1
Chapter 3
“Becoming Important in the Eye of the Civil Powers”: New Light Baptists, Cultural
Respectability, and the Founding of the College of Rhode Island
Thomas S. Kidd, Baylor University
It may be hard for modern Americans, particularly Southerners, to fathom how countercultural eighteenth-century Baptists were. “New Light” Baptists emerging from the religious
revivals of the mid-eighteenth century suffered significant persecution, especially under the
governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts. The clerical and political establishments viewed
Baptists as dangerous, destabilizing incendiaries who ordained untutored farmers and indulged
spiritually extreme behavior. Baptists and other radical evangelicals claimed the indwelling of
the Spirit, not credentials from Yale or Harvard, gave men (and sometimes women) the right to
preach. Nevertheless, moderate leaders of the early Baptist movement did not disparage learning
altogether, but instead sought to establish educational institutions to gain cultural respectability.
In this context, the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University) was founded by Baptists in
1764. The founding of the College of Rhode Island raises critical questions about the place of
education and the quest for cultural respectability in the anti-establishmentarian Baptist tradition.
This essay will introduce the reader to the history of the eighteenth-century “New Light” Baptists
in New England, focusing especially on the career of their most prominent leader, Isaac Backus.
It will then consider decisions New England Baptists made regarding the maturation and
2
respectability of their movement, including the founding of the College of Rhode Island,
ministerial associations, and their support for American independence. Finally, the essay will
examine the connections between cultural respectability and the secularization of Brown, and
conclude with reflections on the tension between respectability and public religious commitment
at Baptist and Christian institutions of higher education.
Baptists had been present in the American colonies from their founding, although
Massachusetts had outlawed them in the 1640s. The Baptists achieved informal toleration in
New England by the late seventeenth century. However, before the revivals of the 1740s,
Baptists in America had little connection to the developing evangelical movement. All this
changed when radical evangelicals began to promote a new primitivism and concern for the
absolute purity of the church. Some former Congregationalists and paedobaptists began to
wonder whether baptizing infants was not just a remaining corrupt practice not corrected by the
Reformation. Reading their Bibles with newly critical eyes, Baptists realized that a plain reading
gave little sanction for baptizing infants. Some Separates (those who had removed themselves,
illegally, from the established churches of Connecticut or Massachusetts) began to see baptism
simply as a public recognition of conversion. Baptizing only converted believers would clear up
confusion regarding the status of infants: though believing parents would raise them in the
church, children could not in any sense join the church until they showed hopeful signs that they
had been converted.
Isaac Backus, the key Baptist leader in eighteenth-century America and a future trustee of
the College of Rhode Island, came over to these Baptist beliefs in a way that reveals the early
movement’s anti-establishment characteristics. Backus was converted in 1741 in Norwich,
3
Connecticut, as part of the revivals of the “First Great Awakening.” Backus recalled “it pleased
the Lord to cause a very general awakening Thro’ the Land; especially in Norwich.” He traced
the operations of the Spirit in his soul to May and June of that year, when he saw “that now God
was Come with the offers of his grace.” The arrival of itinerants greatly helped him along the
conversion path: “It pleased The Lord to Send many Powerfull Preachers To Norwich,”
including Eleazar Wheelock of Lebanon Crank and Jedidiah Mills of Ripton, Connecticut, soon
thereafter. It was James Davenport of Southold, Long Island, whose preaching most deeply
affected Backus, however: “About the begining of August Mr. Devenport Came to Norwich and
preached There three days going in an exceeding Earnest and Powerful manner: and I apprehend
that his labours were the most blest For my Conversion of any one mans.” Wheelock and
Davenport cooperated in a number of “powerfull meetings” that August in Norwich. Backus,
however, worried that despite the powerful work of the Spirit in Norwich, he would miss his
opportunity to find grace. But on August 24, 1741, while “mowing in the field alone,” Backus
finally apprehended the forgiveness available to him in Christ, saw that he too could be saved,
and found that “now my Burden (that was so dreadful Heavey before) was gone.”1
In late 1744 Backus’s church began to squabble over the long-standing questions of
ministerial associations recommended by Connecticut’s 1708 Saybrook Platform, and standards
of full church membership. It is not clear whether the separation preceded or followed a relaxing
of membership standards, but it does seem that Norwich’s pastor, Benjamin Lord, wanted both to
deemphasize personal conversion testimonies for full membership and to continue an informal
compliance with the Saybrook standards through his involvement with the New London County
1
William McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, vol. III: 1786-1806 (Providence, R. I., 1979), Appendix 1,
1523-26; William McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston, 1967), 12-15.
