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"A Clear and Steady Channel": Isaac
Backus and the Limits of Liberty
PETER JUDSON RICHARDS
.weall declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the
same thing."
Abraham Lincoln
in recent years, scholarship on revolutionary America has focused

increased attention on the genre of the political sermon, "hortatory"
works that sought to "relate politics to convictions about eternal veri-
ties." It seems to be undeniable that "the great political events of the
American founding... have a backdrop of resurgent religion whose
calls for repentance and faith plainly complement the calls to resist
tyranny and constitutional corruption... ."' So, in his assessment of a
pre-revolutionary political sermon, An Appeal to the Publicfor Relig-
ious Liberty, Against the Oppressionsof the Present Day (1773), histo-
rian William G. McLoughlin designated the work as "pietistic
America's Declaration of spiritual independence."2 Of its author, Mas-
sachusetts Baptist pastor Isaac Backus, it has been said that "perhaps
o PETER JUDSON RICHARDS (A.B., University of Michigan; J.D., University of North

Carolina) is assistant professor of law and political science at the United States Air Force
Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. A major in the U.S. Air Force, he is also editor-in-
chief of the USAFAJournal of Legal Studies. His articles have appeared in the Stetson Law
Review and the Naval War College Review. He wishes to thank ihe USAF Academy's Dean
of Faculty Director of Research Fund for a grant that provided time and resources to enable
him to prepare this article. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone
and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. government or any of its components.
1. Ellis Sandoz, ed., PoliticalSermons of the American FoundingEra: 1730-1805 (Indian-

apolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1990), .xii,xvii-xwiii. See also John Wingate Thornton, ed., Pulpit
of the American Revolution; or, the Political Sermons of the Period of 1776 (1860); John
Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago, Ill.:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); Ellis Sandoz, A Goverment of Laws: PoliticalThconj,
Religion, and the American Founding(Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press,
1990); Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The ProtestantOrigins of
American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); J.C.D.
Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: PoliticalDiscourse and Social Dynamics in the
Anglo-American World (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
2. "Like Jefferson's Declaration three years later, it contained a legal brief against a long
train of abuses, a theoretical defense of principle, and a moral argument for civil disobedi-
ence." William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American PietisticTradition (Boston,
Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 127. Elsewhere McLoughlin called the tract
"the Declaration of Independence of the Separate Baptists against the ecclesiastical tyranny
of the Standing order, for it was written in order to justify the policy of civil disobedience
JOURNAL OF CHURCH AND STATE
no single separatistic convert augured larger consequences for New

England church history."3 Backus "was the most forceful and effective
writer America produced on behalf of the pietistic or evangelical theory
of separation of church and state."4 His short treatise belongs in the
rank of Roger Williams's Bloody Tenent of Persecution (1644), and
James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance (1785), "as one of the
great American expositions of [the principle of Separationism]." Of the
three works, the Appeal to the Public is most probably the least known,
though McLoughlin identifies Backus's vision of the separation of
church and state as the best representative of "the evangelical view of
Separationism-the 'sweet harmony' of a Christian nation-that has
predominated" throughout much of the course of American history5
In the introduction to his Appeal to the Public, Backus sought to
establish the principles of political theory out of which his challenge to
the Standing Congregational Order in Massachusetts would spring.
These "thoughts concerning the general nature of liberty and govern-
ment" were to serve as a platform for the concrete action of civil diso-
bedience. In all of his discussions touching on liberty,6 Backus
consistently sought to lessen potential misunderstandings by fixing the
idea within the specific context provided by a cluster of related no-
tions-though these too could be subject to misinterpretation, in his
day and in our own. Still, he deemed the interlocking nature of the
relationships between liberty and public duty, between good govern-
ment and selfless service to others, and between the political commu-
nity and true happiness would together serve to mitigate the danger. It
was his particular concern to present a picture of liberty grounded and
rooted in the solidity of meaning provided by this context of human
virtues, responsibilities and aspirations-to ensure that the destructive
"sons of Belial" would not wrench it into an airy abstraction where it
would wither and perish. Ultimately, the security of liberty depended
upon the resilience of this web of associations. This essay examines in
adopted by the Baptist churches ....See McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists' Struggle
in New England,1630-1833 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991), 262.
3. Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1972), 292.
4. William G. McLoughlin, ed., Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pain.
phlets, 1754-1789 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 1.
5. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty, 262, 269.
6. For a complete bibliography of Backus's works, see T.B. Maston, Isaac Backus: Pioneer
of Religious Liberty, Appendix. Backus authored thirty-seven pamphlets on religious and
political subjects-the common threads of which were the themes of spiritual and political
liberty-ranging in length from seven to one-hundred-fifty pages. In addition, he produced
A History of New England with ParticularReference to the Denomination of Christians
Called Baptists, in three volumes, along with published letters and articles and a dlay, in
three volumes.
ISAAC BACKUS AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY
greater detail the principle of liberty that Back-us sought to enunciate

here at the crucial turning point of his public campaign for religious
liberty. In doing so, the essay seeks to identify with greater precision
the context within which Backus believed liberty would thrive and
prosper.
DUTY, OBEDIENCE AND LIBERTY

Backus opened the Appeal to the Public with a question that
formed the basis for much political and religious discourse throughout
the America of the eighteenth century.7 He asked, do we give up some
part of our liberty in submitting to government? Are the principles of
"liberty" and "government" inimical to one another "by nature"?
Against what he called the supposition of "multitudes," Backus re-
turned a resounding "No" to such questions. In fact, ". . . those who
now speak great swelling words about liberty, while they despise gov-
ernment, are themselves servants' of corruption." The reason that such
despisers of government saw it to contradict with the principle of lib-
erty lay in their fundamental ignorance of the nature and condition of
men. For, even it were true that man lay everyhere in chains, it did
not follow that he had been born free. Rather, in the fall, "man first
lost his freedom by breaking over the rules of government."8 The ca-
lamity of original sin had wrought asunder principles that required one
another for their proper functioning. Law and government, as limita-
tions on man, did not necessarily represent constraints on true liberty.
For man, by nature, was a being beset by limitations from tie outset.
To the extent that the external limitations set by the laws of God and
man remained consonant with the internal limitations imposed by
man's own nature, the external rules would operate not as chains of
bondage, but as aids to liberty.9
7. Reid, The Concept of Liberty, 22-37.
8. Backus, An Appeal to the Public, in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 309.
9. In another address, Backus tied his description of government and liberty to the meta-
phorical language of both Old and New Testaments, "In Amos, v. 24, he says, 'let judgment
run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.'" Thus, "Freedom is not acting at
random but by reason and rule. Those who walk after their owm lusts are clouds without
water carriedabout of winds [Jude 12] or raging wares of the sea foaming out of their own
shame, [Jude 13],while the true SONS oF LmEim" are like streams which run down in a clear
and steady channel. David says, I will run the way of thy commandments when thou shalt
enlargemy heart. [Psalm 119,32] 1 will walk at libertyfor I seck thy precepts. [Psalm 119,
45] Streams and rivers must have steady channels to run in. but they that promise liberty
while they despise government are wells without water, douds that are carriedwith a ten-
pest, 2 Pet. ii, 10-19." Note the transposition of "liberty" for the word "righteousness." Lib-
erty, then, must be understood first and foremost as a spiritual good. The Psalmist, tie
prophet, and the New Testament apostle presented one harmonic strand of meaning: lib-
erty and government, exercised within the limits provided by reason and revealed rule,
Thus, Backus described it as "a root of all evil... for men to imag-
ine that there is anything in the nature of true government that inter-
feres with true and full liberty!" Such vain imaginings sprung from an
essential "ignorance of what we are, and where we are," from a failure
to "view things in their true light." For instance, the physical size and
shape of a frog set limits on its ability to swell itself. It would be no
meaningful exercise of "liberty" on the part of the frog for it to swell
until "he bursts himself in trying to get as big as the ox." Similarly, the
antinomian proponents of "boundless freedom" resembled the "beast
or fowl" that exerts its "liberty" by diving "into the fishes element until
they drown themselves." Such "liberty" amounted to a mere absurdity,
or worse, to suicidal danger. 10 In designating this human ignorance
and arrogance as "a root of all evil," Backus introduced another com-
parison with the sin of greed. For the biblical warning against the love
of money as a root of all [kinds of] evil directly follows the quotations
from 1 Timothy with which Backus concluded the introductory para-
graph of the pamphlet. Mentioned earlier in the argument, the addi-
tional reference to the "root of all evil" concept tied together his
thoughts on human nature and its limits, and identified the despisers of
law and government as guilty of a kind of avarice. Backus did not tease
out his meaning with this comparison, but the flow of the succeeding
argument suggests that he saw the excesses of antinomian license, with
the excesses of greed, as analogous expressions of the same fundamen-
tal distortion of the order in creation.
For true liberty, he said, consisted in acknowledging and fulfilling
one's proper place in the order established by God: "The true liberty of
man is, to know, obey and enjoy his Creator, and to do all the good
unto, and enjoy all the happiness with and in his fellow-creatures that
he is capable of; in order to which the law of love was written in his
heart, which carries in it's nature union and benevolence to being in
general, and to each being in particular, according to it's nature and
excellency, and to it's relation and connexion to and with the supreme
Being, and ourselves."" The proper ordering of the soul in its relation
to God corresponded to a right ordering of the community of men.
The divine command of love, "written in [man's] heart," had its own
teleology: "union and benevolence to being in general and to each be-
ing in particular" as each is seen to occupy its rightful place in the
would "carry all before them and never rest till they can get through or over all obstacles
which are put in their way," flowing in their proper channels "like a mighty stream." See
Backus, Government and Liberty Described; and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed (Boston,
1778), reprinted in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 350.
10. Backus, An Appeal to the Public, in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 309.
11. Ibid., 309-10.
hierarchy of creation. While carefully preserving the distinction be-

