WHAT IS A BAPTIST?
by Barbara Jackson
Newsletter editor of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Virginia.

What is a Baptist? Historically speaking, Baptists were dissenters against some old-time theocrats who wanted to make everyone conform.

Baptists dissented, first, in England in the 17th century in reaction to the theocracy of Puritanism, and then again in the New World, resisting the theocracy of New England Puritanism. That was the reality that led Roger Williams to establish a new colony and a Baptist witness in New England. Then in 18th century colonial Virginia, Baptists were the dissenters to the established church. They were the voices who helped secure the First Amendment rights all citizens now enjoy. My kind of Baptist!

The fundamentalists in the new SBC on the other hand, as partners in the religious right, want to establish a new theocracy, a society where government legislates morals, where church and state are bedfellows, where women are subject to the power and authority of autocratic religious leaders, where authority issues from the top instead of from the people, a society where people are told what to believe.

Fundamentalism, by its own definition, calls for adherence to a specific set of beliefs prescribed hierarchically in an authoritarian mode of leadership. Fundamentalism by definition refutes academic inquiry and honest scholarship. Fundamentalism denies the ability of persons to think for themselves.

Fundamentalism is the opposite of historic Baptist principles. Therefore, to complete the argument, fundamentalist Southern Baptists are not Baptist as historically defined.

The historical Baptist affirms the principles that our forebears went to jail for. I repeat: those principles are soul freedom, congregational autonomy, priesthood of the believer, and separation of church and state.

This is where I stand.

December 1998/January 1999