4
Ministerial Association. By summer 1745, thirteen members, including Backus, had withdrawn
from the church. Lord summoned them to explain their absence, and in August 1745, Lord
recorded some of their reasons. Many expressed objections to Lord himself, saying he denied
“the power of godliness” and was not sufficiently supportive of the late revivals. Some
complained that the church had lax membership standards, and that it did not make “conversion a
term of Communion.” Others protested that the church was committed to the congregational
model of church government, but that Lord had swayed toward the Saybrook presbyterian
model. One mentioned that Lord was no “friend to Lowly Preaching and Preachers,” and that he
had banned radical Connecticut itinerant Andrew Croswell from preaching there. Mary Lathrop
may have spoken for most when she stated simply, “By Covenant I am not held here any longer
than I am edified.” The Separates established a new congregation in the western part of Norwich.
The church appears to have benefited both from the radicals’ zeal and from the ongoing
frustrations on the west side of town concerning the relatively distant location of Lord’s
meetinghouse. In any case, the church ordained one of the Separates, Jedidiah Hide, as its first
pastor in October 1747. Hide and Backus frequently itinerated together during this period. Hide
testified that he separated from Lord’s church because “The Gospel [is] not preached here.”2
Backus later gave his primary reasons justifying church separations: 1) when “manifest
unbelievers are indulged in the Church,” 2) when corrupt doctrine is preached, 3) when the true
gospel and its messengers are shut out of the church, and 4) when the church admits to
2
J. M. Bumsted, “Revivalism and Separatism in New England: The First Society of Norwich, Connecticut, as a
Case Study,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 24, no. 4 (Oct. 1967): 602-04, 607-08; Norwich Separates’
reasons for separation, in Frederic Denison, Notes of the Baptists, and Their Principles, in Norwich, Conn.
(Norwich, 1857), 21-22, 24-26, reprinted in Richard Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the
Revival of Religion, 1740-1745 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1989), 102-03; McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1: 7 n.12.
5
membership those who “have the form of Godliness but [deny] the power thereof.” Backus
cultivated a network of Separates that opponents would call the “Eastern Exhorters.” Among
these was Joseph Snow, Jr., a Separate pastor in Providence, Rhode Island. In December 1747,
Backus and Snow visited Titicut, a new parish in southeastern Massachusetts. Little did Backus
know that this would become the place where he would serve the rest of his life, nor did he
anticipate the controversies over baptism and church-state relations that he would soon generate.
But as he sat down for dinner at his host family’s home, “’em words in John 4.35 to 38, were
brought in With great clearness and power upon my Soul, and Thro’ ‘em Truths I was Led to
View a Large field all white to harvest here. . .my hart was so drawn forth towards God, and in
love to his People here that I felt willing to Impart not only the gospel to them But my own soul
also, because they were made dear unto me; tho’ I knew none of ‘em personally. Thus the Lord
bound me to this People ere I was aware of it.” Without seeking the approval of local ministers
or officials, the evangelical inhabitants of Titicut asked Backus to stay and help them form a new
church. Backus drew up a church covenant, which the new church members signed in February
1748.3
Backus had no college education, but those who joined the church believed his spiritual
call to the ministry far outweighed his unfamiliarity with classical learning and languages. They
were willing to court disdain and even persecution from educated elites for the right to ordain an
uneducated but Spirit-filled minister who was committed to revivalism. The church arranged for
3
Isaac Backus, “Reasons of Separation” (1756?), in McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 3: 1528; Samuel Finley to
Joseph Bellamy, Sept. 20, 1745, Richard Webster transcription, Joseph Bellamy papers, Presbyterian Historical
Society; McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1: 12; C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 17401800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1987),
217-28.
