One of the greatest Christian dissenters I’ve ever known was James M. Dunn, late chief executive of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and founding faculty member of Wake Forest University School of Divinity.
Like his dissenting Baptist forebears, James simply gave a gospel witness and let the Holy Ghost fall where it might. I shall never forget the day not long after the School of Divinity began when I was sitting in my office watching Professor Dunn testify at the cabinet appointment hearings for John Ashcroft to be attorney general of the United States. Dunn’s name appeared at the bottom of the TV screen, as did the words “Wake Forest University.”
Bill Leonard
“O God,” I said out loud, as a prayer, not an oath.
Minutes later, my phone rang and a voice on the other end said, “Does this man who’s testifying against Mr. Ashcroft work at Wake Forest?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well,” she continued, “he’s criticizing a fine Christian. Can you stop him?”
“No, ma’am,” I responded, “I’m just the dean; you’d have to talk with Jesus if you want to stop him.”
“You’re no better than he is,” she declared, and hung up.
I still take that as a gospel compliment.
Our times compel us to acknowledge that dissent, often with religious implications, is not only present, but also essential in a democracy, or even a former democracy. LIKE NOW! That reality prompted “The Legacy of Dissent” conference sponsored by Wake Forest School of Divinity, Aug. 7-8, as graciously highlighted by Derek Crawford in his recent BNG article.
History of dissent
Dissent as a descriptive term came into usage for labeling Protestant sectarians in 17th century England. It was applied to those minority groups — Separatists, Baptists, Quakers, Seekers, Ranters, Levellers and other religious nonconformists who challenged what Daniel White calls the union of “secular morality” and the state-privileged Anglican Church. It was a classification for Christians who were “dissenting from something” doctrinally, politically and morally, as represented in a state-supported religious establishment. Dissenter-oriented groups were described by the novelist Daniel Defoe as those Christians who were “straightned in their Consciences,” and “spoke from the Heart to the Heart.”
In Dissent in American Religion, Baptist history professor Edwin Scott Gaustad explores the imperative of dissent, writing, “Should a society (whether church or state) actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow, and the shadow of death begins to fall across it. LIKE NOW! No society — ecclesiastical or political, military or literary — can afford to be snared by its own slogans.”
Gaustad acknowledges that dissent can be “irritating, unnerving, pigheaded, noisy and brash. It can also be wrong.” Yet, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, he concludes that “consent makes democracy possible, dissent makes democracy meaningful.”
Dissenters compound faith’s eccentricities and call attention to the ways in which governments and religious communities cut deals with their consciences for the sake of order and control. Gaustad notes: “This reform of religion in the name of religion, this growing edge, this refusal to let well enough alone, is the role of dissent.”
“The dissenter is a powerful if unpredictable engine in the service of a cause.”
It “may also be a manifestation of the unfettered human spirit,” he adds. “The dissenter is a powerful if unpredictable engine in the service of a cause.”
Shine some gospel light
The rhetoric of dissent calls us to shine some gospel light, not only on the major ethical and spiritual challenges of our time, but on the often-unnoticed deals by which church, individuals or societies normalize the little injustices, the casual callousness, the “locker room banter” that dehumanizes. LIKE NOW!
In Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, Oxford University professor Paul Fiddes reminds readers that “flowing from the personal nature of faith and salvation is the defense of freedom of conscience and freedom from persecution.” He declares, “The very first appeal in English for religious liberty for all — not just Christians — was made by the minister of the first Baptist Church on English soil.”
That person was none other than Thomas Helwys, writing in The Mistery of Iniquity (1612), that “for men’s religion to God, is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man, Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
Also in 1612, a confession of faith titled “Propositions and Conclusions Concerning True Christian Religion” demonstrates how early in their history Baptists linked conversion with religious liberty. It reads: “That the magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, to force or compel men to this or that form of religion, or doctrine: but to leave Christian religion free to every man’s conscience and to handle only civil transgressions, injuries and wrongs of man . … For Christ only is the king and lawgiver of church and conscience.”
In 17th century England, the state required all infants receive Christian baptism at birth; each baptismal certificate being a birth certificate. Baptists insisted Christian conversion was an encounter between God and sinners seeking redemption and could not be compelled by the state.
Nineteenth century British historian Edward Underhill, insisted that “a distinguishing … trait” of the early Baptists was their claim, “for the church and for the conscience, of freedom from all human control.”
“Sometimes dissent is demanded because injustice is simply unbearable.”
Sometimes dissent is demanded because injustice is simply unbearable and to end that injustice requires dissent as civil disobedience, times when an oppressed minority is at odds with the cultural, religious, political, economic status quo. And all too often the times get out of hand, and dissent is thrust upon us. LIKE NOW!
Sometimes history and dissent collide. The times explode, and if we don’t claim the dissenter’s calling, it claims us. Conscience compels us to break the silence.
Such was the gospel imperative required to end Jim Crow segregation and cruelty in the American South.
Martin Luther King and dissent
In Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. I neither started the protest nor suggested it. I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman.”
For King, dissent against Jim Crow laws and culture was inseparable from Jesus’ own sermonic dissent. King recalled, “When the protest began, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance.”
For King and other Black preachers, such dissent was anchored in the witness of the gospel — a sign that the gospel itself was alive, demanding action against legalized racism, oppression and injustice. LIKE NOW!
King insisted, “The Christian gospel is a two-way road” of response to human need. And he concluded: “Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”
“To claim the voice of dissent is metaphorically to handle serpents.”
Even after the mantle of leadership fell upon him, King was well aware of the difference between gospel dissent and bellicose chaos. Reflecting on his role as preacher and civil rights activist, King asked: “How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds?”
Thus to claim the voice of dissent is metaphorically to handle serpents, to take a chance that your own sense of justice, righteousness and gospel is a true one and deliberately step into the danger zone. LIKE NOW!
King captured the purpose of gospel dissent, declaring that, “in substance,” Jesus told us: “Whenever I come, a division sets in between justice and injustice. I have come to bring a positive peace which is the presence of justice, love, yea, even the kingdom of God.”
Today, we have a historic opportunity, indeed, obligation, to exercise “the responsibility of a minority,” in our own culture, and for many of us perhaps, in our own churches and denominations, speaking out from the depth of Christ-arrested consciences against the hatred, discrimination and violence of our own times.
I said this years ago. It’s still true: Practicing dissent is never easy. One person’s dissenter is another’s anti-Christ. One person’s conscience is another’s heresy. One person’s community organizing is another’s mob.
Sometimes dissent can get you damned.
Sometimes silence can too.
LIKE NOW!
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce.