religious liberty coupled with a high view of ecclesiastical authority. Both men were thoroughly Baptist, and both have their ongoing descendants among Baptists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And yet, it does seem that only one of these men led Baptists in a direction that maintains the nature and function of the local church.
[1] Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 137.
[2] Wills, 137.
[3] Wills, 139.
[4] John Leland’s individualism will be explained further, but it is important to note here that he was a persistent preacher at Third Baptist Church in Cheshire, MA, for fifty years. However, his relationship with the church could hardly be defined as traditionally pastoral. Leland biographer Eric Smith wrote of Leland’s original agreement with the Cheshire church, and the relationship between them over the years remained just as tenuous. Smith said, “It was… agreed that while the church would recognize Leland as an elder… Leland would operate as a kind of preacher in-residence… [using] Cheshire as base of operations for his itinerant ministry, and then ‘preach [at Third Baptist] whenever he felt disposed and duty seemed to call him there.’” Eric C. Smith, John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022). 99.
[5] John Leland, The Writings of John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene, Reprint (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1969). 181.
[6] Leland, 181.
[7] The language of “First” and “Second” Great Awakening has been demonstrated to be somewhat inaccurate by Thomas Kidd. The revivals in New England during the 1740s were preceded by others, and there were more revivals during the 1760s and 1780s. But for the purposes of this essay, the present author is content to use the phrase “First Great Awakening” to refer to those revivals in New England during the 1740s. Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Kindle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
[8] William McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, ed. Oscar Handlin, The Library of American Biography (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1967). ix.
[9] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, x.
[10] Alvah Hovey, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, ATLA Monograph Preservation Program (Boston, MA: Gould and Lincoln, 1859). 39.
[11] William McLoughlin does not mention Backus’s conscious post-conversion connection with the Standing Order church in Norwich, merely that Backus had already been a member of the church from the time of his infant baptism. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, x. Both Alvah Hovey and James Leo Garrett describe Backus as having “joined” the Congregational Church in Norwich after a ten-month period of hesitation due to Reverend Benjamin Lord’s inclusion of members who had “no account of any change of heart.” Ultimately, it was this practice of unregenerate membership that provoked Backus and other church members to separate from the established church in Norwich. James Leo Garrett, Baptist Theology: A Four-Century Study, 1st ed (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009). 155. Hovey, 41-42.
[12] Hovey, 42.
[13] Garrett, 155.
[14] Backus had no formal theological training, and he was not recognized as an ordained minister by the Congregationalists. Backus wrote of his own personal experience of God’s call upon him to “preach his Gospel.” Hovey, 61.
[15] Garrett, 155. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 57 and 61.
[16] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 59.
[17] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 64.
[18] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 64.
[19] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 67.
[20] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 73
[21] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 73.
[22] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 74.
[23] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 74.
[24] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 87.
[25] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 87.
[26] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 87.
[27] Hovey, 334-339.
[28] Leland, 9.
[29] Leland, 9.
[30] Leland, 9. Eric Smith notes that the “Grafton Record Book has the event listed June 28, 1759 (p. 104), which would make John five years old, not three.” Smith, 12.
[31] Leland, 9.
[32] Leland, 10.
[33] Smith, 11.
[34] Smith, 16.
[35] Leland, 11.
[36] Leland, 13.
[37] Leland, 14.
[38] Leland, 14.
[39] Smith, 24.
[40] Smith, 24.
[41] Smith, 24.
[42] Thomas Kidd has demonstrated that the “Old Light” and “New Light” dichotomy is insufficient for understanding the two poles of reaction to the eighteenth-century revivals in New England. Kidd, The Great Awakening, xiv. But the historic label is still recognized as accurate, even appearing repeatedly in Eric Smith’s 2022 Oxford University Press publication. Smith, 26.
[43] Smith, 26.
[44] Smith, 30.
[45] Leland, 16.
[46] Leland, 16.
[47] Leland, 16.
[48] Leland, 15.
[49] Leland, 16.
[50] Leland, 17.
[51] Leland, 17.
[52] Leland, 17.
[53] Smith, 5.
[54] Smith, 3.
[55] Smith, 3.
[56] Smith, 5.
[57] Smith, 6.
[58] Edwin S. Gaustad, “The Backus-Leland Tradition,” Foundations 2, no. 2 (April 1959): 131–52.
[59] Edwin S. Gaustad, “The Backus-Leland Tradition,” Foundations 2, no. 2 (April 1959): 132.
[60] James Leo Garrett claims that Backus and Leland had a fundamental difference in their view of the proper relationship between church and state. Garrett, 163. Barry Hankins asserted differences as well, citing William McLoughlin, who wrote at length on the Backus-Leland divide decades earlier. Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon : Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture, Religion and American Culture (Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press, 2002). 128. Albert Wardin is yet another historian who has documented the contrasting views of Backus and Leland on the church and the state. Albert W Wardin, “Contrasting Views of Church and State: A Study of John Leland and Isaac Backus,” Baptist History and Heritage 33, no. 1 (1998): 12–20.
[61] Rhode Island and Pennsylvania did not establish religious institutions with their governing documents, but established religion at the state and local level was nearly ubiquitous.
[62] Hankins, 127.
[63] Garrett, 161.
[64] Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the Oppressions of the Present Day (Boston: John Boyle in Marlborough-Street, 1773). 14. Backus is typical of contemporary Baptists and Separatists in his assessment that Christianity and the civil government were first joined by the Roman empire and hardly separated thereafter. John Leland says much the same in a pamphlet he published in 1815 on Sabbatical laws. Leland, 442.