6
his ordination by inviting pastors and delegates from nearby Separate churches. To Solomon
Paine of Canterbury they wrote, “the Lord hath appear’d Gloriously for us here. . .& he hath
united our hearts in the Choice of our brother Isaac Backus to be our pastor.” Paine attended
Backus’s ordination along with Jedidiah Hide, Joseph Snow, and other key Separates. As the
ceremony began, a town official and several local ministers arrived and asked them to stop, but
the Separates took no heed of them and proceeded to ordain Backus. The twenty-four-year-old
Backus threw himself into the work of the church, and the original sixteen members had become
sixty-one by the end of 1748. Members had to give convincing evidence of their conversion and
practiced strict congregational rule. No halfway members were allowed.4
Backus and the Titicut Separates faced fines and occasional imprisonment for resisting
tax payments to support the established churches in the area. Persecution would not remain as
consuming an issue for Backus, however, in light of internal dissent in his church over the issue
of baptism. In summer 1749, two church members began to proselytize for the doctrine of
believer’s baptism, against the time-honored practice of infant baptism. Originally, Backus was
stridently opposed to this innovation, as were most ministers across New England, whether
Anglican, Presbyterian, or Congregational. Nevertheless, the question of Scriptural warrant for
infant baptism began to haunt Backus and led him into the most profound spiritual crisis of his
life after his conversion.5
To most Reformed Christians, rejecting infant baptism seemed both subversive and
callous. It struck at the fabric of the social order, which required the passing on of the faith to
each successive generation, and it seemed to abandon infant children to fend for themselves
4
Bridgewater and Middleborough Church to Canterbury Church, April 1, 1748, James Terry Collection,
Connecticut Historical Society; McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1: 37-39; McLoughlin, Isaac Backus, 42-43.
5
McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1: 67 n.1.
7
outside the church. Baptists, of course, saw the matter much differently. They saw no clear call
for infant baptism in Scripture, but saw plenty of evidence, particularly in the book of Acts, to
suggest that baptism was for those who had put their faith in Christ for salvation. To them, the
ritual was not a mark of entrance into the covenanted community, parallel to the Old Testament
practice of circumcision. Instead, baptism was a symbol of the spiritual death and resurrection
experienced in conversion.
Most Separate churches, as well as established evangelical ministers like Jonathan
Edwards, rejected the seventeenth-century Halfway Covenant that allowed baptized but
unconverted parents to baptize their children. They saw this practice as a corrupt concession,
allowing the unregenerate to share in one of the two most sacred privileges of church members
(the other was the Lord’s Supper). Some Separates, however, took the abandonment of the
Halfway Covenant one step further. They believed that baptizing unregenerate children meant
the church would necessarily have unregenerate pseudo-members, so they adopted what they
considered the apostolic mode of believer’s baptism.6
Backus must have wondered about these matters even before they became an open
controversy in his church in August 1749. Otherwise, one could hardly conceive of his decision
late that month to come out––temporarily––against infant baptism. He spent a great deal of time
in prayer seeking direction about the matter, until suddenly he came to the conclusion that baptist
principles must be right precisely “because I felt Such a Strugling against it.” Backus assumed if
tradition strongly supported some theological notion, it was likely to be proved wrong by a plain
reading of Scripture. Thus, on August 27, 1749 he told his congregation “that none had any right
6
Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 208-09; Stanley Grenz, Isaac Backus--Puritan and Baptist (Macon, Ga., 1983),
70-71.
8
to baptism but Believers, and that plunging, Seemed the only right mode.” Even as he preached,
however, Backus had second thoughts, and within a month his mind was “turned back to infant
baptism.”7
Backus could not get away from believer’s baptism, however, and struggled with the
question for the next two years. Finally, in July 1751 Backus announced to his church that he
could find no grounding in Scripture for infant baptism. This was no easy decision, not only
because of pressure against it from outside the church, but also because a majority of his church
members were opposed to believer’s baptism. In August, Backus took a final step in his personal
journey to baptist convictions by receiving believer’s baptism himself. Benjamin Pierce, a
visiting Baptist pastor from Rhode Island, held a baptism service in Titicut at which Backus gave
his conversion testimony and “went down Into the Water with him And was Baptized.” This
move put many in his congregation into a “jumble,” he wrote.8
The “jumble” at Titicut persisted for months and a church council was called to try and
address the “Unhappy Divisions” caused by “Isaac Backus his Travail in Baptism.” The church
had almost ceased to function because of divisions over baptism, and Backus had stopped trying
to enforce church discipline, even in flagrant cases. Backus could not agree to a proposed
covenant renewal, and for a time left to go back to Norwich. He was recalled, however, to pastor
the Titicut church under a mixed-communion plan, which accepted either infant or believer’s
baptism for membership. This never worked very well, however, and the church staggered along
in debilitating disagreement over the issue for five more years.
7
McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1: 68.
8
McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus, 1: 143, 147-48.
