A recent “dustup” over a new book by R. Albert Mohler Jr. — president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — has put an old question back on the table: may the state punish blasphemy? In the book Mohler argued that “the government has the full right to restrict and punish blasphemy”, then, after an outcry, withdrew the claim this week, saying simply “I blew it.” An essay at The Gospel Coalition uses the episode to untangle the historical, legal, theological and ecclesiological questions behind blasphemy laws — and to show why support for them falls well outside the Baptist, believers-church consensus.
The essay begins with the English roots of the crime. Blasphemy was first recognised under English common law in 1676 — in Taylor’s Case, decided by Chief Justice Matthew Hale — against the backdrop of a church merged with the state, where the Clarendon Code and the 1673 Test Act had already been used to persecute anyone worshipping outside the Church of England. It was against that same backdrop that the first English Baptist church was formed by Thomas Helwys in 1612. Helwys became an ardent defender of religious liberty, insisting that “men’s religion to God is between God and themselves” and that the king had no power to punish “heretics . . . in the least measure”. When the Second London Baptist Confession was adopted in 1689, largely modelled on the Westminster Confession, its most notable edits included cutting the clauses that authorised the civil magistrate to enforce religious conformity and to punish blasphemy and heresy.
The pattern held in America. Nearly every colony criminalised blasphemy — Massachusetts Bay made it a capital offence in 1641 — while Rhode Island, founded by the (momentary) Baptist minister Roger Williams, stood alone in protecting even blasphemous speech. Baptists were prominent among those who opposed ratifying the US Constitution because it lacked an explicit guarantee of religious liberty, a pressure that helped produce the First Amendment. The essay notes that the Southern Baptist Convention’s own Baptist Faith and Message 2000 affirms that “the state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind” and that “church and state should be separate”, and that no resolution adopted by the SBC has ever called for governmental punishment of blasphemy.
The essay’s diagnosis is that Mohler’s position rests on a move Baptists have resisted for four centuries: compelled religious acknowledgment — requiring acknowledgment of the nation’s Christian character as a condition of citizenship or office, a religious test in all but name. That, it observes, was precisely the kind of requirement the British Crown used to exclude dissenting Baptists from public life in the 1600s. To abandon the tradition now, in a culture increasingly hostile to Christian faith, would be “foolish in the extreme”. The essay closes with the argument that the freedom to speak against current cultural dogmas “protects us today, allows us to push for change tomorrow, and ensures we can spread the gospel that alone will save in the end.”
Source: The Gospel Coalition — thegospelcoalition.org