[65] Leland wrote, “when Constantine the Great established Christianity in the empire… Christianity was disrobed of her virgin beauty, and prostituted to the unhallowed principle of state policy, where it has remained in a criminal commerce until the present moment.” Leland, 442.
[66] Backus, 15.
[67] Backus, 15.
[68] Backus, 15.
[69] Backus, 15-16.
[70] Backus, 15-16.
[71] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 350.
[72] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 359.
[73] Hankins, 128.
[74] Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 205.
[75] Eric Smith asserts that it “is unhelpful to call Leland a ‘strict separationist’ if that term implies the creation of a totally secular public square. After all, Leland preached the gospel on the floor of Congress, voiced biblical arguments as a Massachusetts state legislator, and never (that we know of) even used the term ‘wall of separation,’ though the phrase was coined specifically for New England Baptists like him.” Smith, 94. Nevertheless, Kidd and Hankins do affix the label “separationist” upon Leland, citing Leland’s claim that “Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.” Kidd and Hankins, 205. Even Eric Smith admits that “Leland was a more radically consistent Jeffersonian than virtually all of his Baptist peers.” Smith, 94-95. Thus, Leland may not accurately be labeled “strict,” but he was certainly a “separationist” with ample assertions that far exceeded the typical Baptists of his day.
[76] Leland, 103.
[77] Leland, 250.
[78] Leland, 441.
[79] Leland, 441. William McLoughlin points to Sabbath laws as a particular dividing line between Backus and Leland, saying, “Backus did not live to take a stand on all of these matters [i.e., moralistic laws concerning blasphemy, profanity, gambling, card playing, dancing, and theater going], and like most colonial ministers he was no teetotaler, but he would certainly have criticized John Leland for opposing the petition to end the delivery of the mail on the Sabbath and for praising Col. Richard M. Johnson’s defense of this position.” McLoughlin, Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 51.
[80] Leland, 273.
[81] Leland, 275.
[82] Leland, 275.
[83] Leland, 275.
[84] Leland, 276.
[85] Leland, 276.
[86] Leland, 276.
[87] Leland, 648.
[88] Leland, 648.
[89] Leland, 648-649.
[90] Backus, 16.
[91] Backus, 30.
[92] Backus, 32.
[93] Backus, 44-45.
[94] Leland, 78-90.
[95] Leland, 283-300.
[96] Leland, 317-318.
[97] Smith, 5.
[98] In his biography of John Leland, Eric Smith spends an entire chapter on Leland’s relationship with Third Baptist Church in Cheshire, MA. As was already noted earlier in this essay, Leland began his fifty-year pastorate of this church by establishing his role as a “kind of preacher in residence.” Smith, 99. Throughout the first several years of Leland’s ministry in Cheshire, he had a busy itinerant ministry, but he still “preached [many] morning and evening Sunday services, composed hymns for congregational singing, officiated funerals, performed baptisms, ordained new deacons and elders, moderated business meetings, drew up a church constitution, and represented the church each year to the Shaftsbury Association.” Smith, 100. Yet, says Smith, “For all his success among the Baptists of Virginia and western Massachusetts, John Leland was never entirely at home in a Baptist church… For the self-reliant Leland, who ‘could never endure any cramping or abridgment of his own personal freedom of thought or action,’ this demand [of submission to the authority of a local congregation] was bound to create problems.” Smith, 102.
[99] Smith, 6.
[100] Leland, 60.
[101] Leland, 60.
[102] Leland, 60.
[103] Leland, 198.
[104] William Gerald McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 391
[105] McLoughlin, Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism.
[106] Eric Smith points out that Leland did pen seven articles of his faith in a letter to James Whitsitt in 1832. And Leland also led Third Baptist Church of Cheshire to publish its own confession of faith in 1834, which was a direct and unsophisticated recapitulation of traditional Calvinism. Smith, 135-136. However, Leland’s motives seem here to be far more influenced by the growing anti-Calvinism influences outside of Third Baptist Church than by any pastoral impulse to shepherd his congregation toward unity in a shared faith, governance, and fellowship.
[107] Hovey, 335-336.
[108] Hovey, 334, 336.
[109] Hovey, 337.
[110] Hovey, 338.
[111] Leland, 60.
[112] Hovey, 338.
[113] Smith, 105.
[114] Smith, 108.
[115] Smith, 116.
[116] Smith, 126.
[117] E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia, PA: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908). 54.
[118] Mullins, 56-57.
[119] Mullins, 54.
[120] Mullins, 54.
[121] John S Hammett, “From Church Competence to Soul Competence: The Devolution of Baptist Ecclesiology,” Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry 3, no. 1 (2005). 157.
[122] Hammett, 157.
[123] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 35.
[124] Mullins. His formal citations include about twenty-five unique sources, and Mullins alludes to several other sources in the text without citing them in a footnote. The volume contains no bibliography, and the sources that are cited seem to be a wide array of representative authors who offer an example or an illustration of Mullins’s substance at various points. Therefore, one can hardly expect to find a direct link between Leland and Mullins in the form of a citation. And yet, the similarity between Mullins’s “soul competency” and Leland’s “conscience” suggests a conceptual link.
[125] E. Y. Mullins defined “soul competency” by saying “Religion is a personal matter between the soul and God.” Mullins, 54. John Leland defined “liberty of conscience” by saying, “religion is a matter between God and individuals.” Leland, 181.
[126] Wills, viii.
[127] Wills, 139.
[128] Wills, 139.
[129] Wills, 139.
Marc Minter 