9
The Separates and Baptists were very close to one another theologically, but their sharp
disagreement over the meaning of baptism allowed no ultimate reconciliation. For instance,
though he once entertained the idea of becoming a Baptist, Wethersfield’s Separate pastor
Ebenezer Frothingham was calling believer’s baptism the “mystery of iniquity” by 1752. After
many arguments and splits in local congregations, the Baptists and Separates finally held a synod
in Stonington, Connecticut on May 29, 1754, to decide whether they could continue in mixed
communion. Separate paedobaptists argued that either the paedobaptist “sins in making infants
the subject of baptism,” or the antipaedobaptist sins “in cutting them off” from baptism. They
recognized, probably correctly, that there was no point in trying to hold the two groups together,
despite their common origins. In a key vote, the Separates at the synod carried a bare majority to
close communion against Baptists. Backus continued to try and salvage a Separate-Baptist union,
but to little avail. Finally, Backus decided in 1756 to make a final break with his church and start
a Baptist church that would only accept believer’s baptism for membership. Once at Norwich
and twice at Titicut, Backus helped engineer separations in the name of gospel purity.
Considerations of cultural respectability seemed entirely irrelevant to the Baptists’ decisions to
separate.9
Across the colonies, the Separate Baptists maintained an uneasy relationship with socalled Regular or Particular Baptists, who were generally receptive toward the revivals of the
1740s, but whose churches, and chief organizational structure, the Philadelphia Association
(1707), predated the “Great Awakening.” The Regular Baptists’ denominational strength lay
9
Council at Bridgewater and Middleborough, Oct. 2, 1751, Ebenezer Frothingham to Solomon Paine, Nov. 23,
1752, James Terry Collection, Connecticut Historical Society; Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 127-28, 219-21,
262-64; McLoughlin, Isaac Backus, 82-84; Isaac Backus, History of New England with Particular Reference to the
Denomination of Christians Called Baptists (Newtown, Mass., 1871), 2: 113-15.
10
mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with a growing presence in the South. These Baptists,
enjoying toleration in the Middle Colonies, were much more accomodationist in their cultural
stance than their New England Separate counterparts. Accordingly, the Regular Baptists in the
1750s began to advocate establishing Baptist educational institutions that would lend intellectual
credibility to the movement. The Hopewell (New Jersey) Academy was founded in 1756 for
educating future Baptist pastors, and among its early graduates was James Manning, soon to
become the first President of the College of Rhode Island.10
Manning himself attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but the
Philadelphia Association began to believe that the Baptists needed a college for themselves, an
enterprise that no Baptists had yet taken on anywhere in the world. The idea was formally
proposed in 1762. Though there was some initial thought of placing the college in the South, or
in the Middle Colonies, it was determined that the institution would have the best chance for
political and financial success in Rhode Island, a province with religious toleration, no existing
college, and increasing Baptist strength. The idea for the “seminary of polite literature” was
quickly welcomed by the Rhode Island legislature and by Newport’s Ezra Stiles, future president
of Yale College. Stiles, a Congregationalist minister, tried to co-opt the plan for the college and
create an interdenominational Christian school, but the Baptists insisted on maintaining a
majority position on the trustee board and controlling the Presidency.11
From the outset, many Separate Baptists did not like the idea of a Baptist college and
they did not appreciate the moderate Philadelphia Association horning in on the radical New
England Baptist way. As we have seen, among the Separate Baptists’ hallmarks since the Great
Awakening were an uneducated ministry and an accompanying suspicion of college education as
10
Reuben A. Guild, Early History of Brown University (Providence, R. I., 1897), 8-9.
11
Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University, 1764-1914 (Providence, R. I., 1914), 15-27.
11
a means to preserve the power of the establishment. It is too simplistic to call this sentiment
“anti-intellectualism,” for the Separate Baptists always liked godly ideas and good (Calvinist)
theology. They sorely resented, however, the way college graduates monopolized the statesupported ministry. Their grievance was held against the cultural hegemony exercised by the
Congregational establishment, and one of the establishment’s chief claims to legitimacy was
their education. The Separates of New England also, no doubt, felt a certain condescension
coming from the more polite Philadelphia Regulars, who not only wanted to start a respectable
college, but they wanted to start it in the Separates’ back yard.
Backus expressed the concerns of many in a letter written to English Baptist John Gill
shortly after the founding of the college. He noted that critics charged, “that none but ignorant
and illiterate men have embraced the Baptist sentiments.” True enough, he acknowledged, as of
the mid-1750s there were only two New England Baptist ministers who had college educations
and neither of them were Calvinists (a requirement to be in good standing among the Separates).
