The Risk of Majority Faith C. Douglas Weaver
C. Douglas Weaver is associate professor of religion and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Religion, Baylor University, Waco, Tkxas.
Winning Sermon in the 2009 Baptist Heritage Preaching Contest
I
f you want to find a good compelling story about Baptists who believed in religious liberty for all people, any Baptist history book worth its salt with tell you a few. We like to tell the story of the seventeenth-century gadfly, Roger Williams, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because he defied the religious-based government of his day and then established Rhode Island, the first American colony to be formed on the principle of religious freedom. We highlight the fact that Williams spoke of soul liberty and understood that forced conversion and coercive conformity was a bloody tenent and produced hypocritical, artificial faith. We like to tell the story of another seventeenth-century hero, Obadiah Holmes, who along with two other colonial Baptists, were arrested in Lynn, Massachusetts, for preaching to a man who was practically blind. Holmes refused an anonymous donor's offer to pay his bail, and consequently, he received a whipping of thirty lashes. His retort to the authorities who persecuted him is the stuff of legends: "You have struck me as with roses."1 We like to tell the story of James Ireland, eighteenth-century evangelist in colonial Virginia. After being arrested for preaching, he spent time in the infamous Culpeper jail, known as a notoriously dangerous place. Ireland continued to preach to those outside the walls of the jail, even though his opponents cursed him and filled his cell with fumes of burning sulphur and pepper. Gunpowder was also exploded underneath the cell. However, Ireland 53