tween creator and creation, this organic cosmology excluded any notion
of autonomous individualism. In stating the terms of the organic
human community, Backus used the term "system" to emphasize the
priority of the whole over its constituent parts. Each "rational soul"
occupied its place as "a part of the whole system of rational beings." 2
Man's duty, and his liberty, flowed from a candid recognition of his
proper place in this "system" of creation. Backus defined this duty and
liberty as man's requirement "to regard the good of the whole in all his
actions." Thus Backus stitched together the notions of duty, obedi-
ence, and liberty as his vision of the fabric of an interrelated human
community under God unfolded. 13
Given Backus's theologically derived definition of liberty, the ques-
tion arises as to the extent to which this notion of liberty could be said
to have application outside of the hedge surrounding the regenerate
faithful. It is significant that Backus was not speaking here primarily of
the church in particular, but rather of humanity as a whole-the dis-
cussion at this point concerned not the order of redemption, but the
order of creation. Without regard to the special, voluntaristic ties bind-
ing the regenerate community of Christian believers, Backus recog-
nized a prior bond among all men, forged out of the natural, created
order of things. Consequently, the redemptive-historical biblical narra-
tive of the fall of man provided an account of the decoupling of the
virtuous co-existence of liberty, duty, and obedience. These terms now
stood juxtaposed against the postlapsarian distortions perpetuated by
"the father of lies," who fomented rebellion, disobedience, and license.
If this account of Backus's argument is accurate, then it seems inap-
propriate to say that Backus viewed the institution of government-at
least in the broad sense in which he used the term here-strictly as a
consequence of the fall of man. The created order of humanity-the
relational nature of "the whole system of rational beings" that consti-
tuted the human race-and not "human depravity," formed the basis
for government. Thus, man had "first lost his freedom" by the breach
12. In another tract, Backus used a very similar complex of expressions, emphasizing again
the "whole system of rational beings," in developing his argument for a correct understand-
ing of law and gospel. See his The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace, Opencd and Vindicated
(Providence, 1771), 49.
13. In setting out his argument for an expansive gap between eighteenth-century and
modem meanings of liberty, Barry Alan Shain describes the context for the most common
formal definition in the eighteenth century. "the... understanding of liberty was framed by-
Anglo-American presuppositions of a rationally ordered and purposeful universe in %0hic1
the central antithesis to liberty was licentiousness." See Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of
American Individualism. The ProtestantOrigins of Amcrican Political Thought (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 161, and references.
of "rules of government" already in existence. Government-defined

as the rule and measure of the human social order and of its vertical
relation to God-predated the fall. 14 Of course, no human institution
of civil government had existed in the first three chapters of Genesis.
But the breadth provided by this theologically oriented definition of
government enabled Backus to underscore the ethical imperative that
"true and full liberty' was not at odds with "the nature of true govern-
ment." In fact, the one could not exist without the other. It was not as
if the essential notions of government or of liberty had somehow trans-
mogrified into something different as a consequence of the fall.1i Lib-
erty, defined as the proper ordering of the self in relation to God and
others,16 remained liberty still. Liberty always required limits-it was
in the "nature of true government" to set such limits according to wis-
dom. Human sin had brought about the disjunction of duty and lib-
erty, so that in their ignorance, fallen men saw the two as
incompatible.17 Original sin did not precipitate a need for government
14. Clearly, this notion stands in stark contrast to the modem liberal conception of govern-
ment as neutral umpire, arbitrating between conflicting, competing interest groups and/or
individuals. Elsewhere, in discussing the nature of moral responsibility, Backus illustrated
by declaring: "Neither can debts be forgiven by a creditor, nor crimes by authority, while the
debtor or the criminal denies the justice of the charge or sentence against him, without
giving up the nature of all government; the end of which, is the safety and happiness of the
faithful, relief to the poor and needy, and infliction of just punishment upon the wicked,"
Backus, The Atonement of Christ, Explained and Vindicated (Boston, 1787), 4. For further
discussion on Backus's use of the term "happiness," see infra.
15. At the same time, McLoughlin notes that Backus was demonstrating some sleight of
hand here by an ambiguous use of terms: "For while the King and Parliament had been
clearly untrue to the civil rights of Englishmen by the claims of taxation over the colonies in
all cases whatsoever, at the same time the General Court of Massachusetts had been untrue
to the religious rights of dissenters by denying them liberty of conscience." Thus, his use of
the term "true government" is "ambiguous." The conditions of the Baptists' position, politi-
cal, social, and ecclesiastical, forced Backus to use circumspection. In the same way, "liberty
of conscience was itself an ambiguous "right" for it was both a "charter right" given by the
king and a divine right commanded by God's higher law. "The beauty of Backus's tract was
that he could fall behind either bulwark as it suited the immediate need of the Baptists....
Like all such arguments, its very flexibility was its greatest weakness." See McLoughlin, ed.,
Pamphlets, 306. However, especially here where he was laying the introductory groundwork
for his argument, Backus clearly spoke at the more abstract level in terms of a cosmic order
flowing from the biblical theology of Calvin and the Puritans.
16. From his comprehensive survey of the literature, Shain summarizes the eighteenth-
century sense of spiritual liberty-"Revolutionary Americans' most findamental under-
standing of liberty"-as "voluntary though communally mediated (and potentially coercive)
obedience to true ethical standards derived from a divinely ordered cosmos." Shain, Myth
of American Individualism, 193, 201.
17. "Before man imagined that submission to government, and acting strictly by rule was
confinement, and that breaking over those bounds would enlarge his knowledge and happi-
ness, how clear were his ideas! (even so as to give proper names to every creature) and hoW
great was his honor and pleasure! But no sooner did he transgress, than instead of enjoying
the boldness of innocency, and the liberties of paradise, he sneaks away to hide himself...
that had not existed before, but it did make the target of true govern-
ment a much more difficult thing to achieve.
Moreover, this communalist account of the human social order
must surely be factored into any assessment of Backus's status as "one
of America's greatest defenders of religious individualism."' 8 Backus's
separatism did lead him in some sense to a repudiation of the New
England social order that had developed in part upon a theological
identification of the covenants of circumcision and baptism and thus
secured the continuing identity of New England as a reconstituted
New Israel. 19 But in doing so, Backus was only attempting to return
the church to what he deemed to be a purer, more biblically integrated
position-to which the fathers of the New England colonies had estab-
lished a much nearer approximation than the corruptions of subse-
quent generations.20 Disastrous innovations such as the notorious
compromise on church membership initiated by Jonathan Edwards's
By which it appears, that the notion of man's gaining any dignity or liberty by refusing ,an
intire submission to government, was so delusive, that instead of it's advancing him to be as
gods, it sunk him down into a way of acting like the beasts and tie like tie devil!" Backus,
Appeal to the Public,in Pamphlets,310. Backus frequently returned to this exposition of the
fll and its consequences in other writings: see, e.g., An Appeal to tie People of the Massa-
chusetts State, Against ArbitraryPower (Boston, 1780), reprinted in McLoughlin, ed., Pam-
phlets, 390; and Backus, The Doctrine of Socereign Grace. Opened and Vindicated, 50-52.
18. Shain, Myth of American Individualismn, 219.
19. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Procince (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 82-92; and Alan Heimert and Pery Miller, eds.,
The GreatAwakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and its Consequences (Indianapo-
lis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967). See also C.C. Coen, Reivalism and Separatism in New
England, 1740-1800 (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1957), 20S-15.
20. The "foundation principles" of those Independents who -came over and planted New-
England" were now "loudly call[ing] for the attention of their posterity. vithout which our
INDEPENDENCE can never be maintained." Backus, The Atonement of Christ, Explalned
and Vindicated, 23. See also his A Fish Caught in his own Net (Boston, 1769), reprinted in
McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 183-87; and The Testimony of the Two Witnesses (Boston,
1793), Appendix, 37-39. Perry Miller identified the New England Covenant as a later devel-
opment of Calvinism, an "amplification," a "rationale" that provided the means of "filling in
chinks and gaps, of intellectualizing the faith, of exonerating it from the charge of despotic
dogmatism." The Federal theory of the covenant softened the edges of Calvinism's harsh,
unblinking brilliance, and by "freeing man from the absolute moral impotence of the strict
doctrine, first made possible an enlargement of his innate capacities." In addition, "it pro-
vided a logical device for immediately listing these capacities in the service of morality, even
before they had been further envigorated by divine grace." Pery Miller, Errandinto the
Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 53. Backus saw such con-
cessions, to the extent that they represented an innovative compromise of the Gospel, as the
thin end of a wedge that would introduce the error and confusion of a rationalistic, anthro-
pocentric religion based on works righteousness. But see the comments of Harm, S. Stout,
who, while acknowledging the cleavage in New England's religious life wrought by the
Great Awakening, still recognizes an essential continuity of vhuntaristlcvision sustained in
New England through the time of the Revolution: "In 1770 as in 1630 the covenant re-
quired that God's vord alone be sovereign and that God's people be at liberty to voluntarily
454 JOURNAL OF CHURCH AND STATE
grandfather, Solomon Stoddard,21 had compromised and sullied the

