Baptist Persecution and the Birth of American Religious Freedom

by Kevin S. Pirnie

They were whipped, jailed, and taxed for their faith. Here’s how Baptist persecution in colonial America forged the religious freedom every American enjoys today.

A Wall Built from Suffering

On January 1, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson sat down to answer a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut — and in doing so, wrote one of the most consequential sentences in American constitutional history:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

— Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802

That famous metaphor was no abstract flourish. It was drawn directly from the lived experience of persecuted Baptists — men and women who had been whipped in public squares, locked in colonial jails, and taxed to support churches they refused to attend.

The thesis of this article is straightforward but often overlooked: the persecution of Baptists in colonial America directly shaped the American commitment to religious liberty. Enlightenment philosophers supplied the intellectual framework, but it was the suffering of dissenters, their strategic alliances with political leaders, and their relentless advocacy that turned abstract ideals into constitutional guarantees. The road from the whipping post to the First Amendment runs through the jail cells of Virginia, the petitions of Isaac Backus, and the political dealmaking of John Leland.

The European Background: State Churches and the Free-Church Tradition

One Realm, One Religion

To understand why Baptists were persecuted in America, we have to start in Europe. There, both the Roman Catholic Church and the major Protestant churches — Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed — were bound to the state or functioned as arms of government. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) enshrined the principle of cuius regio, eius religio — “whose realm, his religion” — making the ruler’s faith the mandatory faith of the ruled. The assumption underneath it all: religious uniformity was essential to political stability, and the state had both the right and the duty to enforce orthodoxy.

The Radical Alternative

The Baptists and Anabaptists of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation offered a stark alternative. They rejected infant baptism in favor of believer’s baptism by immersion — and, just as radically, they rejected any connection between church and state. They championed liberty of conscience for everyone, including people of other faiths and no faith at all. This was theology, but it was also survival: they had been persecuted by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike.

As Robert Boyte C. Howell put it in 1856: “The doctrines which they invariably held were equally well known. To the despots of the world, religious and political, they have ever been, and continue to be, unmeasurably offensive.”

The core Baptist convictions — that religion is “at all times and places a matter between God and individuals,” that no one should “suffer in name, person or effects” for religious opinions, and that civil government’s legitimate power “extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor” — were first articulated by persecuted minorities who had no hope of ever wielding state power themselves. Those same principles would later be written into American constitutional law.

The New World Repeats Old Mistakes

The American colonies offered dissenters hope of escape — but many settlements simply rebuilt the establishment model they had fled. Massachusetts Puritans erected a Congregationalist establishment as intolerant as the Church of England. Virginia established the Anglican Church by law and penalized dissenters. The Baptist experience in America would prove a hard-won lesson: religious liberty requires not merely the absence of persecution, but the positive separation of church and state.

Persecution of Baptists in the American Colonies

New England: The Puritan Establishment Strikes Back

Roger Williams stands as the first great figure in America’s struggle for religious liberty. Banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1635 for his “dangerous” views on freedom of conscience, Williams founded Providence Plantation in 1636 — the nucleus of Rhode Island — on the principle that civil magistrates have no authority over the conscience.

Working alongside Williams, John Clarke secured the Rhode Island charter of 1663, the first legal guarantee of religious freedom in the Americas. Its language was sweeping: no person in the colony “shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion.”

But Rhode Island remained an outlier. Consider what happened elsewhere in New England:

• The whipping of Obadiah Holmes (1651). This Baptist minister was publicly flogged in Boston — thirty stripes — for conducting an unauthorized worship service. Contemporary accounts say he was “so cruelly whipped, that he was like to have died under the hands of the executioner,” and he carried the scars to his grave. His response to his tormentors? He “thanked God he was counted worthy to suffer for the truth.”
• The Norwich whippings (1725). Several Connecticut Baptists were “taken up on the King’s Highway, and cruelly whipt at Norwich” — as John Rogers’s published account records, “for no other cause than going to a meeting of their own society.”
• The church tax. Throughout New England, Baptists were forced to pay taxes supporting Congregationalist churches they never attended. Some paid and then sued for recovery; others refused and faced prosecution.

Baptist historian and advocate Isaac Backus attacked the church tax with an argument colonists could not easily dismiss: “it is essential to liberty that representation and taxation go together.” If Americans could reject taxation without representation by Parliament, how could they justify taxing Baptists for churches in which they had no voice and from which they received no benefit?

Virginia: Where Persecution Turned Savage

If New England’s persecution was systematic, Virginia’s was at times brutal. The Anglican Church had been legally established since the colony’s founding, and between 1765 and 1778, at least seventy-eight Baptist men are known to have suffered imprisonment, whipping, or other violence for their faith.

Baptist growth in Virginia flowed from the Great Awakening, the transatlantic revival of the mid-1700s. Virginia’s Baptists came in two streams: the “Regulars,” rooted in the traditional English Baptist tradition, and the “Separatists,” former New England Congregationalists who had embraced Baptist convictions. The Separatists were tireless evangelists — and their success alarmed the Anglican establishment.

Who Led the Mobs? Not Who You’d Think

Later narratives blamed lower-class ruffians for the violence, but the record tells a different story. As historian Sandra Rennie has documented, “the largest proportion of ‘mobs’ were instigated by prominent figures in Virginian society; the clergy, captains of the militia, gentry folk.” The persecutors were often “people of fortune and fashion” — the very men who held authority in colonial government.

Jail Cells That Became Pulpits

The persecution took many forms, and it consistently backfired:

• 1768: John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs were seized and imprisoned in Spotsylvania County for preaching without licenses — a requirement Baptists considered idolatrous.
• 1769: James Ireland was jailed in Culpeper County. Undeterred, he preached through the bars of his cell to crowds outside. When men on horseback rode through the listeners at full gallop to scatter them, the crowds simply came back.
• 1773: “A lawless mob, headed by two magistrates” seized preacher Jeremiah Moore and his companion and ducked them in a pond — a cruel mockery of baptism by immersion.
• 1778: Lewis Lunsford was attacked by “a banditte” determined to silence his preaching.

Why Were Baptists So Threatening?

The establishment’s grievances against Baptists reveal that the persecution was as much social and economic as it was religious. Baptists defied licensing laws. Their explosive growth threatened to hollow out the established Anglican Church. They were branded a menace to religion, morality, and family unity; dismissed as false prophets and wandering “strollers”; despised for their open criticism of the established clergy; and even accused of luring laborers away from their work. The Baptists, in short, threatened the entire structure of Virginia society.

Yet the persecution never achieved its goal. Baptists kept preaching, writing, and organizing — and their suffering itself became their most powerful argument. If the state could not tolerate peaceful religious dissent, they reasoned, then the state’s authority over religion was illegitimate. That argument would prove decisive in the revolutionary era.

Baptist Advocacy and Alliances: Backus, Leland, Madison, and Jefferson

Isaac Backus: The Historian as Advocate

No one did more to document Baptist persecution and press the case for religious liberty than Isaac Backus (1724–1806). Converted during the Great Awakening in 1741 and a convinced Baptist by 1756 after years of wrestling with the question of infant baptism, Backus became the agent of the Warren Association (formed 1767) in promoting religious liberty.

In 1774, Backus presented Baptist grievances to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia — the first time religious liberty was raised before a national American body. The reception was frosty. John Adams famously told him that “we might as soon expect a change in the solar system as to expect that they would give up their establishment.” Even the most “liberal” revolutionary leaders, it turned out, were deeply attached to their state churches.

Backus refused to relent. For over a decade he pressed his case in pamphlets, newspapers, sermons, and petitions, hammering one central point about church taxes: “it is not the PENCE but the POWER” that mattered. The objection was never the amount of money — it was the principle that the state claimed any authority over religion. He turned the Revolution’s own logic against the Massachusetts establishment: representation and taxation go together; causes must be tried by unbiased judges; and the power to tax is the power to control.

His monumental History of New England with Particular Reference to the Baptists — begun around 1770 and published in parts after 1777, built on extensive travel, original sources, and wide correspondence — remains a crucial primary record of the Baptist struggle.

John Leland: The Preacher as Political Activist

If Backus was the movement’s historian, John Leland (1754–1841) was its most charismatic operator. Baptized at age 20 in his native Massachusetts, Leland preached for the next 67 years — more than 8,000 sermons, 1,524 baptisms, and enough miles traveled to circle the globe three times.

Leland’s decisive years came in Virginia. Settling in Orange County in 1778, he lived just ten miles from James Madison’s Montpelier and thirty from Jefferson’s Monticello. He watched fellow Baptist preachers beaten, mobbed, and jailed — and was himself threatened at gunpoint. The experience forged his convictions into steel:

“Every man must give an account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience. If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”

— John Leland

Note what Leland was not asking for: mere toleration. He called toleration “despicable” because “it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence.” His demand was full equality: “all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”

His most influential work, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (1791), stated the principle with unforgettable bluntness: “Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics… let government protect him in so doing.” Truth, he insisted, “disdains the aid of law for its defense — it will stand upon its own merits.”

The Handshake That Helped Secure the Bill of Rights

Leland’s greatest political moment came during the fight over the Constitution. Proposed without a Bill of Rights, the document alarmed Baptists. On March 7, 1788, the Virginia Baptist General Committee, led by Leland, resolved unanimously that the new Constitution “does not make sufficient provision for the secure enjoyment of religious liberty” and must be amended.

James Madison was warned that Leland was one of three men with “much weight with the people” opposing ratification — and was advised to “spend a few hours” with him. The two reportedly met on March 23, 1788, at Gum Springs, near Leland’s home. The details of the conversation are lost to history, but the outcome is not: Madison pledged support for a Bill of Rights, and Leland delivered Baptist support for Madison and the Constitution.

Though the meeting itself survives only through later Baptist tradition, its consequences were real. As one scholar observes, “There might have been a federal Constitution without Madison, but certainly no Bill of Rights.” And, one might add, there might have been no Bill of Rights without Leland — whose Baptist votes helped secure Virginia’s ratification and Madison’s election to Congress.

The Madison–Jefferson Alliance: Philosophy Meets Persecution

Madison and Jefferson were the political architects of American religious liberty — but they did not build alone. They were responding to the petitions, arguments, and organized pressure of Baptists and other dissenters. It was one of the most consequential alliances in American history: not because the parties agreed on theology (Jefferson was a skeptical deist; Leland a fervent evangelical), but because both were passionately committed to liberty of conscience.

Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance (1785)

When Patrick Henry proposed a “general assessment” bill to tax Virginians for the support of Christian teachers, Madison answered with his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments — arguably the single most important document in the history of American religious liberty. Its arguments echoed the Baptist experience at every turn:

• Religion cannot be coerced. “Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator… can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” Every person’s religion “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man.”
• Small taxes lead to total control. The same authority that “can force a citizen to contribute three pence only” for one establishment “may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever.” Baptists knew this from experience: tax support for one church had led to legal discrimination against all others.
• Establishment corrupts the church. After nearly fifteen centuries on trial, legal establishment had produced “pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution” — while Christianity had flourished in the centuries before its union with civil power.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786)

The Memorial worked. Henry’s assessment bill died, and on January 16, 1786, Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom became law. Its guarantees were sweeping: no one shall be “compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” nor suffer in body, goods, or civil capacities “on account of his religious opinions or belief.” The Statute declared these protections to be among “the natural rights of mankind.”

Jefferson considered it one of the three achievements of his life worth engraving on his tombstone — alongside the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia. The Virginia disestablishment fight was the direct rehearsal for the federal First Amendment, and the Baptist experience supplied its central lessons: establishment breeds persecution, the state cannot be trusted with power over religion, and liberty requires separation.