Backus told Gill that since the New England Baptists had “met with a great deal of abuse from
those who are called learned men in our land, they have been not a little prejudiced against
learning itself.”12
There is scattered evidence to suggest some Separate Baptists in New England opposed
the college, or at least worried about what it might portend for the Baptist churches. Ezra Stiles
wrote of one Baptist critic that “Eld[er] Young is Illiterate—don’t like the College—says when
the old Ministers die off he forsees a new Succession of Scholar Ministers:––that it has got so far
already as scarcely to do for a common Illiterate Minister to preach in the baptist meeting at
Providence.” Critically, however, Isaac Backus threw his support behind the new college, even
12
Isaac Backus to John Gill, [1765?], in Guild, Early History, 64-65.
12
becoming a trustee. Backus decided in this case he would try the accomodationist approach,
telling John Gill the lack of Baptist education might well be alleviated by the college, which
“appears in a likely way to increase fast.”13
When Backus was elected as a trustee, one Baptist, Thomas Green, complained he could
not understand how Backus, “acting faithfully, upon his own declared principles, can long keep
his standing as a member of that body the chief of whose principles and views differing so
widely from his.” Green speculated Backus might soon get kicked off the trustee board “for the
truth’s sake.” Backus justified his cautious support for the college, however, by arguing that the
Baptists needed leaders with college degrees, and that the Baptists could not safely send their
boys to any other American college without fear that they would be recruited to another
denomination. Some Baptist parents had been “disappointed” before as sons sent to Princeton,
Yale, or Harvard had been drawn into Presbyterianism or Congregationalism. He argued that
educational credentials were not foreign to the Baptist tradition anyway, so Rhode Island College
could serve a godly purpose. Backus sternly warned, however, that he hoped Baptists “may
never imagine to confine Christ or his church, to that, or any other human school for
ministers.”14
In the school’s early years, James Manning won over many Separate Baptists by his
management of the school. He continued to emphasize that true conversion was infinitely more
important for ministers than good education. In 1769 he reminded graduates that they should
make sure they “have been taught of God, before you attempt to teach godliness to others. To
13
Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 276; Isaac Backus to John Gill, [1765?], in Guild, Early History, 64-65.
14
Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 276; Isaac Backus, A Fish Caught in His Own Net (Boston, 1768), 129, in
Guild, Early History, 65.
13
place in the professional chairs of our universities the most illiterate of mankind, would be an
absurdity by far less glaring, than to call an unconverted man to exercise the ministerial
function.” Soon Separates began widely to accept the legitimacy of the college, and Separate
ministers participated in the ordination of early graduates.15
Soon after the chartering of the new college, supporters in Rhode Island became
embroiled in a controversy over its location, a dispute that would ultimately result in the
college’s settlement in Providence and its renaming for the wealthy Brown family, who lived
there. In 1770, Providence and Newport emerged as the two leading contenders for the college’s
location. Led by the merchants of the Brown family, Providence had raised almost £2700 in
support for the college, but Newport’s boosters claimed to have raised just as much. Nicholas
Brown wrote a letter to Backus pleading with him to support Providence. Providence’s boosters
were more firmly committed to the college, and wanted it to remain distinctively Baptist, as
opposed to its “New Friends” in Newport, according to Brown. At the corporation meeting, the
supporters of Newport and Providence argued vehemently, with “such indecent heats and hard
reflections as I never saw before among men of so much sense as they,” Backus wrote. When the
vote came, Providence won by a slim majority. The decision favored a stronger Baptist identity
over the more cosmopolitan and prosperous climes of Newport, but it also firmly committed the
college to the financial support of the Brown family.16
The founding of the College of Rhode Island was quickly followed by the founding of the
Warren Association (1767). Inspired by James Manning, this union of New England Baptist
15
Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 276-77.
16
Nicholas Brown to Isaac Backus, Jan. 27, 1770, in Richard Luftglass, ed., “Nicholas Brown to Isaac Backus: On
Bringing Rhode Island College to Providence,” Rhode Island History 44 (1985): 121-25; McLoughlin, Diary of
Isaac Backus, 2: 753.
14
churches was clearly intended to imitate the structure of the Philadelphia Association. Many,
including Backus, feared the new association would try to exercise authority over individual
congregations, an issue toward which the persecuted Baptists felt particularly sensitive.
