Surely every authentic Baptist rejoices in the 350 years of American Jewish life. We celebrate the freedom of religion and pluralism that has marked our lives together since 1654 when the first 23 Jews arrived in New Amsterdam.
A strong chain has linked Baptists and Jews theologically, historically and politically. Amanda Porterfield, in her 2001 book The Transformation of American Religion, gets right to the heart of Jewish/Baptist theological affinity. She wrote that an “internalized ethical analysis,” or “commitment of conscience” fueled the thought of Roger Williams, founder of the first Baptist church on this continent. For cultural historian Perry Miller, Williams was “the symbolic embodiment” of complete religious freedom.
To the degree that Baptist leaders like Walter Rauschenbush and Martin Luther King Jr. have exercised this cantankerous Baptist individualism, they have been at the heart of a common Baptist/Jewish religious personalism. In fact, King wrote his doctoral dissertation on this subject.
To the secular observer, it may appear to be simply high humanism. But to Jewish and Baptist believers, a person's profound biblical belief affirms that all mortals are made in the divine image and that immediate and personal access to the Creator is possible, without formula or filter.
Historically, Baptists and Jews have a long-standing partnership. By its denial of any official religion, Rhode Island's bold experiment in radical religious liberty bound together Baptist believers and observant Jews. One can see its roots in Roger Williams's Limits of the Civil Magistrate (1652) that he addressed to Parliament:
“I humbly conceive it to be the duty of the civil magistrate to break down that superstitious wall of separation between us Gentiles and the Jews, and freely (without their asking) to make way for their free and peaceable habitation among us.”
By 1663 Roger Williams and Dr. John Clarke had secured a charter for “The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” It was called “the most liberal state paper ever issued by the English Crown.” It permitted English subjects to “hold forth a lively experiment … with full liberty in religious concernments.”
May we never lose that liberty!
The “otherwise minded” dissenters, including Baptists and Jews, were glad that the state no longer had a right to enforce religious uniformity or to collect taxes for the support of the clergy.
A group of Sephardic Jews came to Newport, R.I, then governed by Baptists, as early as 1658. By 1677 the Jews bought land for a sanctified cemetery plot, and by Dec. 2, 1763, they dedicated the synagogue in Newport, later named for Isaac Touro, an early spiritual leader. As Jews flourished in late colonial Rhode Island, they were still unwelcome in Puritan Massachusetts.
In August 1790, before there was a Bill of Rights, President Washington, visiting that Newport Congregation, heard an address given by Moses Seixas, warden of the synagogue. Washington's reply days later repeated the warden's historic phrases: “The Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Politically, religious belief is none of government's business. Our two peoples have been solid and steadfast allies in the struggle for separation of church and state, the necessary corollary of religious liberty.
A half-century after Roger Williams, John Locke wrote that “true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.”
Then, nearly a century later came Madison and Jefferson making it clear that when government intrudes into religion, it always has a touch of mud. When government tries to foster religion, it inevitably does it harm. When religion appeals to government to enforce faith it falls flat on its face because “forced faith” is an oxymoron.
Today, most Baptists and Jews who are mindful of our American heritage oppose state-sponsored religious exercises in public schools. We tend to dislike graven images of the Ten Commandments put up by the people in public places. We often fight voucher schemes that take tax dollars for private and parochial schools. We are generally suspicious of all sorts of so-called “faith-based” initiatives that drain needed resources from people-serving programs and divert those monies into religious institutions.
Roger Williams knew that a nation cannot be Christian; only persons can be Christians. To call a nation Christian, he said, may make a nation of hypocrites but not one single true believer.
Here's to another 350 years of Baptist/Jewish partnership for freedom, for pluralism, for truth telling, for democracy. For Heaven's sake!
Religion News Service
James Dunn is professor of Christianity and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School and former executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee.