01 Persecution of Baptists by Protestants

“And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth” (Hebrews 11:36-38).

Before the Lord went away, he told the disciples, “They shall put you out of the synagogues; yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2). In those two passages the Lord recorded in advance much of the history of the church. The experience of his people has been one long trail of blood. At every turn the adversary has used fair means and foul to hinder the gospel. We will look at some of the experiences of the saints. But while we will be as faithful as possible to record that long trail of persecution, we want to be as careful as we can be of the tender feelings of those who read these lines. We have no desire to injure the feelings of any person. For centuries Christians have chastised the Jews for crucifying the Lord. But when we read the Bible record we discover that “the common people heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37). It was the religious leaders, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and scribes, who saw him as a threat to their wealth and power, and they dogged his every step. “The chief priests and elders [the religious hierarchy] persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas and destroy Jesus” (Matthew 27:20). It was at their urging that the multitude cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him.”

We want to say it as clearly as it can be said. We must make a sharp distinction between Judaism and the Jewish people-between the religious hierarchy, and those the Bible calls the common people. The Bible makes a distinction between that false system, along with those tyrants who used it to victimize the people, and the people who were victimized by it. By the same token, for centuries Protestants have chastised Roman Catholics for persecuting their ancestors, and there can be no question that during what we call the Dark Ages, and especially during the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Inquisition did sentence untold numbers of Protestants, Anabaptists and other dissenters to be tortured and killed. While that record is clear, it does not give anyone the right to act as if our own Catholic neighbors were involved in those atrocities. Most of us know Roman Catholics who are as decent, as honest, as God-fearing as anyone you would care to meet. We need to be careful about the way we present the historical record. The Lord pronounces a great woe on those who offend one of his little ones.

One thing we hope to demonstrate is that while Protestant writers have been faithful to record the transgressions of the Catholic Inquisition, they have been just as careful to conceal the fact that when the shoe was on the other foot, they were themselves just as brutal in persecuting those who differed with them.

Again, we tremble at the thought of putting the facts on paper. Our people have the right to know the facts, but we must keep it always in mind that we are talking about a system. We are not talking about those people in our day who subscribe to what is left of that system. We cannot hold our Protestant neighbors responsible for the transgressions of their predecessors. They did not engage in those atrocities. Very few of them are even aware of what happened, and we should not imply they are in any way implicated. For over 400 years, Protestant writers have been rewriting their history, and very few Protestants of today have any idea of their own history. For instance, when John Fox wrote his Book of Martyrs, he was very faithful to record the persecution of Protestants by Catholics, but he was just as careful to conceal the fact the Protestants were just as vicious with Baptists. For instance, he faithfully recorded the steadfastness of the Protestants, Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, as they were led to the stake to be burned. He did not record that not long before that he had personally pleaded with Cranmer not to burn a Baptist, Joan Boucher, (Joan of Kent) at the stake. It would have taken away from the story, if his readers had known Cranmer was probably reaping what he sowed.

It is impossible to overestimate the extent to which Fox’s book has altered and colored the thinking of people with regard to the persecution of Baptists by the early Protes-tants. In 1554, John Fox published the Latin edition of his Book of Martyrs. He detailed the suffering of his brethren, especially under the reign of Queen Mary. No one can read his material, especially some of his other letters, without being convinced that John Fox was a truly godly man. But, godly man though he was, when he published his English edition in 1563, his loyalty to his friends would not allow him to record their own atrocities against the Baptists, Quakers and others. In his History of the English Baptists, Thomas Crosby (1738) tells us, “These sad instances of persecution practiced by the Protestants in this king’s reign against the Anabaptists are in Fox’s Latin book of martyrs [1554], but left out in his English edition [1563], out of a tender regard, as is supposed, to the reputation of the martyrs in Queen Mary’s day” (vol. 1, pg. 59). Fox published both editions of his book while John Calvin was still living, and, regardless of his tender regard for the reputation of his friends, with that book he began a whitewash, that has continued now for over 400 years. With the thousands of books flooding the market, it is impossible for us to realize what a sensation Fox’s book was in his day. There is nothing in our day with which to compare the attention, and the veneration, it received.