However, the association made clear that it only meant to serve as an advisory council. Many
Baptists saw the association as a central agency for agitating against the New England religious
establishments. Accordingly, the Warren Association was successfully formed, and it adopted
the Philadelphia (or Second London) Confession of Faith as its doctrinal standard. It affirmed
Calvinist orthodoxy and believer’s baptism. By the early nineteenth century, even Separate
Baptists had warmly embraced associations, with thirteen unions embracing more than three
hundred churches in New England. By then, there was no point in referring to them as
“Separates,” for disestablishment and growing sophistication made their antiestablishmentarianism passé.17
The culmination of the Baptists’ mainstreaming in New England, and American culture,
came with their decision to support the cause of American independence from Britain. Backus
began his campaign for the rights of religious dissenters in 1749 when he and other Separates
protested against a local tax requiring Separates to help pay for a new Congregational
meetinghouse. Their petition was rejected by the Massachusetts General Court. Backus suffered
quietly under this taxation until the late 1760s, when he began publishing tracts advocating the
end of the state-supported establishment. His key text on the subject was An Appeal to the Public
for Religious Liberty, against the Oppressions of the Present Day (1773). In it, Backus argued
that God clearly favored separate civil and ecclesiastical governments, in contrast to the frame of
Massachusetts’ government. “Who can hear Christ declare, that his kingdom is, NOT OF THIS
17
Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 277-82.
15
WORLD, and yet believe that this blending of church and state together can be pleasing to him?”
Backus wondered. He cleverly linked the Baptists’ cause to the Patriots’, arguing that to deny the
one while supporting the other was hypocritical. No American should expect that God “will turn
the heart of our earthly sovereign to hear the pleas for liberty, of those who will not hear the cries
of their fellow-subjects, under their oppressions.” The colonists complained of taxation without
representation, yet “is it not really so with us?” Did not the Baptists have to support ecclesiastical
governments in which they had no voice? The Baptists of Massachusetts arranged for a copy of
An Appeal to the Public to be distributed to every member of the First Continental Congress.18
Backus decided to take his case directly to Congress, as little help seemed to be
forthcoming from the Massachusetts legislature. Arriving in Philadelphia, Backus and his
colleagues found themselves in over their heads in the city’s political waters. The Philadelphia
Baptists were developing a reputation for Loyalism, keyed by pastor and historian Morgan
Edwards’s promotion of the British side. Backus immediately met several Quaker leaders who
were opposed to the Continental Congress. “These friends manifested a willingness to be helpful
in our case,” but their assistance ultimately proved damaging. The Quakers advised Backus not
to meet with the whole Congress, but with the Massachusetts delegates and others friendly to
religious liberty. The meeting assembled on October 14, 1774, and included Samuel Adams,
John Adams, and a number of other skeptical delegates. James Manning opened the session by
reading a memorial of the Baptists’ grievances. John and Samuel Adams both responded with
18
William McLoughlin, “Isaac Backus and the Separation of Church and State in America,” American Historical
Review 73, no. 5 (June 1968): 1404-05; Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, against the
Oppressions of the Present Day (Boston, 1773), 19, 52, 54; William McLoughlin, “Massive Civil Disobedience as a
Baptist Tactic in 1773,” American Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Winter 1969); 725; Mark Noll, Christians in the American
Revolution (Washington, D. C., 1977), 80-87.
16
long speeches in which they argued that “there is indeed an ecclesiastical establishment in our
province but a very slender one, hardly to be called an establishment.” The meeting went
downhill from there, with Samuel Adams suggesting the outlandish complaints “came from
enthuseasts who made a merit of suffering persecution, and also that enemies to these colonies
had a hand therein.” The Massachusetts delegates pointed out that Baptists needed only to file
certificates of tax exemption for dissenters, but Backus insisted that the often-abused certificates
also represented a violation of conscience. The Massachusetts delegates ended the session by
offering to bring the grievances to the Massachusetts assembly, but John Adams still cautioned
that “we might as well expect a change in the solar systim, as to expect they would give up their
establishment.”19
When Lexington and Concord forced a decision in 1775, most New England Baptists
joined the cause of independence, hoping the Patriot calls for liberty would eventually bring their
own full religious rights. The College of Rhode Island closed for several years during the war,
but when it reopened the trustees commissioned the fashioning of a new college seal, minus the
bust of King George III. In 1782 Manning still feared for the college’s future, telling Backus the
“State of the College is really deplorable,” and that if it did not receive sufficient support they
“must wholly relinquish it.”20
Despite the troubles of the Revolutionary period, Manning and Backus later wrote the
“American Revolution…doubtless, stands closely connected with many other [events], which
will take place in their order, and unite in one glorious end, even the advancement and
19
William McLoughlin, Diary of Isaac Backus 2: 915-17; McLoughlin, Isaac Backus, 129-32; Thomas McKibbens,
Jr. and Kenneth Smith, The Life and Works of Morgan Edwards (New York, 1969), 25-40.
20
James Manning to Isaac Backus, Aug. 3, 1782, no. 1562, Papers of Isaac Backus (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003).
