HISTORY - continued

American Baptists

In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century several great traditions emerged. They can be identified as the Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Anabaptist traditions. The American Baptists find their origin in the Anabaptist tradition.

The Anabaptists were the left wing of the Reformation. They opposed ecclesiastical ceremonies, abhorred established churches, believed in separation of church and state and practiced only adult or believers baptism, thus their name, Anabaptists . . . re-baptizers. This was not an age of tolerance and the Anabaptists suffered the fanaticism of fellow reformers. Both Ulrich Zwingli, from the Reformed tradition, and Martin Luther decreed the penalty of drowning for any who went through the ceremony of re-baptizing. But the height of the intolerance was an edict passed by the Lutheran Diet of Spires in 1529. It reads in part:

By the plenitude of our imperial power and wisdom we ordain, decree, oblige, declare and will that all Anabaptists, men and women who have come to the age of understanding, shall be executed and deprived of their natural life by fire, sword, and the like, according to opportunity and without previous inquisition of the spiritual judges.

Nevertheless, or perhaps because of the persecutions, the Anabaptist movement grew. Slowly the movement gained in numbers, and by 1624 there were five Anabaptist churches in the south of England. The seeds of the Anabaptist dissent came to America in 1631 with the arrival of Roger Williams in New England. His Anabaptist, Separatist, views were no more welcome here than they had been in England. Cotton Mather once described him as, “a preacher that had less light than fire in him . . .” He was eventually banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and he landed in what is present day Rhode Island.