Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,212

This is the grave of Isaac Backus.

Born in 1724 in Yantic, Connecticut, Backus grew up in relatively well off circumstances, but not necessarily easy ones, not after his father died in 1740. But then that wasn’t too young for the time period and Backus and his siblings were probably working by this time anyway. His mother was a deeply spiritual and religious person who had some kind of religious conversion experience back before he was born and brought this into the family. That wasn’t necessarily too common in the 1720s. What was really uncommon is that in 1740, she was imprisoned for not paying taxes because she said Christ had told her not to. Someone just paid them for her.

But the 1740s brought George Whitefield to the American colonies. The Great Awakening was the first large-scale religious revival movement in American history. It would not be the last. In 1741, Backus had his own conversion experience. He spent the rest of his life thinking about the role of religion in American life. The problem with Protestantism–as Luther, Henry VIII, and other early Protestant leaders quickly discovered–is that once you claim that others than standard religious authorities can read and interpret the Bible and other core texts, you have opened a Pandora’s Box you cannot close again. The Puritans found this out for themselves after establishing their own theocracy in 1630.

So by the 1740s, disputatious religious people were in full force. There was the Old Lights and the New Lights in these New England churches. The New Lights were a pain to the Old Lights. They made a lot of noise. They relied heavily on conversion experiences. Backus became a leading New Light in his Norwich, Connecticut church. Finally, the minister there just refused to allow them to participate anymore. So in 1746, Backus and others formed their own church based on New Light principles. In 1748, he became a minister and took a church in Middleborough, Massachusetts. By this time, he was a Baptist and so was this church.

But Backus was still seeking. One of the big issues of the day was infant baptism. Now, the level of anger debates over baptism have caused in American Protestantism is almost hard to comprehend. Should infants be baptized? Or was that a sin that promised salvation that was not going to come when God took these sinful children (which of course was a real issue in this era of child mortality)? What about the method of baptism? Should it be full immersion? Or just water placed on the head? I’d argue–who cares! But then I am not the audience. This was a serious issue in American religion. Backus had strong feelings on it. He thought infant baptism was a sin. So he left his church in 1756 over it and organized another church that revolved around his feelings on infant baptism.

None of this is really why anyone remembers Backus today, but it is a useful entrance point into some of the religious complexities of the 18th century. What we do remember Backus for is his commitment to religious liberty at the time of the American Revolution. He helped found Brown University in Providence as the first Baptist college in the United States (in fact, the oldest Baptist church in the country is just down the hill). He already had strong feelings against taxation for standard religions and was writing about how this was awful in the 1760s.

So unsurprisingly, Backus was a big supporter of the American Revolution. He was a prominent figure with a powerful voice and he fought hard to ensure religious and political freedom through it. As early as 1773, he published a sermon titled An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the Oppressions of the Present Day that specifically argued against the mixing of church and state. For modern Republicans, Backus would be Enemy No. 1, if any of them had heard of him or didn’t just lie and state that this person who specifically said that the mixture of church and state was a sin in Christ’s eyes in fact would think that 21st century America should be a theocracy. It’s not like they care about any accuracy in their use of the past for their own nefarious purposes.

Anyway, while at first Backus was skeptical about the idea of the colonies breaking away from the British, by 1775, he was fervently on board. Baptists were trying to contact the king and Parliament about religious freedom and ending taxes for state supported churches and, unsurprisingly, the British did not care about these colonist weirdos. So this brought a lot of Baptists around to the American Revolution.

Now, Backus wasn’t himself that involved in the daily activities of the Revolution. He was a supporter and he preached and wrote extensively about the need for the new government to center religious liberty and not have taxes supporting state-approved churches. But during the Constitutional debates, he was more important because he was a big proponent of the document due to its religious freedom clause and thus lent his voice to the ratification debates, which as we should all know, was hardly a foregone conclusion when it was sent to the states in 1787.

Over time, Backus also moved slowly against slavery. This was also hardly predestined. Plenty of northern fortunes were made on the slave trade, including the money held by a lot of rich people in the north today. The Baptist church would notoriously split over the question of slavery in the 19th century and never reunite and the Southern Baptist Convention is among the most revanchist parts of American society today and has been for a long time. But that also was not inevitable. There was nothing about the Baptist Church in its foundational years that suggests it would go down that road and the regular Baptists today in the North are not so insane. Backus did travel a good bit to build Baptist churches. That includes in the South. It’s unclear to what extent he disapproved of slavery in these years. He did oppose the transatlantic slave trade. Over time though, he started moving against it and announced his public opposition in 1797.

In any case, Backus was probably the most important Baptist in the United States in the 1770s and 1780s and thus his role in creating what is decent about modern America should be recognized. We’ll see how long it lasts, but he did the best he could to establish real religious freedom in this nation.

Backus died in 1806. He was 82 years old.

Isaac Backus is buried in Titicut Parish Cemetery, Middleborough, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other Baptist ministers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Kenneth Scott Latourette is in Oregon City, Oregon and Francis Bellamy is in Rome, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.