According to the Sketch of the Author in William Forbush’s 1926 edition, Fox’s Book of Martyrs “was ordered by the bishops to be placed in every cathedral church in England, where it was often found chained, as the Bible was in those days, to a lectern for the access of the people.” Except for the Bible, no other book in history has ever received such treatment. The book was very effective in recording the excesses of Roman Catholic persecution, and concealing persecution by Protestants. In the Peasants’ War, the German peasants had requested such rights as choosing their own pastors, gathering firewood to heat their homes, supplying their tables with fish and game, and being paid for any work they did above what was customary. The German princes refused, and Martin Luther urged them to “stab, kill, and strangle” them. 50,000 peasants (many of them Anabaptists) were butchered at Luther’s urging. Fox recorded Luther’s struggle with the Pope, and especially his objection to the sale of indulgences, but for what he called causes reasonable, he did not tell about Luther’s involvement in the slaughter of the peasants. In his early days, Luther advocated liberty of conscience, but Fox did not record that he later urged that Anabaptists should be pursued to the death, and that he made good on that threat. The Catholics burned Baptists; the Lutherans more often drowned them. To his credit, Fox does mention John Calvin’s involvement in the burning of Michael Servetus, but he pretends Calvin was swept along by the spirit of the time. He does not mention that Calvin had previously threatened that if Servetus ever came to Geneva, he would see to it he would never leave alive. He mentions that Calvin tried to prevent the burning. He does not mention that Calvin wanted him beheaded instead. He does not mention that the Consistory, of which Calvin was President, ordered a child’s head to be chopped off for striking his parents. He mentions that Calvin “made all the people declare, upon oath, their assent to the confession of faith” he and William Farel had written. He does not mention that those who objected were driven out of their homes, and banished from the town.

Fox died long before the Presbyterians took over Parliament in England in the 1640’s. So he was too early to record their drive to assume the power that once belonged to Rome. By 1611, the Protestants learned that burning Baptists at the stake only fueled the fire. But that did not stop them from arresting Baptist preachers, and leaving them to starve and freeze for years in filthy jails until they finally died there. He did not mention that, out of desperation, their families sometimes joined them in jail, and that they all starved and froze together.

He did not mention that, if a person happened to die not long after being baptized, the Protestant authorities pretended the chill of being immersed was the cause, and they then charged the preacher with murder, and did all within their power to have him hanged. Samuel Oates was one preacher so charged. When the Puritans came to America in 1629, they set up their own theocracy, and forbade any other kind of worship. Until the First Amendment put a stop to it, they arrested, publicly whipped, and banished Baptists and Quakers. They drove Roger Williams from his home in the dead of winter. They publicly whipped Obadiah Holmes until he had to sleep for weeks on his knees and elbows. Because she refused to pay a tithe to support the Puritan minister, they arrested Isaac Backus’s mother on a cold winter night, even though she was burning with a fever, and carried her off to jail.

Again, we have no desire to injure the tender feelings of those who identify themselves as Calvinists. Many of them are the victims, not the villains, in this matter. They have just not done their homework. They have no use for Arminianism, and they have no taste for much of what, today, passes for the Christian religion. Some of those they see on television look more like religious charlatans than gospel preachers. Then they read brilliant and articulate Calvinistic writers, and it seems like a breath of fresh air. They devour their books, without realizing there is a much better, and more scriptural alternative.

It seems very few of today’s Calvinists have actually studied Calvin as an original source. They usually know him from very carefully-and cautiously-selected quotes by Calvinist writers. I have no doubt that many of those good brethren would recoil with horror at much of what John Calvin actually did and taught. Our American people have been so free for so long we have forgotten what religious persecution is all about. The First Amendment has been so effective in quelling persecution, we have forgotten how brutal both Catholics and Calvinists were so long as they were able use the law to force conversions.