UPCOMING BOOK FROM WELSH TRACT PUBLLICATIONS ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY (Santamaria)

 

This work matters in Baptist history because it’s not a later “Baptists were always for freedom” victory lap—it’s early, primary-source Baptist-era argumentation where the principle is hammered out while the bruises are still fresh. Thisvolume even states bluntly that Leonard Busher’s tract “remains to us as the *earliest t on this great theme.” That’s historical gold: it lets you watch early Baptists (and their close allies) reason from Scripture to a public ethic in real time—before “religious liberty” became the respectable thing to say at civic banquets. (Wikipedia)

It’s also important because it shows what Baptists meant by liberty of conscience: not “anything goes,” but a jurisdictional claim—the magistrate’s job is to punish civil wrongs, not police salvation. The text points to Gallio’s refusal to referee religious disputes—“I will be no judge of such matters”—as the model for government res Then it goes straight for the theological jugular: Christ didn’t spread truth by coercion; “the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them,” so persecution in the name of Christ is treated as a category The “why” is stated with unusual clarity: the goal is “setting at liberty that which God made free, even the consc

In the story of Baptist identity, this theme isn’t a side quest—it becomes one of the tradition’s signature fingerprints. The foreword-level material claims that “to the Baptists… belongs the honour of first asserting… the right of every man to worship God as conscience dictates.  And it situates these arguments in the orbit of Thomas Helwys and the early English Baptist community that, as the book notes, “norsecution… for conscience’ sake.” That’s not just pious talk: Helwys’ A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity is widely treated as a landmark statement of religious liberty in English Baptist origins. (The Free Speech Center)

Finally, this collection is important because it preserves the logic chain that later Baptists kept reusing—across confessions, controversies, and continents. The arguments here (conscience before God, Christ’s non-coercive kingdom, limits of civil authority) are the same conceptual engine behind later Baptist appeals for church–state separation in both Britain and America. (ifl.web.baylor.edu) Even if you end up disagreeing with parts of the rhetoric or historical framing, the texts remain a kind of Baptist “source code”: you can trace how a persecuted minority forged a durable theological case for freedom that outlived the particular persecution that provoked it.

This bookis a collection of early Baptist-era (and Baptist-adjacent) texts arguing for liberty of conscience, framed as both a theological principle and a practical necessity for civil peace. It’s stitched together with editorial material explaining why these tracts mattered historically and why they were reprinted for later readers.

The foreword/society framing treats these writings as a kind of paper trail of persecution and principle: early Baptists (in England) are credited with being among the first to argue—carefully and scripturally—that every person should worship God according to conscience, owing submission only to divine command rather than to human religious authority. The whole publishing project is presented as rescuing influential but scarce works from obscurity and putting them back into circulation for churches, families, and ministers.

The introductory notice highlights how little is known about Leonard Busher, while still treating his address as one of the earliest extant treatises on the topic of liberty of conscience. It even notes the bitter irony that King James could speak in unusually “anti-coercion” terms—arguing (in effect) that truth isn’t planted by violence—while his practice did not match his rhetoric.

Inside the tract material itself, the argument is hammered out with a blend of Scripture, moral logic, and political realism. The “Epistle to the Reader” says the point is the “general good,” specifically freeing conscience from violent religious uniformity—because coercion doesn’t create faith; it breeds division, hypocrisy, and eventually blood. The authors lean on Christ’s ethic of reciprocity as a moral measuring rod for policy and church power: “do ye even so to them.” They also define the project in one tight phrase: “made free, even the conscience.”

A major spine of the reasoning is jurisdiction: magistrates are appointed for civil order, not as arbiters of saving truth. The tract points to the example of Gallio refusing to adjudicate disputes of “words and names” as the model: punish civil wrongdoing, but don’t pretend the state can reliably referee worship. It also argues that if rulers could compel religion as rulers, then religion would change whenever regimes change—an absurdity that turns conscience into a weather vane for power.

The most explicitly theological core is Christological: the tract insists the gospel doesn’t advance by the sword because Christ didn’t. It cites Jesus rebuking violent zeal—“to destroy men’s lives, but to save them”—and treats that as a direct veto on persecution-as-policy. Then it underlines that even apostolic leadership disowned coercive spiritual lordship: “Not … dominion over your faith.” In other words, church authority is persuasive and pastoral, not carceral.

From there, it builds two hard-nosed warnings. First, persecution is epistemically reckless because human authorities are fallible; they can (and repeatedly did) persecute the righteous while congratulating themselves as defenders of orthodoxy—Henry VIII is used as an example of a ruler whose “truth” shifted dramatically. Second, persecution is socially corrosive: forcing people to “church” doesn’t convert them; it manufactures dissemblers and drives sincere believers into exile, weakening the nation. The tract even argues persecution can block conversions (including of “strangers” and Jews) because people will avoid a country where conscience is punished.

One of the most compelling “lived” moments is the petitioning voice of sufferers: they insist they will be subject to the king in civil matters, but they cannot surrender the divine command to assemble and worship—“we ought… to obey God rather than Man”—and they’re prepared to suffer if that’s the price. That’s the collection’s thesis in flesh-and-blood form: liberty of conscience isn’t a salon idea; it’s what you cling to when the jail door closes..