From the Declaration of Independence to the First Amendment

The Declaration of Independence never mentioned religious liberty directly, but its framework — all men “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” — made liberty of conscience claimable as a natural right. The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), drafted by George Mason with Madison’s input, was explicit: “All men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”

The Constitution as originally drafted contained no Bill of Rights — a deliberate choice by Founders who believed the structure of separated powers was protection enough. Baptists disagreed, forcefully. Their opposition to ratification, and Leland’s negotiated support, produced the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

— First Amendment, U.S. Constitution (1791)

Both clauses answer colonial Baptist grievances directly. The Establishment Clause barred the federal government from doing what the colonies had done: creating a state church and taxing citizens to fund it. The Free Exercise Clause barred what the colonies had also done: arresting, fining, whipping, and jailing citizens for their beliefs and worship.

An Unfinished Victory

One crucial caveat: the First Amendment originally bound only the federal government. State establishments lived on — Connecticut’s until 1818, Massachusetts’s until 1833, more than forty years after the First Amendment was ratified. Baptists kept fighting at the state level, and not until the Fourteenth Amendment (and 20th-century Supreme Court decisions applying it) did the First Amendment’s protections reach the states.

The Danbury Letters: A Defining Exchange

The Baptists Write to a President

On October 7, 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association — twenty-six churches, mostly in western Connecticut, plus three in eastern New York — drafted a letter to the newly elected President Jefferson. They were still a legally disadvantaged minority under Connecticut’s Congregationalist establishment, and they said so with disarming honesty, apologizing that their “mode of expression may be less courtly and pompous than what many others clothe their addresses with.” Then came their creed, stated with remarkable clarity:

“Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty — That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals — That no man aught to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions — That the legetimate Power of civil Goverment extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour.”

— Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson, October 1801

The letter’s most piercing insight was its distinction between toleration and liberty. Under Connecticut law, the Baptists explained, “what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights” — favors received “at the expence of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistant with the rights of freemen.” Toleration is a gift the powerful can revoke. Liberty is a right no government can grant or take away.

Jefferson’s Reply — and the Birth of a Metaphor

Jefferson’s answer of January 1, 1802, gave the Baptists’ principles their most enduring expression. Affirming “with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” and that “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions,” he described the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

What the “Wall” Actually Meant

The metaphor has become one of the most contested phrases in American constitutional law, so it’s worth being precise about what Jefferson meant — and what he didn’t:

• He was not banishing religion from public life. Jefferson attended church services held in the House of Representatives just two days after writing the letter.
• He was denying federal authority over religion. The wall kept government from interfering with religion — and kept religion from harnessing government power for its own ends.
• Contemporaries read it through the lens of federalism: religion was a matter reserved to the states and the people, beyond the national government’s reach.

Above all, the Danbury exchange was not an abstract philosophical seminar. It was a conversation between a president and a persecuted minority still paying taxes to a church they did not attend, still living under legal discrimination. Jefferson’s letter was not a declaration of victory — it was a promise that the struggle would continue.

Legacy: Why This History Still Matters

The Baptist struggle left an indelible mark on the American constitutional order. The principles they articulated under the lash and behind bars — religion as a matter between God and the individual, freedom from penalty for religious opinion, civil power limited to punishing actual harm — became the foundation of American religious liberty.

The through-line of Baptist influence is direct and documented. Backus carried Baptist grievances to the Continental Congress. Leland traded Baptist support for Madison’s pledge of a Bill of Rights. Madison and Jefferson, moved by Baptist pressure, drove through the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment. The “wall of separation” was not a twentieth-century judicial invention — it was a principle forged in persecution and articulated by Jefferson in direct response to Baptist pleas.

The Baptist experience offers at least four enduring lessons:

• Religious liberty requires separation of church and state — not because religion is dangerous, but because state power over religion is.
• Persecution can become advocacy, and advocacy can become constitutional protection. Suffering, organized and articulated, changed the law of a nation.
• Alliances across theological divides are possible when the shared commitment is liberty itself. A skeptical deist and fervent evangelicals built the First Amendment together.
• Religious liberty is never a one-time achievement. Massachusetts held its establishment until 1833. The fight outlived the Founders — and it continues today.