17
completion of the Redeemer’s kingdom.” Worldly men would interpret the Revolution only
through the lenses of freedom and liberty, while the godly would take an eschatological view,
argued Backus and Manning. The Revolution, they believed, was “design’d by the Lord to
advance the cause of Christ in the world; or as one important step towards bringing in the glory
of the latter day.” As the “principles of liberty” spread, so also would true religion. “As light or
sacred knowledge shall be diffused, Antichrist will be destroyed.” The gospel would spread
throughout the whole earth, but they thought it not “at all improbable, that America is reserved in
the mind of JEHOVAH, to be the grand theatre on which the divine Redeemer will accomplish
glorious things.” They noted with pleasure that some revivals had recently appeared as signs of
those “glorious things.” They called on the Baptist churches to pray for “a more universal
effusion of the Holy Ghost.” Backus and Manning would have been delighted to know just how
quickly the Baptist church would grow in America over the next seven decades. As part of the
stunning evangelical Protestant boom during that period, the total number of Baptist churches
rose from about 150 in 1770 to just over 12,000 in 1860. However, full disestablishment, and full
religious freedom for Baptists, did not come to Massachusetts until 1833.21
The founding of the College of Rhode Island, the Warren Association, and the Baptists’
alignment with the Patriot cause fit almost perfectly Max Weber’s model of how marginal,
charismatic religious sects become established, rational denominations. Eventually, after a
vigorous political campaign for their religious freedom, the legal harassment and oppressive
taxation they faced in earlier years were dropped by the New England state governments.
Baptists in New England had become respectable. From then on, Baptists and other marginalized
21
Warren Association, Minutes of the Warren Association ([Boston?, 1784]), 6-7; Mark Noll, America’s God: From
Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002), 166.
18
religious groups––including Catholics, Mormons, and fundamentalists of all stripes––used
higher education and other means to establish social respectability and denominational stability.
In a remarkably frank statement of the Baptists’ intentions, the Warren Association said it was
founded for the purpose of “becoming important in the eye of the civil powers.”22
Brown did not lose its intentional Christian identity for another century, thanks largely to
the long mid-nineteenth century presidency of Francis Wayland, who remained largely faithful to
the Baptist tradition after his predecessor resigned because of his Unitarian beliefs. By the early
twentieth century, Brown had clearly become one of the nation’s elite universities, and it enjoyed
the benevolence of magnates John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Fearing that it might
appear “sectarian” or narrow, however, Brown also began to cut its ties with the Baptist church.
For a time, President William Faunce tried to manage the tension by reportedly (in a possibly
apocryphal quote) explaining, “When I speak in Baptist churches and their mission boards,
Brown is a church-related university. When I speak to the officers of the educational
foundations, Brown is a university.” Finally, in 1910, Brown officials announced denominational
tests for the Trustees and President would no longer be observed, in order to secure funding from
agencies like the Carnegie Foundation, and to “fulfill the real purpose of the founders.” The
voyage to cultural respectability was finished.23
22
The Sentiments and Plan of the Warren Association (Germantown, Pa., 1769), 3, quoted in Susan Juster,
Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, N. Y., 1994), 113,
see also 109. Revealingly, the Association dropped the “becoming important” clause fourteen years later.
23
“Sectarian Brown,” New York Times, June 19, 1910, p. 10; Faunce quote from James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of
the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, 1998),
823; Bronson, Brown University, 470-71. On the problems caused by explicit Christian commitments at research
19
The story of the New Light Baptists and College of Rhode Island should give us pause to
consider the place of education and respectability in the Baptist tradition, and the broader
Christian tradition. It would be hypocritical for me to characterize the founding of the College of
Rhode Island as a sell-out, as I currently work for and enjoy the largesse of the largest Baptist
university in the world, Baylor University. However, the history of the College of Rhode Island
at least suggests Baptists should view the religious function of Christian higher education as
susceptible to dilution in the quest for respectability.
Baptists need education and educated leaders, just as all Christians do. When it is
appropriated in a godly way, education brings humility and wisdom. It mitigates against a kind
of “me and Jesus” naiveté about the tradition of the church. It can give a stabilizing depth and
richness to the church’s teaching. Educational institutions strengthen and perpetuate the best
elements of denominational heritage. They can encourage young adults to appropriate Christian
disciplines. Learning can give students a Christian worldview that is both orthodox, and tailored
to the maturing individual soul. Baptists should not say (a la Pink Floyd) “we don’t need no
education.”
But no one is really arguing anymore that Baptists (or Christians) “don’t need no
education.” Instead, it seems that the problem may be a lack of critical reflection on the goals
and presuppositions of Baptist education. Should one of Baptists’ main goals be respectability?
