By Bill Leonard
In 1645, Anglican clergyman Daniel Featley wrote of the “Dippers” (Baptists) rampant in England:
“They preach, and print, and practice their Heretical impieties openly; they hold their Conventicles weekly in our chief Cities, and Suburbs thereof, and there prophesie by turns; … they build one another in the faith of their Sect, to the ruin of their souls; they flock in great multitudes to their Jordans, and both Sexes enter into the River, and are dipt after their manner with a kind of spell containing the heads of their erroneous tenets, … And as they defile our Rivers with their impure washings, and our Pulpits with their false prophecies and fanatical enthusiasms, so the presses sweat and groan under the load of their blasphemies.”
In the spring of 2015 amid debates over conscience, bigotry and religious liberty laws in Indiana and Arkansas, Baptist preacher and probable presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told a radio interviewer:
“The [political] left has gotten very good at creating a crisis, something to divide the country. Well, it won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the gospel. And I’m talking now about the unapologetic, unabridged gospel that is really God’s truth. … And that’s what I’m seeing here is that in the name of tolerance, there’s intolerance. In the name of diversity, there’s uniformity. In the name of acceptance, there’s true discrimination.”
The more things change; the more they remain the same? Almost four centuries of cultural transition have passed between Featley and Huckabee, but debates over sexuality and religious liberty continue. Daniel Featley took one look at the Baptists and saw in them the collapse of both church and state. In a book titled Dippers Dipt, or the Anabaptists Plunged over head and ears in a Debate in Southwark published in 1645, Featley reported on his dispute three years earlier with a group of English Baptists (he calls them Anabaptists) in London.
It started with religious liberty. Among the dangers of that upstart sect was their “insolent” belief, “that it is the will and command of God, that since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian Consciences and worships be granted to all men in all Nations and Countries; That Civil States with their Officers of justice are not Governors or defenders of the Spiritual and Christian state and worship. …” Should the sect prevail, Featley warned, “we shall have no Monarchy in the State, or Hierarchy in the church, but Anarchy in both.”
Baptists’ radical views on religious liberty were compounded, Featley insisted, by their “promiscuous” baptismal practices, a sure sign of underlying sexual depravity. He described this scandalous sacrament graphically, with “great multitudes of men and women together in the evening, and going naked into Rivers, there to be plunged and Dipt.” Such acts, he said, “cannot be done without scandal, especially where the State giveth no allowance to any such practice …. Ergo, The Sacrament of Baptism ought not to be administered with such plunging or Dipping.” These outdoor, dusky, “promiscuous” immersions of both sexes were not only morally questionable; they were also politically illegal, lacking permission from the state.
To illustrate this licentious practice, Featley published a sketch of Baptist baptisms as allegedly practiced in the rivers of 17th-century England. The baptism scene is surrounded by caricatures of theologically aberrant heretical groups from across church history, linking Baptists to a heritage of heresy. Labeled “The Description of Several Sorts of Anabaptists with their manner of Rebaptizing,” the drawing shows a “Jordan” in which two distinct immersions occur. To the right are two naked, bearded men, their hands and bodies pressed close against two females (“Virgins of Zion”) whose soaked robes cling to their bodies, revealing their naked breasts. To the left is a baptism involving only males. Three naked men, labeled “proselytes,” are clustered around another naked male whose head, while tipped toward the water, appears to linger at crotch level of the one who is “dipping” him.
This amazing drawing is clearly a kind of 17th-century baptismal pornography, intended, no doubt, to give visual evidence of the dissolute intentions behind Baptist advocacy of immersion, a pseudo-biblical deed that offered opportunity for both heterosexual and homosexual activity. Baptists respond to the accusations ably but Featley dismissed them as “an illiterate and sottish sect,” intellectually unfit to interpret Scripture.
What might debates between Featley and the Dippers mean today?
• History should inform, perhaps temper, our rhetoric as to how and when the church is collapsing.
• Religious liberty is inherently controversial, contentious and messy. We Baptists should know that since our forebears set it in motion.
• Caricature can occur on all sides of any issue, particularly where religious freedom and sexuality are concerned.
• Today’s heresy sometimes becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy.
• What sounds like conviction in a religious community can sound like bigotry in the public square.
• Religious liberty debates are far from over. They are worth having then and now.