Perhaps most striking of all is how far the Baptists’ vision extended beyond themselves. Leland’s insistence that “all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians” was radical in his day and remains challenging in ours. The Baptists did not fight merely for Baptist liberty; they fought for the rights of conscience of all people.

Their story is not merely denominational history. It is the history of how a persecuted minority reshaped a nation’s constitutional order — how conviction and compromise, principle and pragmatism, produced a guarantee that has protected conscience for more than two centuries. It is worth remembering not because the Baptists won, but because the liberty they secured belongs to all of us.

Frequently Asked Questions

How were Baptists persecuted in colonial America?

Colonial Baptists faced public whippings (like Obadiah Holmes in Boston, 1651), imprisonment for unlicensed preaching (at least 78 documented cases in Virginia between 1765 and 1778), mob violence often led by clergy and gentry, mock “duckings” that ridiculed baptism, and compulsory taxes supporting established churches they did not attend.

Where does the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” come from?

It comes from Thomas Jefferson’s January 1, 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut — a persecuted religious minority still living under a state-established church. The phrase describes the First Amendment’s effect, not language found in the Constitution itself.

What role did John Leland play in the Bill of Rights?

Leland led Virginia Baptist opposition to ratifying the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights. After a reported meeting with James Madison at Gum Springs in March 1788, Leland delivered Baptist support for ratification in exchange for Madison’s pledge to champion constitutional amendments protecting religious liberty — a pledge Madison kept.

What is the difference between religious toleration and religious liberty?

Toleration is a revocable favor granted by those in power, implying their superiority; liberty is an inalienable natural right that no government can grant or withdraw. The Danbury Baptists made this distinction central to their 1801 letter, and John Leland called mere toleration “despicable.”

When did state churches finally end in America?

Although the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, it originally applied only to the federal government. Connecticut kept its Congregationalist establishment until 1818, and Massachusetts until 1833. The First Amendment’s protections were extended to the states only later, through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

1. Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. January 1, 1802. Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers.
2. Danbury Baptist Association. Letter to Thomas Jefferson. [after October 7, 1801]. Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers.
3. Madison, James. Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. 1785.
4. Jefferson, Thomas. Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. 1786.
5. Virginia Declaration of Rights. 1776.
6. U.S. Constitution, First Amendment. 1791.

Secondary Sources

1. Christian, John T. A History of the Baptists. 1922.
2. Carroll, J.M. The Trail of Blood. 1931. Note: Carroll’s “Landmarkist” thesis of unbroken Baptist succession from the apostles is contested by mainstream historians; his documented colonial-era material, however, is consistent with other primary sources.
3. Backus, Isaac. A History of New England with Particular Reference to the Baptists. 1777–1800.
4. Semple, Robert B. A History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia. 1810.
5. Rennie, Sandra. “Virginia’s Baptist Persecution, 1765–1778.” Journal of Religious History 12, no. 1 (1982): 48–61.
6. Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. “Isaac Backus.” Biographical entry.
7. Richards, Reed. “Speak Freely, Without Fear.” Liberty Magazine, November/December 2020.
8. Mercer University Libraries. “Leland, John Papers.” Biographical/Historical note.
9. Bill of Rights Institute. “Letters between Thomas Jefferson and the Danbury Baptists.” Primary source documents.
10. Virginia Museum of History and Culture. “Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.”
11. Howell, Robert Boyte C. The Early Baptists of Virginia. Philadelphia: Press of the Society, 1857.
12. McLoughlin, William G. New England Dissent 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.
13. Rogers, John. A Brief Account of Some of the Late Sufferings of Several Baptists Inhabiting in New-London County in Connecticut Colony in New-England. 1725.
14. Smith, Eric C. John Leland and the Transformation of Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

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