gospel, and threatened to undermine the integrity of the church alto-
gether by sowing into the very fabric of the church principles of unbe-
lief and unregenerate hard-heartedness.2 In this context, surely his
appeals to the authority of the conscience of the individual believer are
most clearly viewed in the same light as the appeals to conscience
made centuries earlier by Luther. Those who wish to find in Backus
and his followers the doctrinal breach in the foundations that suc-
cumbed to the first waves of modernist individualism might as easily
look 250 years further back to the German reformer.9-
For instance, the issues set forth in Backus's first tract, A Discourse
Showing the Nature and Necessity of an Internal Call to Preach the
Everlasting Gospel, are said to alienate the conscience of the individual
believer from the prerogatives of an educated professional ministry and
even from the community over which the ministers stood as preemi-
nent spokesmen. McLoughlin finds here in kernel form all "the indi-
vidualistic and democratic implications of the Awakening which keep
commit themselves to its precepts" in his The New England Soul: Preachingand Religioug
Culture in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 274.
21. "Stoddard, an immensely practical man, decided the old congregational principle of
limiting the [church] membership to those who could give a profession of their faith, and of
restricting the Lord's Supper to those who offered evidence of conversion, would not work
on the frontier. So, while the rest of New England ... waited for lightning to strike him, le
announced that we have no reason to take the practices of our fathers on trust, and opened
the church doors to everybody in town (except the openly scandalous). He offered them the
communion, calling it a converting ordinance, on the highly pragmatic ground that 'All Ordi-
nances are for the Saving good of those that they are to be administered unto."' Perry
Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1959), 10-11.
22. Backus, A Short Description of the difference between the Bond-woman and the Free
(Boston, 1756). Backus's conversion occurred during the middle of the Awakening.
Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and other leaders of the revival had emphasized the
same points, though they stopped short of renouncing pedobaptism. See Stout, The New
England Soul, 185-211.
23. Or perhaps further still. Professor Hadley Arkes has exposed the futility of many at-
tempts to pin the maladies of modernity upon the putative founding fathers of "individual-
ism"-among whom Backus seems now to have been granted his own, albeit subordinate,
place: "It requires just a moment's reflection to remember that there is no tension ...
between the just treatment of the individual and the aggregate good of the community, that
was not already contained in that encounter, long before Hobbes, when Abraham negotiated
with God over Sodom and Gomorrah:
That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked,
that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that be far from Thee; shall not the
Judge of all the earth do justly? [Genesis, 18]
They may not be, at all times, the best of company, but the late news is that individuals
are here to stay. We must suspect that they and their rights were a part of the moral land-
scape even before historians discovered 'individualism."' Hadley Arkes, The Axonts of Pub.
lic Policy, in Natural Law and Contemporarj Public Policy, ed. David F, Forte
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 132.
cropping out in Backus's works and which the Revolution brought to

fruition." Thus, says McLoughlin, the tract reflects all of Backus's re-
curring themes: "experience as the primary source of knowledge rather
than social rank or education; a direct experiential relationship between
God and the individual superceding all institutional means; individual
accountability to God alone, and above all, equality among the breth-
ren and between the brethren and their pastor."2'' Moreover, Backus's
"reliance on revelation was secondary to his direct personal perception
of divine truth."' - But Backus continually appealed to the authority of
the Reformers, to the confessional reformed tradition, and, most of all,
to the teachings of the Scriptures "6 not only to support his positions,
24. McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 30.

