It was in the post-Reformation period that pleas for religious toleration and religious liberty became most common and influential. This is understandable given the aftermath of the Reformations in Europe: countries now deeply and widely divided by religious pluralism and yet whose governments still often sought to enforce a Reformation and pre-Reformation religious uniformity. Unsurprisingly, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods of great religious conflict.

And yet out of this conflict came the solution: religious liberty. As historian Perez Zagorin pointed out in his classic How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (2007), if it is true that the Christian tradition was uniquely intolerant of other religions, it is also true that it was out of the Christian religion that religious toleration and religious liberty emerged. Christians reached into their own traditions to overcome the problem. Modern religious liberty is, for the most part, a product of an evolving Christian tradition in Europe.

Central to this story are the Baptists, whose interest in religious toleration should be obvious, seeing that they were always a dissenting tradition from established churches. Among other Protestant traditions, the Baptists rejected notions of a state church and went beyond Christ’s distinction between church and state (Matthew 22:21) towards a separation of church and state. Such thinking would feed into the social ideas of the most influential theorists of church-state relations, including John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.

Crucially, the doctrine of separation of church and state was really another way of describing religious liberty or religious toleration. True, religious liberty and religious toleration are not quite the same. Religious liberty assumes that all people have a right to practice their religion regardless of what the state deems acceptable, whereas religious toleration conceived of the free practice of religion more in terms of a permission granted by the state for the sake of achieving some greater good, such as social harmony. Nonetheless, they both teach an ideal situation in which religionists enjoy a negative liberty from the state’s interference in their religious lives and institutions.

Sadly, today we have to a large extent forgotten that separation of church and state meant religious freedom, and nowadays it often means the exact opposite: forcing religious influence out of the public sphere and public institutions. This is not separation of church and state, it is secularist domination of church over state. Recent events surrounding Covid-19 should also jolt us into remembering a long history of Christian scrutiny of state domination over churches. In many liberal democracies, churches were summarily deemed “non-essential services” and physically shut down for months on end. Often when they reopened, they did so with vaccine passports, excluding anyone who did not take a vaccination. It is impossible to think of a greater level of state interference in the church in recent memory. Furthermore, with the onward march of the therapeutic state and the therapeutic totalitarianism that is increasingly describing biblical views on sexuality and gender as harmful and detrimental to mental health, a serious consideration of the Christian tradition of religious liberty is urgent.

The Baptists are important in this history, and this book offers an illuminating and readable account of the tradition of religious liberty in the Baptist tradition. It is a book that Baptist ministers, teachers, and denominational leaders must read to appreciate the great tradition of Baptist critique of the pretensions of the state. But it is also a book that may be read by members of other denominations, many of whom once enjoyed an established status, but now, with the rise of a new ideological establishment, find themselves not only little better off than the Baptists today, but, it must be said, may find themselves little better off than the Baptists many hundreds of years ago in countries in which to be a Baptist was enough to be persecuted.