Baptist persecution and religious liberty in early-colonial America
Religious Freedom Day, 16 January
© 2015 Christy K
Robinson
If you’re
the slightest bit familiar with my blog,
William and Mary Dyer, you
know that Mary Dyer laid down her life for the cause of religious liberty, or “liberty
of conscience,” as it was called. Her husband William Dyer, the first attorney
general in North America, was one of the founders of Portsmouth
and Newport, Rhode Island, which group stated, in
contrast with the other colonies’ theocracies, that they were a secular
democracy (religion and government were separated). William was active in the Rhode
Island legislature and was instrumental in the
groundbreaking 1663 charter of liberties granted by King Charles II, that
allowed the separation of church and state, and the freedom to do what the
conscience dictated in religious matters. That was the very beginning of the
human right that would be codified in the great First Amendment to the United
States Constitution, 130 years later.
 |
The story of the three Baptists' persecution is told in the
book, Mary Dyer Illuminated, available in paperback and Kindle.
See this link for information on the five-star-reviewed book:
http://bit.ly/RobinsonAuthor |
I was
researching ancestors in New Jersey.
I knew that they had been Baptists living north of Salem, Massachusetts.
That area, the place where Massachusetts Gov. John Endecott lived, was
inhabited by the most extreme fundamentalist Puritans, who had tried to
suffocate some Quakers and tried to sell others into slavery. They’d imprisoned
and severely whipped Quakers, too.
But before
the Quakers, there were Baptists. In 1651, the good Christians of Massachusetts
imprisoned three Baptists from Newport who had gone up to Lynn (five miles
south of Salem) to administer Communion to an old, blind man, William Witter,
who had become a Baptist. After a trial, Dr. John Clarke was fined £20 (a huge
amount of money), Obadiah Holmes £30, and William Crandall £5. If they refused
to pay the fine, they would be whipped, a stripe for a pound. They refused to
pay. Clarke and Crandall were released on the way to their flogging because
sympathetic onlookers took up a collection and paid their exorbitant fines and hustled them away as they protested, but
Obadiah Holmes refused to allow a fine to be paid for him. He wanted the
vicious hatred of the persecutors to be shown to the Puritan colonists.
The scourge
had three branches of hard leather, so that the 30 strokes left 90
gashes—and hideous scars for a lifetime. It was laid on so hard that the people
begged the executioner to stop, worried that he’d kill Holmes. As his blood
sprayed, Holmes said, ‘Though my flesh should fail, yet God will not fail: so
it pleased the Lord to come in, and fill my heart and tongue as a vessel full,
and with audible voice I break forth, praying the Lord not to lay this sin to
their charge, and telling the people I found He did not fail me, and therefore
now I should trust Him forever who failed me not.’ Afterward, when the pain did
set in and he was recovering, Holmes insisted that his flogging felt like it
had been done with roses, and that he bore the marks of the Lord Jesus.
In 1651,
after John Clarke went to London to act as Rhode Island’s agent
(and procure a new charter for the colony), Holmes became the pastor of the
Newport Baptists.
***************
I had
families of Ayers, Bowens, Davis, Swinney, and others who had emigrated from Wiltshire and
south Wales, to Salem and Ipswich,
presumably as Puritans during the Great Migration. One of the Ayers women had
a brother who was an officer at Mary Dyer’s execution in Boston.
But after
some time, they became Baptists (perhaps as a result of seeing persecution
unleashed on their neighbors), and moved temporarily to the Massachusetts-Rhode
Island border at Swansea, before leaving there in 1687 to found Bowentown, New
Jersey. They formed a Baptist church at Cohansey, and when a number of them,
including the Irish Baptist immigrant, John Swinney, became Sabbatarians in the 1710s, they
formed the Shiloh
Seventh Day
Baptist Church
a few miles away. One of their ministers, who seemed (according to my research)
to serve both the Saturday and Sunday churches, was a Welshman named Rev.
Nathaniel Jenkins.
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St. Ursula's Church, Llangwyryfon, Cardiganshire, where
Jenkins was baptized as an infant. |
Nathaniel
Jenkins was born and baptized (meaning his parents were not Baptist because Baptists believed in the choice to be baptized
after the age of accountability) in Llangwyryfon, a tiny farming village near Aberystwyth, Wales.
He would
have become a Baptist as a child or young man and studied theology in Wales or England. And he would have been exceptionally bright, to be able to be sponsored for university fees--certainly parents in a tiny farm village (still tiny even to this day) would not have had the means.
He married Esther Jones,
and they had several children before emigrating to New Jersey in 1710. He served as a Baptist
minister in the First Baptist Church
for 18 years at the fishing and whaling community of Cape May, NJ.
During that
time, he served as a Trustee in the Loan Office and was elected as a member of
the colonial Council, which was equivalent to today’s state legislature. In
1721, a bill was introduced in the assembly,
"to punish such as denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the Divinity
of Christ and the Inspiration of the Scriptures."
(This appears to be
related to Baptist groups and the Unitarian movement in England, holding a doctrinal
conference called the Salter’s Hall Controversy in 1719.)