25. Ibid. Thus, apparently, for an observer such as Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, a
pastor like Backus would stand near the head of a long line of centrifugal departures from
historic Christianity, a contributing founder of a uniquely American religion, central features
of which include -a personal salvation through enlightenment, [i.e. reconstituted Gnosti-
cism], unmediated grace, autonomy of the soul and radical individualism, and tie elimina-
tion of the church as necessary for salvation." In this wvay, Kenneth R. Craycraft, in
favorably summarizing Bloom's thesis, scoops up and disposes'of most Protestant Christian-
ity as an aberrant freakish concoction-ultimately, incidentally, the -legacy of Lacke's phi-
losophy and political theology." See Kenneth R. Craycraft, The American Myth of Rellgous
Freedom (Dallas, Tex: Spence Publishing Co., 1999), 34, referencing Harold Bloom, The
American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New Yorhi Simon &
Schuster, 1992). Though it is doubtless possible to find in modem America a sizeable pro-
portion of religionists who fit Bloom's description of Gnostic radical autonomism, it is at the
same time a grossly unfair characterization to attach to all of Protestant Christianity, out of
which a significant remnant, including even some Baptists, can still be found to be aidhering
to the confessional principles of Reformation Christianity. The argument of this article is
that, taken in the context in which he himself sought to be understood, Backus belongs to
the latter category rather than to the former. For a searching critique of contemporary
evangelicalism from the perspective of confessional Reformed Protestantism, see. e.g.,
David F. Wells, No Placefor Truth, Or Whatecer Happenedto Evangelical Theology (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993); God in the Wasteland: The Reality of
Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1994); and Losing our Virtue: Why the Church Ifust Recover its Moral Vision (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998). While I may object to some of Cmcraft's
characterizations, his main argument, an attempt to debunk tfie "myth of American religious
freedom:' is a fascinating and perceptive analysis, for which see n. 64, and discussion.
26. Fundamentally, Backus sought to identi, the Baptists as the legitimate heirs of the
orthodox Puritan tradition of New England. This represented the theme and emphasis of
his compendious History of New England, the opening volume ofwhich sought -carefully to
examine what were the sentiments and character of the original planters,- with the end of
obtaining "clear and just ideas of the affairs of the Baptists in New England." In the preface
to volume one, Backus described his work as setting out "a great number of particulars %ith
good vouchers to support them; which shew that oppression on religious accounts was not of
the first principles of New England, but as an intruder that came in aftemra." See Isaac
Backus, History of New England, with ParticularReference to the Denomination of Chris-
tians called Baptists, 2 vols., ed. David Weston (Nevton, Mass.: Backus Historical Society.
1871), 1: viii.
but to develop them in the first place.27 His position was virtually the
same, on all points but infant baptism, as that of Edwards, who himself
"spoke for the voluntarist tradition that emphasized 'the affections' and
favored more active lay involvement in church affairs."28 McLoughlin
does indicate that Backus's doctrinal position on baptism solidified only
after the pastor's prolonged, agonized wrestlings with the teaching of
the Scriptural passages, rather than being an expression of primary ex-
perience that, ex post facto, he sought to reinforce With Scriptural
proof.29 As Winthrop S. Hudson pointed out, "as sons of the Reforma-
tion and students of Scripture, the Non-Separatists 30 rejected any sac-
erdotal concept of the church. The church was not dependent for its
existence upon any special sacerdotal powers conveyed in holy orders
(ordination). In Christ all special priestly powers had been abolished,
and all Christians were equally priests or equally laymen." As they ne-
gotiated their way between "the Scylla of authoritative presbyterial gov-
ernment," and the Charybdis of anarchic "Brownism," non-Separatists,
who, despite the confusing terminology, were the theological and spiri-
tual forebears of Backus and other Calviistic Baptists, sought a "mid-
dle way" that would be faithful to the "priesthood of all believers"
concept and at the same time maintain unity and order. In doing so,
they followed Luther, "who had said that any company of Christians in
a wilderness was fully equipped to minister Christ and had no need to
derive authority from anywhere, other than from Christ, to choose
their own officers, to administer baptism and the Lord's Supper, and to
become fully a church."3 ' Similarly, in framing his argument for free-
dom of conscience in a later sermon, Backus did say that "religion is
27. See Backus, An Internal Call to Preach the Everlasting Gospel (Boston, 1754), re-
printed in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 65-128.
28. Stout, The New England Soul, 203.
29. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 57-74.
30. This earlier seventeenth-century group "fashioned the principles and practice to which
the major group of Baptists, [among which, a century later, Backus came to be numbered],
adhered." See Winthrop S. Hudson, Baptists in Transition: Individualism and Christian
Responsibility (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1979), 28, 29.
31. Ibid. "However sharply Luther might otherwise oppose the idea that political or eco-
nomic freedoms could be derived from a religious relationship, from 'the freedom of the
Christian man'-in this he saw a clouding of the issues, and abuse of religion for selfish
ends-[a position that Backus sympathized with], he was forced to assert unequivocally this
one point, that freedom of conscience, the right of personal conviction in religious matters,
was something clearly inviolable. Here he had to insist that it was even the duty of the
individual to resist every pressure from without, at least in so far as his inner life would be
thereby affected. For the salvation of every individual hung in the balance here." Such
notions constituted the "fundamental ideas" adopted by Calvin as well. Karl Holl, The Cul-
tural Significance of the Reformation (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 31-32, 39.
ever a matter between God and individuals,"32 and thus, "how can any
man become a member of a religious society without his own consent?"
In the light provided by the historical context briefly outlined here,
surely it is wrong to take this statement, or that quoted infra, from the
proposed Massachusetts Bill of Rights, as complete expressions of
Backus's ecclesiology, or of his view of human society in general. Such
a reductionism runs the risk of ignoring the contextual fabric of
Backus's pastoral purpose, and thus mistaking his intended meaning.
Nor is it appropriate to see such statements as significant departures
from a long established tradition of voluntarism within the various con-
fessional systems of Protestantism. For instance, the Westminster
Confession of 1647 states, "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and
hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which
are in any thing contrary to his Word, or beside it in matters of faith or
worship ....33 Indeed, on closer inspection, the question presents it-
self as to whether Backus's much-emphasized "individualism," and
what McLoughlin calls his "pietism,"34 are considerably better under-
32. Backus, A Door Openedfor ChristianLiberty (Boston, 1783), reprinted in MeLough-
fin, ed., Pamphlets, 432. McLoughlin takes this phrase as the epigraph to his collection of
reprinted Backus pamphlets on church, state, and Calvinism. The same idea is common
enough among prominent representatives of other denominations. For an example, see tie
sermon of Presbyterian Samuel Davies (1723-1761) on "the Necessity and Excellence of
Family Religion," where the prominent leader of the Southern Great Awakening stated:
"The consciences of all, bond and free, are subject to God only, and no man ought to compel
another to any thing, as a duty, that is against his conscience." See Samuel Davies, The
Necessity and Excellence of Family Religion, reprinted in Sermons by the Rev. Samuel Da-
vies, AM., President of the College of New Jersey (Morgan, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria Publica-
tions, 1995), 95.
33. Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), Chapter 20, Art. 2, reprinted in Phillip
Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. III (New York Harper & Brothers), 644. The
Philadelphia Confession of the American Calvinistic Baptists represented "a slight modifica-
tion of the Confession of the Westminster Assembly and the Savoy Declaration." Ibid., 738.
On this article, the two confessions xvere identical.
34. McLoughlin finds evidence of Backus's "pietism" in his emphasis on "experimental'
religion: "the experimental or experiential quality of the Awakening ,,swhat gave it its
pietistic dynamic and at the same time put it in harmony %vith Locke's sensational theory of
epistemology." McLoughlin, Pamphlets,28. But surely, here again, a vast and rich body of
pastoral literature in the Reformed and Puritan tradition had been emphasizing this "e'cperi-
mental" faith for over two hundred years: "[the 17th century Puritan preacher] must...
teach nothing which he had not first tested in his own experience, and he must teach his
people to subject all doctrine to the test of experience. Thus the preachers made experi-
ment a familiar word on the plane of religion and morals long before it became supreme on
that of natural science. Man was, to be sure, saved by faith alone, but the question whether
or not he had faith could be determined only by himself through observation of the workdngs
of the spirit in himself." Villiam Hailer, The Rise of Puritanism (New YorL: Columbia
University Press, 1938), 299. In his study of American Puritanism, Ralph Barton Pern, goes
even further back to argue that "the main body of puritan doctrine... is medieval Clistian-
ity. In America, it was the chief link of continuity with the medieval past. being a traditional
rather than an innovating doctrine." Ralph Barton Perry, Puritanismand Dermocracy (Ne,,
stood when viewed in the contextual light of a long history of classical

Reformed confessionalism.5 Moreover, it must be acknowledged that
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1944), 83 and ff. It is true that Backus borrowed the language of
Locke's Essay in attempting to articulate the epistemology of faith. But at the epistemologi-
cal level, Backus explicitly refused to accept some of Locke's most basic presuppositions, In
his sermon, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace,Backus inserted a full page, one of his longest
excerpts, from the work of Locke in a discussion on the freedom of the will. He cited the
Essay on Human Understandingfor the proposition that the will chooses according to what
appears before it as the greatest good-a principle Edwards elaborated upon In his Freedom
of the Will. But Backus used this quote as an evidence of Locke's deviation from tile biblical
understanding of human ability. The exception posed by human inability because of innate
sin rendered Locke's analysis hopelessly deficient. His unwillingness to accept the reality of'
original sin and of its hold on human consciousness caused him to "turn into the dark way."
Thus Locke was identified at the beginning of the discussion as the "learned master" of
"these men" whom Backus sought to refute. See The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace Opened
and Vindicated, 60-62. There is no evidence to suggest that Backus ever retreated from this
position as to the limited usefulness of Locke. Furthermore, McLoughlin's statement that
Backus's "reliance on revelation was secondary to his direct personal perception of divine
truth," in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 28, runs the risk of setting up a false dichotomy
between experience and written revelation. Backus appealed to the authority of Scripture,
to the Westminster Confession, and to the testimony of writers such as John Bunyan ts
earlier representatives of the same "experimentalism" he was arguing for in his An Internal
Call, reprinted in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 103-07. The categories of knowledge to
which Backus set himself in opposition here parallel the epistemological categories of post-
Enlightenment rationalism to which Michael Polanyi applied his "post-critical" theory of
"tacit knowledge" as an antidote. To the post-Enlightenment dogma that valid knowledge
comes only by means of objective empirical inquiry and scientific rationalism, Polanyi op-
posed his own theory of knowing: "into every act of knowing there enters a passionate
contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and... this coefficient is no mere
imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge." Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowl-
edge, Towards a Post-CriticalPhilosophy (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
vii-viii. For "all knowing is personal knowing-participation through indwelling." See
Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press,
1975), 44. Backus's emphasis on personal experiential faith, like that of Bunyan and the
Puritans before him, set a high priority on the principle which Polanyi gave the name of
"indwelling"--in its spiritual context, "abiding in Christ"--a major theme of the Johannine
and Pauline writings of the New Testament. For explicit linkage between Polanyi's philoso-
phy and Augustinian Christianity, see Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, 149-60; John
Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1998); Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981); and Thomas F. Torrance, ed., Belief in Science and in Christian
Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi'sThoughtfor ChristianFaith and Life (Edinburgh:
Handsel Press Ltd., 1980).
35. Historian Nathan 0. Hatch raises the suggestion that a more significant distinction
existed between Backus's Calvinistic orthodoxy, on the one hand, and the "credo of liberal
individualism" of John Leland, another influential Baptist preacher whose "opposition to
creeds and confessions was also a function of his firm identification with a popular audience,
an instinct that Backus did not appreciate." The contrast between the two further mani-
fested itself in the manner in which Backus "had defended his positions with learned tracts
addressed to civil and religious elites," and in his opposition to "'high and new things' in
religion." Most of all, the two men differed in "their contrasting views of the social order."
Leland's legacy was "an exaggerated opposition to official Christianity." His "aversion to
"the respect for voluntarism," always a feature of the Protestant