Maybe it should be one of our goals, but the pursuit of respect should be tempered by an
expectation of the offense of the gospel, and the sojourning character of a biblical Christian life.
universities, see George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to
Established Nonbelief (New York, 1994), 265-70.
20
One of the greatest difficulties facing Baptist educational institutions is that they often
exist in areas where the Baptist church relates cozily with cultural establishment. It certainly
does not hurt one’s career opportunities in Texas, for instance, to be known as a garden-variety
Baptist. Baptist fundamentalists like to think of themselves as opposed to dominant culture, and
perhaps on some moral issues they are, especially when compared to “blue state” voters.24 Some
Baptist moderates in the South may think that they are really counter-cultural because they are
Democrats. But that only means they are countering the fundamentalists and the Religious Right.
Neither Democratic nor Republican politics, nor advocating for them in the college classroom,
offers a way to be counter-cultural in a biblical sense.
It is difficult to maintain a dissenting stance when you have “made it” as part of the
establishment. Baptists have been at their best historically when they have really been dissenters.
Isaac Backus (at least in his early years) and Martin Luther King, Jr. were model Baptist
dissenters. They had clear enemies to fight: religious establishments and Jim Crow-era racism,
respectively. But what do Baptists (and Baptist universities) do when they fit comfortably––
maybe a little too comfortably––within the established arrangements? There is no point in
inventing ways to dissent. No one is fooled by Baptists or Christians who claim to be countercultural when they are really mainstream.
Nevertheless, Baptists in higher education can at least keep a modest critical edge in
twenty-first century America by insisting that Christ demands our highest allegiance, and that
Christ does not simply add value to our institution. We should be wary of plans that suggest
Christian institutions can be “as good as” secular ones, with Jesus added. Instead, we should
24
Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Tuscaloosa, Ala.,
2002).
21
simultaneously affirm the pluralism of our culture and assert that if Jesus is Lord, he can
transform the established culture, partly through his scholarly followers working in their fields
and classrooms.
If cultural respect can be won without Baptists or Christians masking their conviction that
the gospel is truth, then we should seek respect cautiously. It can be a powerful testimony to
established powers when a scholar produces world-class research, while remaining openly
identified with Christ. In my own field, Christian historians like Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and
George Marsden are widely recognized as among the most brilliant and prolific, and yet critics
still seem to suspect that these scholars have an agenda driven by their faith that should be
scrutinized. This seems to me, for our time and place, a good model for the role of the Christian
scholar and the Christian university. It risks embarrassment because of open association with
Christ, and yet engages with broad, established, published academic discourses. Christian
scholars, and schools that employ them, should publicly and intentionally identify with Jesus, but
refuse to retreat into a fundamentalist enclave where dominant cultural views or ideas will not
intrude.
Christian scholars and their host schools should also resolve to maintain a vital
relationship with their sponsoring churches. Though church people and officials can be
frustrating to professional academics, not least because of persistent anti-intellectualism, Baptist
academics should remain vitally involved with the life of their local churches. They should
expect their institutions to maintain a warm relationship with Baptist churches through recruiting
students, and by requiring most top administrators and trustees to be committed Baptists. Once
religious schools decide the founding church, and Christianity generally, is too embarrassing to
identify publicly with them, secularization has arrived. The desire for cultural respectability
22
should never lead to a denial of the particularity of one’s Baptist, or especially Christian
allegiances.25
Finally, Baptists should be particularly wary of theologies that privatize or
individualize Christian faith to the point that it is relativized or made irrelevant. These kind of
theologies are particularly attractive in higher education because they make it easy to fit into the
broader world of academia. All Christians relate to God individually, but that does not mean that
any and every conception of God’s truth is valid. Just as eighteenth-century Baptists did, modern
Baptists should both elevate their distinctives and intentionally identify with historic Christianity.
One of the best things that education can do for Christians is to show them what is essential and
orthodox, and what is non-essential and trendy about their faith. Though we see “through a glass
darkly,” Baptists should continue to affirm apostolic Christianity, not “me and Jesus”
individualism.
Separate critics were wrong to oppose the founding of the College of Rhode
Island. The time had come for a Baptist college. However, the leaders of Brown paid a
considerable price when they pursued the accolades of men, ultimately, at the cost of a
distinctive Christian identity, or any Christian identity at all. Departing from their countercultural roots, the Baptists of New England became so closely identified with the dominant
culture that they forgot why an institution like Brown needed to be Baptist, or Christian, any
more.
25
Robert Benne, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious
Traditions (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2001), 63-64.