The label “Baptist” carries many connotations. From my rearing in the rural South, the term was synonymous with red-carpeted sanctuaries, red-hot Vacation Bible School summers and, perhaps most prominently, red-faced delivered “hell and brimstone” filled sermons from the pulpit.
While many of the respected fragile Baptist beliefs are worth mentioning, the rich tradition of dissent is often ignored. One only needs to look at the beginnings of Baptists and their nonconformist founders, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys.
Smyth administered a self-imposed believer’s baptism upon himself, seeing this as essential to authentic conversion. At the same time, Helwys, leaving Smyth in Holland to return to England, also wrote a defiant letter to King James I, reminding the King that he was only a man and not God. From these two individuals comes a floodgate of what could be labeled as Baptist “others.”
In her work “The Cloister Walk,” Kathleen Norris offers a name for those practicing dissent by labeling them as “necessary others,” linking them to the prophets of Hebrew scripture. Dissenters and necessary others gift the masses with difficult messages and questions while often experiencing hostility and discrimination. Throughout history, Baptists have been no different.
The mission of early Baptists was to expose a way of life contrary to the rule and power of empire. They believed Jesus was a missionary bringing a message that preached practice over theology.
The history of the early Baptists points to dissension as a marker of identity. It involves fellow renegades partnering with neighbors and God.
A disruptive God, understood in the personhood of Jesus, joins in the mission with other dissenters who are asked to participate fully in the life of the world.
One cannot talk about dissent and not mention Puritan misfit minister turned, for a short time, shit-stirring Baptist Roger Williams. Williams strongly pushed for the separation of church and state by denouncing the Church of England’s involvement with the American colonial churches. He openly debated the prominent clergyman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Cotton.
Williams acted as the de facto dissenter to those in power for five years. Finally, his constant pestering resulted in his exile from the colony in the fall of 1635 for sharing his rebellious teachings and opinions.
In 1636, Williams and those who followed him settled on a piece of land purchased from the local indigenous people in Rhode Island. Williams designated it as a destination for those distressed of conscience.
This land would become a place that welcomed the religious and non-religious alike. While Williams’s actions seemed divisive to some, he pushed for the liberty of conscience to ensure that all people were free and equal.
One of the most famous letters of dissent ever written is one of the most revered pieces of civil rights history. Written by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” called to attention the systematic oppression experienced by African Americans of his day. While many associate King’s works with his activism in the 1960s, his motivation to action, which he expressed poignantly in his Birmingham letter, came from his black Baptist heritage.
After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King publicly opposed the Vietnam War and spoke out against other forms of injustice. His attention to the writings of other dissenters, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Howard Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi, led him to embrace methods of nonviolent resistance and elements of the Social Gospel Movement. King’s call for dissension in his Birmingham letter responded to those he saw as seeking peace and harmony for the sake of conformity.
And then there was Will Davis Campbell. A Mississippi-born Baptist raised by sharecroppers, Campbell would first dissent against his southern upbringing by attending divinity school at Northern Yale University. He would return to the South after graduation and preach on civil rights, fair labor conditions, and the need for racial reconciliation from his small Louisiana pulpit.
Campbell’s nonconformist ways cut short his tenure as a congregational minister. His stint as the director of religious life at Old Miss ended for the same reasons.
Campbell attended demonstrations in an advisory role for the National Council of Churches. This exposure made him the only white man present at the inaugural meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After the death of his friend and activist Jonathan Daniels, Campbell began to minister to those he saw as part of the group he thought Jesus would call the least of these: poor Southern whites.
Campbell was criticized by both conservative and liberal camps, never letting either pigeonhole him. His writings about his life and work express his vulnerability, a willingness he shows through his dissenting position to seemingly take the other side of any argument.
Like communion and baptism, acts of dissent can be seen as a third ordinance for the people known as Baptists.
Smyth’s call for authenticity, as seen in his administering his own baptism, reminds us to be true to ourselves in order to be true to one another.
By establishing Providence, Roger Williams declared that if one person didn’t have the right to worship freely, no one did.
King, with his nonviolent work, proved that love and compassion, a gospel message, was capable of confronting racism and forcing white America to wake up.
Will Campbell helped us see that even our enemies deserve God’s love, and while it can be difficult, we need it, too.
In this light, dissenters are working to expose sin for what it is–not an act, but anything that separates neighbors from neighbors and God. A dissenter’s call invites one to share the uncomfortable message of God’s grace.
This grace often involves the misfits of our society and our faith. Far too often, they have been the best of us.
Lord knows we need these voices now.
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received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity. He is an ordained minister affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and enrolled in the doctor of ministry program at McAfee School of Theology. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. He currently resides in New England with his family. His thoughts and reflections are his own.