worldview, "was transformed by Americans in highly communal
ways." 16 Despite his anti-pedobaptistic views, Backus represented no
exception to this rule, for, as we have seen, he did not neglect to root
the value and worth of the individual in the primacy of communiy: It
was in the theocentric, outward-looking community, grounded in the
virtues fostered by mutual submission to the "Golden Rule" of "univer-
sal equity,"37 that the individual realized to its fullness his own, God-
given identity:3s that is to say, "the long-run interest of the individual
invariably matched that of the entire community.'"
Backus understood himself to be going against the tide in address-
ing the uses to which the terms "slavery" and freedom" were being put
in 1773. The Lockean value associated with property occupied the
minds and hearts of men everywhere: "Now how often have we been
told, that he is not a freeman but a slave, whose person and goods are
not at his own but anothers disposal? And to have foreigners come and
riot at our expence and in the fruit of our labours, has often been rep-
resented to be worse than death."4o Men railed against the evils of
central control and a quest for self-reliance," characteristics that have been attached to the
person and work of Backus, constituted an approach, a style of leadership that opened the
doors in the early days of the republic for "the democratization of American Christianity."
By contrast, Backus represented an older, more hierarchical orthodox), for, "while Backus
never doubted the right of all to worship as they pleased, he was unconvinced that layrnen
could articulate their own theology. He defended the primacy of Calvinism and reminisced
about 'the most eminent fathers of New England.'" Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization
of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 99.
36. Shain, Myth of American Individualism, 125. Donald Lutz says, -[d]uring the found-
ing era, the American tendency to see their communities as primarily constituted at the local
level was based upon a second principle-that a community has a commonly held set of
values, interests, and rights distributed through a limited population." Donald Lutz, The
OriginsofAmerican Constitutionalism(Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press,
1988), 73.
37. In one passage from a later sermon, Backus appealed to the "foundation principles" of
"those Independents vho came over and planted New England"-- "2ithoutwhich our INDE.
PENDENCE can never be maintained"-while pronouncing on the seriousness of violating
"the universal rule of equity." Backus, The Atonement of Christ, Explained and Vindicated,
23.
38. "Each rational soul, as he is a part of the whole system of rational beings, so it vas and
is both his duty and his liberty to regard the good of the whole in all his actions. To love
ourselves, and truly to seek our o%nr welfare, is both our liberty and our indispensable duty;
but the conceit that man could advance either his honor or happiness, by disobedience
instead of obedience, was first injected by the father of lies...." Backus, An Appeal to the
Public, in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 309-10. See also Holl, CulturalSignificance of the
Reformation, 37.
39. Lutz, Origins of American Constitutionalism,77.
40. Backus, An Appeal to the Public, in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 311. See, e.g. the
famous tract of Elisha Williams, The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants(Boston,
1744), reprinted in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons, 51-118. \Williams opened with an
political or economic slavery. 41 Backus deliberately set out to shift the

focus of attention on the far greater harms of "soul-slavery."42 Thus,
for Backus, the notion of liberty could not be properly understood
when dislodged from its transcendent orientation, the neglect of which
resulted in an impoverished and distorted picture. The "servants of
corruption" enticingly proffered the word liberty as a promise while
despising government. It was an "abuse of language" ta led to the
perverse distortion of liberty and, ironically, issued in the worst form of
tyranny. The general ignorance of the spiritual underpinnings to lib-
erty caused a slide into mere licentiousness, and a disdain for the God-
account of the "Origin and End of Civil Government" that followed, even paraphrased, the
Lockean "labor theory" of property point by point. Again, following Locke, and In contrast
to Backus, Williams gave short shrift to the principle of original sin, and emphasized the
sovereign individual and his need for self-preservation: "The great end of civil government,
is the preservation of their persons, their liberties and estates, or their property." Ibid., 58.
In the words of John Dunn, Williams's work fused "Locke's notions of toleration with it
brilliant presentation of his theory of government." See John Dunn, Political Obligation in
its Historical Context (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), quoted In
Sandoz, ed., PoliticalSermons, 54. While Dunn finds here "a doctrine of startling original-
ity," Thomas Curry concludes that "the significance of Elisha Williams did not lie in the
innovation of his thought or the persuasiveness of his contentions, but in the effectiveness of
his method." Curry sees a gap between Williams's "stirring rhetoric of the philosophy of
natural rights," and his failure to question "the existing establishment." See Thomas J. Curry,
The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 96-98. See also Michael P. Zuckert, The Natu-
ral Rights Republic, Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press), 149-201. Zuckert, drawing upon the earlier
work of Clinton Rossiter and Steven Dworetz, argues for the eighteenth-century "Locke-
anization" of Puritan politics, and identifies Williams as a primary example. Where Luther's
political thought, in deriving from scripture its principles for the spheres of both the King-
dom of God and the Kingdom of Man, "is a form of political theology," Williams, who
"derives the principles of the secular or political sphere from reason (as delivered by that
oracle, 'the great Mr. Lock')" engages in a form of political philosophy." Ibid,, 189. At his
point in history, standing at the cusp of this significant divide, Backus clearly looked back to
a more atavistic position.
41. "The fear of slavery was not an apprehension of bondage but of governmental arbitrari-
ness." Reid, The Concept of Liberty, 120; see also 38-59.
42. Shain, speaking of the eighteenth-century use of the contiguous terms, "arbitrariness,"
"licentiousness," and "slavery," states that "each of these terms, regularly placed In opposi-
tion to liberty, lacked an essential element that defined it as antithetical to liberty. That Is,
they described an inability or unwillingness to order one's being freely with the laws of God
and nature." Shain, Myth of American Individualism,302. Thus, Backus declared In 1767,
"We have lately been upon the borders of a civil war, for LiBawrr: hanging and burning
were not too bad for the enemies of LiaBERT! Ahi Little do many see what they are doing;
for after all this noise? Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin, Job. 8, 34. Such
harbour the worst enemies to liberty in their own bosoms. Turkish or Spanish slaves are not
to be compared with those who are under the bondage of corruption." Backus, Truc Faith
will produce Good Works (Boston, 1767), 89.
ordained institution of government.4 Within this framework, Backus

