Baptist Ideas: Freedom of Conscience

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Martin Sutherland

In this series on key Baptist ideas we have traced a line of thought which explains in part the shape and concerns of Baptist life and history. Heirs to the radical reformation, Baptists understand the Christian life in terms of a call to radical following of Jesus – even if it means death – and a parallel radical commitment to others who are making the same journey: personal discipleship and a covenant with real people.

What this leads to is an emphasis on the local, in the conviction that unless our discipleship can be lived out in this place, here and now, then we are not following Christ at all. Going with this is a confidence that the Spirit speaks into the local group – that all disciples can hear the Spirit’s voice but that conversely this will be most clearly interpreted when the covenanted community gathers to listen. The church is therefore a creature of the Spirit and it owes its allegiance only to the Kingdom of God, not to the state, which has no place in religious life.

Truth To Believe

It is this set of theological convictions which generates the Baptist commitment to freedom of conscience. This big Baptist idea - often cited as THE Baptist idea - deserves careful consideration. There is no doubt that freedom of conscience has been a Baptist slogan from the start but it should not be assumed that this means Baptists have accepted whatever people want to believe as OK because they see belief as private or that it doesn’t matter “as long as you are sincere”.

In fact the opposite has often been the case. Remember, an important element of Baptist congregational life has been the covenant, on which the members of a church agree. For early English Baptists this often involved very detailed doctrinal definitions, and not just on obvious markers such as believers’ baptism or congregational government. It mattered a great deal to early Baptists that they define what truth is and that all who would be members of any given congregation should agree on those points. There was no sense that doctrine didn’t matter - if you wanted to join, then you need to join on these terms.

Not Forced To Believe

Now, that last sentence contains the real point: “if you wanted to join”. When Baptists in London in the 1700s spoke of freedom of conscience, they did not have in mind the modern concept of an autonomous mind. What they were battling was the intervention of the state. People needed to be free under the law to choose their religious allegiance. Baptists were willing to defend the right of Jews, Muslims and atheists to decide on religious questions without any bullying.

At the same time they were quite clear on what was the right choice. People should be able to follow their conscience, but in doing so they had to accept that they were making a real choice, with consequences. If your belief was out of kilter with your local Baptist church then you were choosing not to be a member of that community. You would not be taken into the fellowship at all costs. On the other hand, you had the right to come to your decision without coercion or the threat of coercion.

Personal Belief

The picture is a bit different among Baptists in the United States. There, the notion of “soul competency” came to be seen by some as the defining characteristic of the Baptist vision. This is potentially a highly individualistic approach which tends to corrode the notion of covenant and commitment one to another – so much so that one Baptist group on the United States adopted the slogan “each man’s church is the inside of his own hat”!

This development was the result of the influence of the nineteenth-century American liberal tradition which linked American culture to the rugged individual carving out their own place in the wilderness. Nevertheless, at its core, this view too derives from the rejection by Roger Williams of any attempt at human coercion into faith positions. It is perhaps best seen as “soul responsibility”. Each person is called to make their choice before God. Conversely, to bully someone into belief is to rob them of their responsibility.

Today, Baptists will be true to themselves if they continue to defend the right of people to make up their own mind, without minimizing in any sense the importance of that choice. Coercive laws on matters of belief should be resisted. Of course we have few examples of blatant state coercion in religion these days (although the effective requirement not to believe is subtly real).

On the other hand we need carefully to examine ourselves and our methods. Some types of evangelism place moral or sociological pressure on individuals at vulnerable times of their lives. We need to guard against this temptation. The choice is too important. People need to be genuinely free to make it for themselves.