The quest for religious freedom is a distinctive Baptist tradition, but the threats to religious freedom in the 21st century are different from those 400 years ago.
This assessment of Baptists’ historical commitment to religious liberty was given by Denton Lotz, former general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), during a special worship service to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Baptist movement in Amsterdam on July 30.
The first Baptist church was founded in Amsterdam in 1609 by British exiles who fled religious persecution in their country.
At the outset, Baptist pioneers such as John Smyth and Roger Williams were “persecuted, reviled, mocked and often [endured] legal repression,” Lotz recounted.
The refusal of Baptists to baptize infants in 15th- and 16th-century Europe was an anti-state and anti-cultural movement that invited repressive actions by governments and state churches.
But in the 21st century, “most civilized and democratic governments recognize religious freedom as an inherent right” and the “United Nations (Universal) Declaration [of] Human Rights of 1948 affirms religious freedom and the right to conversion,” Lotz explained.
According to Lotz, who served as BWA general secretary for 19 years until his retirement in 2007, “the real enemy of religious freedom is the religion of secularism, which wants … to [confine] religion to its buildings and to prohibit a public expression of faith.”
These rabid secularists, especially in the Western Hemisphere, would rather that religion and faith be silenced.
“The conflict today is not about religious practice … but rather whether or not religion will be granted a fair hearing,” Lotz told the several hundred worshipers gathered in the United Mennonite Church in Amsterdam. “Our public and state education has promoted secularism as its own religion and has indoctrinated the younger generation to believe that man can live without God and can explain the universe and history and community without faith.”
The media often prohibit religious expression, he said, noting that though religion is so prominent in the world, it is absent from the news. As a result of growing secularism, the Western world is “entering a new dark age when ignorance concerning God, creation and morality [exist] and humanity descends again into animalistic anarchy, decadence and violence.”
Therefore Baptist Christians cannot rest on their laurels, depending on the glories of the past when Baptists were champions in the cause of religious and other forms of liberty, Lotz advised.
“We as Baptists must continue to defend religious freedom for all peoples and all religions,” he said.
“If we fail to take seriously the 21st century and merely continue to defend religious freedom as though we were living under King James I, then we will have become irrelevant and our defense of freedom irrelevant.” (BWA)
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