established a fundamental opposition between autonomous individual-
ism and true liberty. In doing so, he placed liberty squarely in the
category of public, rather than private, virtue.
Backus acknowledged that by yoking together the notions of duty
and liberty, he was presenting his readers with a principle that vould
seem retrograde, oxymoronic at best. It was for this reason that he
expended such effort in explaining why the intransigence of human sin
made the concept so difficult to accept. James Madison and others
would later emphasize the importance of maintaining a balance be-
tween order and liberty. It was the coexistence in tension of two po-
tentially antithetical notions that preserved the societies of men.
Backus, the pastor, in addressing this question of political theory, took
special care here to define the concept of liberty itself as containing
within it the principles of order, duty, and responsibility.4 Uberty %vas
a dangerous amorphous abstraction unless it carried within it the prin-
ciple of limits. It was not as if the privilege of liberty was the primary
function, and duty a mere secondary, derivative offshoot.45 For even
the freedom of God himself was limited by the perfections of his char-
acter from doing or being tempted with evil. 46 In defining his terms in
this way, Backus believed he was engaged in the pastoral exposition of
a classical biblical principle. Christian liberty did not mean the free-
43. "We are not insensible that the general notion of liberty, is for each one to act or
conduct as he pleases; but that government obliges us to act toard others by law and rule,
which in the imagination of many, interferes with such liberty. Though when we come to
the light of truth, what can possibly prevent its being the highest pleasure, for every rational
person, to love Cod with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself, but corruption and
delusion? Which, as was before noted, are foreigners and not originally belonging to man.-
Backus, An Appeal to the Public,reprinted in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets,312. The con-
cern-though expressed in a variety of contextual settings-as pervasive in America on the
eve of the Revolution. Reid, The Concept of Liberty, 32-37.
44. Backus was using a common formulation: "At least until the end of the eighteenth
century, freedom as liberty was seen as 'the acting and behaving within those reasonable
bounds that the law has appointed, and being protected therein by the civil magistrate.'"
Shain, Myth of American Individualism, 207, quoting Dyche and Pardon, New GeneralEn-
glish Dictionary (1752).
45. David Lowenthal, No Liberty forLicense, the Forgotten Logic ofthe First Anzendnent
(Dallas, Tex.: Spence Publishing Co., 1997), xix.
46. "With reverence be it spoken, the eternal God never had, nor never can have, such a
liberty as these men tell of, for it is impossible for him to lie, and lie cannot be so much as
tempted with evil... ." Back-us, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace. Opened and Vindicated,
60. It was a point to which Backus frequently returned; see, e.g., his The Sovereign Decrets
of God (Boston, 1773), in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 292-302; and Trth is Great, and
Will Prevail(Boston, 1781); ibid., 403-04. Jonathan Edwards had made the same argument,
with greater depth of detail, in his treatise on The Freedom of the Will.
dom to sin.4 7 Theologically speaking, it was impossible to consider

aright the terms of the Gospel of Christ without first laying the founda-
tion of the law's requirements. 48 Duty and liberty, just like law and
gospel, only made sense when viewed in the context provided by tie
other. The danger posed by men who would overburden liberty by
laying upon it the quality of limitless autonomy required an urgent re-
sponse. In the Appeal to the Public, before making his case for relig-
ious liberty, it was necessary for Backus to sweep away the confusion
and obfuscation surrounding the theological orientation of liberty that
he saw as fundamental to its meaning.
This meant that Backus's theological disputes against the purveyors
of Arminianism and against what he saw as its corruption of the biblical
parameters of human liberty directly impinged upon the practical
questions of religious liberty to which he sought to respond. The deg-
radation of liberty into mere licentiousness corresponded closely with
the proliferation of pernicious and unbiblical teachings on human abil-
ity and competence before the bar of God's holy law.49 For Backus, as
for others, any discussion of liberty must take place within the context
of prior theological commitments. As J.C.D. Clark observes, the
"rearguard action" of Calvinist predestinarians such as Backus "against
rising tides of Arminianism," was "initially theological, but had ines-
capable political implications .... Theological and political struggles
went hand in hand."50 A proper recognition of God's sovereignty was
prerequisite to a true understanding of the meaning and limits of
human moral and political responsibility. Ultimately, the surest, most
sound basis for human community was rooted in the requirements of
the law summarized in Luke's gospel, the love of God and of neighbor:
"Love is the temper of happiness, and without it there can be none,
and the nobler its object the greater the happiness, and the easier to
obey the precept; how holy, just, and good, then is this law, which re-
quires our highest love to the supreme fountain of being and excel-
lency, and our subordinate love to all other beings; according to their
47. See Paul's Epistle to the Romans 3:5-8; 6: 1-2, 15-18; Backus, Doctrine of Sovereign
Grace, 49-53; and his The Atonement of Christ,Explained and Vindicated, 3, 16-17.
48. See Backus's sermon of 30 October 1771 at the ordination of Asa Hunt, "Evangelical
Ministers described, and distinguishedfrom Legalists," Boston, 1772, 18. "Hence see the
great importance of ever keeping law and gospel in their distinct place, since one kills, and
the other gives life. The law is good if we use it lawfully. It's proper use is to shew us what
we ought to be, and in that light to convince us that we are no such, for by the law Is the
knowledge of sin; but if it is made use of to teach souls how to obtain the divine favor, or
how to obtain eternal life, it is then put out of it's proper place." See also Backus, The
Liberal Support of Gospel Ministers, Opened and Inculcated (Boston, 1790), 1.
49. Backus, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace, 57-62.
50. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 114, 115, text and n. 257.
relation and connexion to him and to us? This law then constituted an
union of heart between the whole system of rational beings, which in-
fluenced to all right behavior toward each other, according to their sev-
eral stations and relations; and the fruit of such behavior is, This do and
thou shalt live."51 Men must somehow be lifted up out of themselves,
to move beyond mere self-interest in order to enjoy and secure the
fruits of liberty: "a sense of impotency has like upon the principle of
hope as it has upon fear; as long as persons can hope to shift among
themselves, they do not love to be dependent and beholden to others,
but the clearer their sense is of being unable to do without others help,
the more earnest will be their cries therefore.... How pernicious then
are all those teachings that flatter the sinner's pride, by telling him of52a
great deal he can do, and must do, in order to his coming to Christ!"
Along with the false notion of "a self-determining power in the will, a
power to act with motive, or against motive, just as the will pleases"
came the assertion of moral and spiritual autonomy that spelled the
death not only of the individual soul, but of the capacity for the love
that binds communities together.
SELFISHNESS AND GOOD GOVERNMENT
In the Appeal to the Public, Backus had connected the sin of greed
with the distortions of those who would call fair foul and foul fair in
maligning the true form of liberty. For Back-us, the "law and rule" pro-
vided by sound government helped to bring men out of a stale,
cramped self-interest and into the bracing air of the love for other men
enjoined by the Scriptures. An existence confined to the dimensions of
mere self-interest resulted in the worst form of bondage. The juxtapo-
sition of self-interest or "self-love" with the principles of vise and be-
nevolent governance represented another chord to which Backus
repeatedly returned in his writings and sermons.5 Toward the end of
the tract, Policy as well as Honesty, Backus couched the contemporary
conflict ith Britain in the same terms: "Self-love, under the specious
name of government and a concern for the public good, has moved and
now moves the Britons to act towards us like incarnate devils." The
same "self-love" posed a greater danger to Americans than all the
51. Backus, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace, 49-50.

52. Ibid., 58.
53. Contrast again with the teaching of Locke in the Two Treatses. In paraphrasing
Locke's famous labor theory of property, Leo Strauss has commented, "in appropriating
things by his labor, man must think exclusively of the prevention of waste; he does not have
to think of other human beings." Strauss, Natural Right and Histonj (Chicago, 111.: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1953), 237.
might of the British military.- And it comprised the essence of the

