NORTH MIDDLEBORO, Mass. (RNS) — The Rev. Jason Genest loves God and his church.
He also loves U.S. history.
Which is why he gets nervous when he hears people talk about America being founded as a Christian nation. Or wanting to make America Christian by using the power of politics.
America tried that in the past, he said. It did not go well — including for the founder of Genest’s own church.
First Baptist Church of North Middleboro, Massachusetts, was founded by Isaac Backus – a champion of religious freedom in the 1700s — who often found himself at odds with leaders of the Congregational church, which at the time was the official religion of the Bay State.
The Rev. Jason Genest. (RNS photo/Bob Smietana)
So-called New Light Baptists like Backus, who were followers of the famed evangelical preacher George Whitefield — a leader of the First Great Awakening who stressed the need for personal conversion — were seen as troublemakers and threats to public order by leaders of the official church, which was essentially a state bureaucracy, said Genest.
New Light Baptists questioned social institutions, by claiming the baptisms — and sometimes the marriages — of the unconverted were invalid. They also set up rival churches to draw worshippers away from parish churches and, more importantly, refused to pay taxes to support those parish churches. That led to government crackdowns, with some gatherings of New Light Baptists banned as illegal.
“When you get along with a state bureaucracy, it’s great,” Genest said. “When you disagree, you have problems.”
Today, as America has grown both more secular and more religiously pluralistic, there has also been a rise in Christian nationalism — an insistence that America was founded by Christians and should be run by Christians. But the founding era was not a religious utopia, where Colonists were free to choose their faith. Instead, disputes between different kinds of Christians were fierce in the Colonies that became the United States. Those Colonie …