But
Nathaniel Jenkins, highly educated and respected Baptist minister that he was,
boldly spoke against the bill. The Welshman stood on the platform of "soul
liberty," which was another term for “liberty of conscience” or religious
liberty, granted to Rhode Island
in 1663 by King Charles II, after the work of Mary and William Dyer, Rev. Roger Williams, many who had been persecuted in Massachusetts, and (wait for it!) Rev. John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes (the Baptist who was
whipped). In fact, Obadiah Holmes’ son, by the
same name and also a Baptist minister, had moved from Newport to New Jersey and was well
known to the New Jersey Baptists.
In the
assembly, Nathaniel Jenkins declared that
“although I believe these doctrines as firmly as the
warmest advocate of the bill, yet I would never consent to oppose those who
rejected them with law or with any other weapon than argument.”
Jenkins said his theology actually was similar to the bill's sponsor, so it might have helped his town and congregation to outlaw dissenters like those in the Unitarian movement. But he recognized the injustice of enforcing religious thought and behavior through the government. Government-plus-religion always results in oppression. Whether it
was his reference to the religious liberty struggles in the American colonies, the
justice and logic of his statement, or his standing in the community, the bill was accordingly quashed. Voted down. Dead legislation. Not going to happen. Thanks to the testimony of the saints who'd gone before, and thanks to the principles of Nathaniel Jenkins.
Did I
mention I love history? Soul liberty
is in my blood!
During his
pastorate at Cape May, branches of the Baptist church were established at Salem,
Pittsgrove, and Great
Egg Harbor. Jenkins spoke at a number of Baptist churches in Pennsylvania
and New Jersey in the 1720s, and was called to Cohansey and
Shiloh on a permanent basis in 1728, and
remained their minister for 25 years.
One of his
sons was also named Nathaniel, and the son took over the pastorate of the Cape May church for a short time when his father was
called inland. But the son was an alcoholic, dismissed from the pulpit, and
died in his fifties.
The Bowens,
Swinneys, and Ayers families stayed in the same church for decades, and
siblings of one family married siblings of the other family, so
that my pedigree repeats itself a bit in the 1700s. There was no consanguinity,
however. The Swinneys moved west to Indiana and eventually Iowa. They remained Seventh-day Baptists for
200 years.
While researching something else, I found a mention of Nathaniel Jenkins, where he and other Welsh Baptists wanted to investigate a legend they'd heard about a Welsh prince discovering America in 1170.
I wrote about it HERE.
Rev.
Jenkins died August 2, 1754, in the 77th year of his age, still a minister, and
is buried in the
Baptist graveyard at Cohansey, Shepperd's Mill, New Jersey.
In this second house the church continued to worship during the
pastorate of Mr. BROOKS [also my ancestor!], who died in 1716 in his 55th year and that of
his successors, Rev. William BUTCHER, who became pastor in 1721 and died
in the service December 12th 1724 aged 27. During the pastorate of his
successors, Rev. Nathaniel JENKINS who in 1730 removed to Cohansey from
the first Cape May church, the third meetinghouse was built on the same
site in 1741. It was a frame one 36 by 32 feet in size and Morgan
EDWARDS in 1789 wrote: The house is finished as usual, and is
accommodated with a stove, something not usual in that time, the small
foot-stoves filled with hot coals, brought by the worshippers, being in
that day the only way of counteracting the cold most meetinghouses.
In this house Mr. JENKINS finished his labors on earth, dying June
2nd, 1754 aged 76. Rev. Robert KELSEY succeeded him in 1756 and spent
his life ministering to the people from this pulpit, dying May 30th
1789, aged 78 years. Source: Cohansey Baptist Church history. They are incorrect about Rev. Jenkins dying in June because the calendar convention at the time was "the second day of sixth month," on the Julian calendar which began in March--so the death date should be 2 August 1754.
My parents visited the Cohansey and Shiloh locations in the spring of 1976, and made acquaintance with distant cousins who still lived there, still Seventh-day Baptists. Nathaniel Jenkins was my 7th-great-grandfather.
*****
See comments on http://baptistnews.com/culture/social-issues/item/30066-critics-say-national-day-of-prayer-divides-americans-by-faith
You may think that a national day of prayer, a Ten
Commandments plaque at the courthouse, prayer in schools or council meetings, or mandatory closures
on Sunday as advocated by the government are small things. But they are the
camel's head in the tent. Soon, the tent will be full of
camel, and you’ll be out in the swirling sand storm. If the lobbyists and “morals police” win on one
point, they’ll keep coming at us with more.
People
died in this country and elsewhere,
for the right to keep government separate from religion, and still allow the
freedom to worship God as you feel called. Don't trample their blood in your
eagerness to wave your Bible and feel patriotic and evangelical. I hope you use
the link at the top of the article to read about Mary Dyer and her death for
religious liberty.
Christy K Robinson is
author of the books:
If you enjoy life sketches, anecdotes, and historical details like these, you can find them in the book Effigy
Hunter, by Christy K Robinson. It's available in print from Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