threat to religious liberty planted in the text of the proposed constitu-
tion of Massachusetts: "Eight years ago self-love, under a religious pre-
tense, had such influence in our legislature that we had no way left to
save our friends in Ashfield from being robbed of their lands but by an
appeal to Britain. And if that evil should be engrafted into our new
plan of government we should have no constitutional remedy against it
left upon earth."-" The frequency with which Backus utilized this par-
ticular rhetorical device-setting into opposition what would now be
considered a purely private, individual vice with the manifestly public
virtues of wise and impartial government-amplifies the theological
frame of reference within which he sought to understand political
questions. The blessings of sound government and the secure enjoy-
ment of political liberty required a moral anchoring that could only be
established by the inculcation of neighborly love. Individual men and
societies needed to be lifted up out of the confines of their narrow self-
interest. Thus, though Backus opposed the public support of worship
and of ministers through taxation, he nevertheless saw a clear public
dimension to the calling of the gospel ministry.5 6 The character of a
government and of its officials could not be left to the inevitable, inani-
mate drift of things. Human virtue naturally inclined to decay and cor-
ruption.57 The constant redirection and reorientation of public
morality away from selfish destruction and toward true freedom re-
54. "And self-love in this country, by sinking our public credit, has exposed us to greater
danger than all their fleets and armies could do." Backus, Policy, as well as Honesty (Bos-
ton, 1779), reprinted in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 382. In the preface to a later sermon,
Backus presented this damage to public credit, precipitated by "self-love," in the terms of a
biblical metaphor that would again resonate in the words of a later, more famous commenta-
tor. "At a time when public credit is sunk very low, and our highest Rulers are loudly
complained of, all men among us may justly be alarmed; for a Government divided against
itself, is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand,"
Backus, The Liberal Support of Gospel Ministers, Opened and Inculcated, 1. The gospel
ministry had been neglected in the flux of easy paper money and fine wares that had Inun-
dated the new republic.
55. Backus, Policy, as well as Honesty, in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 382.
56. Backus, The Liberal Support of Gospel Ministers, Opened and Inculcated.
57. In his diary, Backus greeted the news of the final peace with Great Britain with a
somber reflection on the creeping materialism and self-arndizement that already
threatened to undo the new nation: "Great indeed have been the events of this year, The
British court gave up her claims of power over the American States, Nov. 30, 1782. Pre-
liminaries for peace were signed at Paris Jan. 20, and the peace was settled there September
3, 1783. In the meantime the great men of the earth crouded in their fine wares upon us,
which all ranks of people in America were fond of buying, to our unspeakable damage, In
the sinking of public credit, and the most extravagant gratification of pride, intemperance,
fraud, and cruel oppression. Rev. 18.23." Isaac Backus, diary entry of 28 December 1783, In
The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols., ed. William G. McLoughlin (Providence, RI.: Brown
University Press, 1979), 2: 1133.
quired the vigilance and diligence of an active reformative ministry.

These themes converged in the Address to the Inhabitants of New-
England,where, contemplating the "distress" wrought by Shays' Rebel-
lion, Backus took to task both the fiscal irresponsibility of debtors who
resorted to violence, and the crass materialism of Boston merchants
who led such men into the snares of wvorldliness.5" But he reserved his
harshest blame for the "contrary" teachers who tore apart the church
and, consequently, the society by sowing rebellion.5 9 While addressing
the responsibilities of individuals, he located them within the context of
the corporate, communal structure of the church.w Backus expressed
his deepest concerns in pastoral and theological terms. He considered
the teachers of the church to be primarily responsible for preserving
and protecting the moral fabric of the political community. Thus, he
finished this address with a paraphrase of Paul's pastoral exhortation to
61
pray for those in authority.
Backus saw the promotion of public morality as an important func-
tion of his pastoral role. At the same time, it must be acknowledged
that Backus's zealous postmillenialism led him at times to blur bounda-
ries between the realms of church and state. For instance, McLough-
lin notes that "he sided ith the majority of the Baptists in the Warren
Association in 1791 in voting to petition Congress (along with the Con-
gregational clergy) for the establishment of a federal commission to
license the publication of all Bibles in the United States. It never oc-
curred to him that the right to license carried with it the right not to
58. Backus, An Address to the Inhabitants of New England, Concerning the present
Bloody Controcersy therein (Boston, 1787).
59. McLoughlin presents this tract as evidence that Backus's "Protestant etic... was as
individualistic as his theory of conversion; a man had no one but himself to blame if he got
in debt over his head." McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets,441. But surely the far greater weight
of Backus's contumely falls upon those false teachers, the sons of Aaron who offered strange
fire by fomenting discontent: "And instead of fire from Heaven, the tongues of those who
are for many masters are a world of iniquity, setting on fire the whole course of nature, and
it is set on fire of Hell." The method of these malcontents manifested the familiar and
pernicious errors of Arminianism: "The vay wherein teachers have kept up these evils so
long in the world has been by insisting upon it that self-determination in the %villof man is
essential to moral agency." Because we are too apt to project an overly modernistic inter-
pretation on his words, the context of Backus's remarks on individual re;ponsibility becomes
especially crucial to understanding his meaning. Shain, Myth of American Indirdualhsn
127-28.
60. Backus elsewhere identified the proper grounds of "office power in the church" to rest
in the "community as a body," rather than "by succession from other officers." Backus. The
Atonement of Christ, Explained and Vindicated, 18. To this extent his ecclesiolog can un-
doubtedly be said to be "democratic."
61. McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 446; see 1 Timothy 2: 1-2. The same complex of associa-
tions between liberty and selflessness, slavery and greed is evident in Backlus's earlier tract,
True Faith will produce good Works (Boston, 1767), 89-90.
license." Backus also praised the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution for

its requirement of religious oaths on the part of officeholders. 2 In ad-
dition, Backus advocated for religious training in the public schools of
New England-drawing the line, it would seem, at the teaching of in-
fant baptism. Similarly, Backus showed support for various Puritan
"blue laws" prohibiting profanity, blasphemy and the profanation of the
Sabbath, along with laws against such immoral practices as "gambling,
card playing, dancing, and theatergoing."63 Backus's words opening a
later writing, Policy, as well as Honesty, suggest what the contemporary
liberal understanding of church-state relations would designate as an
inconsistency, a confusion of categories6 Backus elsewhere sought to
keep separate. Here, Backus asserted that "[t]he necessity of a well-
regulated government in civil states is acknowledged by all, and the
importance and benefit of true Christianity in order thereto is no less
certain."65 However, he intimated a different motivation, perhaps, as
he went on to explain the primary reason for his statement: "the univer-
sal rule of equity enjoined by our Lord has the most natural and effec-
tual tendency to promote extensive union of any means in the world."6
62. But see Stanley J. Grenz, Isaac Backus and Religious Liberty, who argues that the
context of Backus's comments here demonstrate the fact that "for Backus, religion does not
constitute any special right to political rule." 22 Foundations,355-57.
63. See McLoughlin, Soul Liberty, 1410-11, where he catalogues these examples of
Backus's atavistic conception of church-state relations. At the same time, Maston's observa-
tion on the "universal principle" underlying Backus's statements on moral responsibility
serves as a reminder of the theological context for these strict standards of conduct, without
which they cannot properly be understood: "Practically everything Backus says concerning
man's moral responsibility in some way, directly or indirectly, is related to his conviction that
doing God's will is man's chief duty." See Maston, Isaac Backus: Pioneerof Religious Lib-
erty, 45.
64. See the recent interesting and persuasive thesis of Kenneth Craycraft, Jr., who con-
cludes that "there is no such thing as religious freedom, because there is no such thing as a
neutral political or philosophical principle by which such a freedom can be judged." Given
these conditions, "Christians have no stake in liberal religious liberty, . . . no interest In
following a political principle which facilitates disbelief in Christ; their interest is rather to
persuade people to believe by witnessing to the resurrection of the Christ who, Christians
believe, relativizes all political theories and who commands that people bind themselves to
none-indeed that they bind ourselves [sic] to Jesus Christ alone as King." See Craycraft,
The American Myth of Religious Freedom, 27, 25-26.
65. Backus, Policy, as well as Honesty, forbids the use of Secular Force in Religious Affairn
(Boston, 1779).
66. Backus made frequent appeal to this "universal rule of equity," which lie defined In a
letter to Mr. Benjamin Lord, of Norwich, Providence, 1764, 2. He opened the letter: "To
do to others as we would have them do to us, must be allowed to be the universal rule of
equity; yet, alas! How far is it from being universally practiced?" In a later writing An
Appeal to the People, Backus, spokesman for the Warren Association, responded to what
they concluded to be the insufficient guarantees for religious liberty produced by the Massa-
chusetts Constitutional Convention. Backus catalogued the "essentials" of Christ's doctrine
for his readers, and described "the whole of duty" of man as being "included in love to GOD
Backus repeatedly returned to Christ's summation of the law, empha-

sizing the limits on the role of the civil magistrate as being restricted to
the principles summarized in the command to "love thy neighbor."67
Backus never faced the questions posed by a political community char-
acterized by modem religious pluralism, though the religious variety of
the colonies was more varied than is sometimes believed to be the
case.68 His New Light separatist principles did lead him to seek to
clarify the scriptural distinctions between the regenerate believer and
his unregenerate neighbor. Such distinctions formed critical elements
in his arguments against infant baptism. Regardless of what he thought
the future promised in the way of a "Christian America," the Baptist
pastor cherished no illusions as to the idea that the American colonies,
and later, the fledgling nation, had arrived at any such state of perfec-
tion. Rather, the dangers posed by godless men who sought to unmoor
liberty from its God-given context and send it spinning into anarchy led
him to weigh in with these thoughts concerned not with the establish-
ment of a Christian theocratic state, but with the re-anchoring of
human endeavors in the bedrock of universal principle. Thus, it may
vell be that his advocacy for "the importance and benefit of true Chris-
tianity" as a requisite for well-regulated government did not amount to
a platform for a new and improved version of the old Massachusetts
theocracy. The context of Backus's statements show him to be
animated here perhaps not by so much by narrow sectarian spirit, as by
the conviction that the "rule of equity" stated in Christ's summation of
the law represented the clearest and wisest statement of principle for
the administration of civil rule for all communities everywhere.6 The
and love to our neighbor." Consequently, he said, "the civil magistrate's power is limited to
the last of these and... his sword is to punish none but such as work ill to their neighbors."
Backus reiterated his lament against the despisers of government in a later sermon. Spelling
out the "Golden Rule" from Matthew 7, he proceeded: "... men who assume tie place of
judges of others, while they disregard this rule of equity themselves, are hipocrites, dogs,
swine and wolves.... They despise government, and are self-wiled, under the name of
liberty." See Backus, The Kingdom of God,Described by His Word, with iWs I nile Benefits
to Human Society (Boston, 1792), 22.
67. See, e.g., Backus, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace Opened and Vindicated (Provi-
dence, 1771), 49.
68. Jack P. Greene, Pursuitsof Happiness: The Social Development of EarlyModern Brit-
ish Colonies and the Forntion of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of
North Carolina Press, 1988).
69. See also The Liberal Support of Gospel Ministers (Boston, 1790), where Backus
weaves the same themes together in enunciating an account of church-state separation:
'The ordinances of men, enforced by the sword, are to defend the persons and property of
all impartially, and to punish such as work ill to their neighbours; but the ordinances of the
gospel are for begetting and promoting faith and love in the souls of men, so as to act
towards God and their neighbours from heavenly motives. Therefore pure religion is an
infinite blessing to mankind, and false pretences to it, produce infinite mischiefs. This hath
rule was rooted in creation, part of the warp and woof of human exis-
tence in all times and places. Every ruler needs to be guided by some
set of moral principles, for human laws constantly address the conduct
and interactions of human beings as moral agents. Backus's suggestion
that the injunctions comprising the "second table of the law" repre-
sented the highest form of wisdom for civil magistrates to follow was a
common enough formulation.7o
The same concern to inculcate this "universal rule of equity" could
possibly underlie another apparently contradictory assertion by Backus.
In celebrating a favorable judicial application of the Massachusetts
Constitution's provisions for religious liberty, Backus emphasizes "this
truth, that the highest civil rulers derive their power from the consent
of the people and cannot stand without their support."71 Taken on its
own, the statement suggests a possible shift in the direction of modern-
ist contractualism, and away from a Calvinistic theory of government
rooted in the doctrine of original sin. But, as we have seen, Backus did
not perceive government in the broad sense as having arisen as a con-
sequence of the fall of man, but rather as a Creation ordinance God
had written into the nature of man as a social being. 72 Such a position
been experienced in all ages, and in all countries. Fear and love are the great principles of
human actions; but they were divided by the fall, and the devil hath held men in bondage
through fear of death. And nothing can unite these two principles, but faith In the death
and merits of Christ, our great high priest and king in heaven. His kingdom Is not of this
world, and therefore the world have no right to use force about his ministers," Clearly, In
Protestant eighteenth-century America, Backus saw no conflict between his doctrine of'
keeping separate the "ordinances of men" and the "ordinances of the gospel," on ti one
hand, and his encomiums to the "infinite," universal blessing of "pure religion" on the other.
He would not have understood or appreciated the twentieth-century doctrine of tolterance
dictating the sequestration of religion to the purely private sphere. His primary focus here
was to extol the value of gospel ministers to civilized society, and thereby encourage their
"liberal support." Later on in the same tract, he emphasized the danger posed by "all men
who love self above God and their neighbours." It was the special calling of gospe ministers
to assist in rooting out such selfishness so that its corrosive effects could be contained and
mitigated. Ibid., 3, 22-23.
70. Ellis Sandoz, ed., PoliticalSermons of the American Founding Era: 1730-1805 (Indi-
anapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1990). Elsewhere, Backus described "the essence of' all gov-
ernment of mankind" as "known laws, wel executed, within certain limits," in his The
Kingdom of God, Describedby His Word, with its infinite Benefits to Human Society (Bog-
ton, 1792), 22.
71. Backus, A Door Opened for ChristianLiberty (Boston, 1783), reprinted in MeLough-
in,ed., Pamphlets, 436.
72. Nineteenth-century Princeton theologian A.A. Hodge, commenting on cit. 23 of the
Westminster Confession of Faith, entitled Of the Civil Magistrate,articulated thils principle
of the divine origins of government in words that would have found Backus's unqualified
assent: "Civil government is a divine institution, and hence the duty of obedience to our
legitimate rulers is a duty owed to Cod as well as to our fellow-men. Some have supposed
that the right or legitimate authority of human government has its foundation ultimately In
'the consent of the governed,' "the will of the majority,' or in some Imaginary 'social compact'
reckoned upon the biblical account of original sin, but it also demon-
strated sympathy to the proposition that legitimate governments would
normally seek the consent and support of the people they represented.
Indeed, it was an outworking of the principle of divine sovereignty,
which necessarily limited and constricted the sovereignty of mere
human rulers. Such also was the natural manifestation of the divinely
mandated "rule of equity," applied to principles of governance. After
all, Backus was not a political theorist, but a Christian pastor. His ulti-
mate concern lay not with the realm of the political order, but with the
church over which he saw himself to be called as a shepherd. If Backus
was paraphrasing Locke here, it was to pronounce the vindication of his
own pastoral interest against "the deceitful and crafty teachers and law-
yers of Boston." 3 He was not so naive as to trust that rulers and author-
ities left to run in their natural courses vould have maintained a stance
of magnanimous benevolence toward the churches., 4 Indeed, experi-
ence dictated the opposite. It was his pastoral conviction that persons
in positions of authority in civil government needed to look at them-
selves in the mirror provided by the "rule of equity," and find remedy
entered into by the forefathers of the race at the origin of social life. It is self-evident,
however, that the divine will is the source of all government- and the obligation to obey that
will, resting upon all moral agents, the ultimate ground of all obligation to obey human
governments. This is certain-(1) Because God is the Creator and absolute Possessor of all
men; (2) Because he has formed their constitution as intelligent, morally responsible, free
agents, and is the Lord of the conscience; (3) Because lie is the supreme moral Governor of
all moral agents, and because his all-embracing moral law of absolute perfection requires all
that is morally right of every kind, and forbids all that is morally wrong. Hence every moral
obligation of every kind is a duty owed to od, (4) Because Cod has constituted man a social
being in his creation, and has providentially organized him in families and communities, and
thus made civil government an absolute necessity; (5) Because as the providential Ruler of
the world God uses civil government as his instrument in promoting the great ends of re-
demption in the upbuilding of his kingdom in the world, and (6) This is explicitly affirmed in
Scripture... (quoting Rom. 13: 1-2, 4)." A.A. Hodge, The Confession ofFaith (Carlisle, Pa.:
Banner of Truth Trust, 1992), 293-94.
74. It was from this perspective that Roger Williams's far-reaching metaphor of the ",all
of separation" between church and state must be understood, i.e., as a hedge protecting the
garden" of the church from incursions of the "wilderness" represented by the state. Con-
sidering the anti-historical interpretations that have clothed this metaphor since Williams
first brought it to light, the story of its usage is full of an irony that Backus would have
understood and regretted. Mark DeWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wllderness: Religion
and Government in American Constitutional HWtonj (Chicago. IlL: University of Chicago
Press, 1965); Daniel L. Dreisbach, "'Sowing Useful Truths and Principles': The Danbury
Baptists, Thomas Jefferson, and the 'Wall of Separation'," Journalof Church and State 39
(Summer 1997): 455-501; and Timothy L. Hall, "Roger Williams and the Foundations of
Religious Liberty," Boston University Law Review 71 (May 1991): 455-524.
for the defects they saw there in the Gospel of Christ, that spurred him
to action in the public square.75
Throughout his writings, Backus demonstrated an understanding of
the requirements of political community that stood in sharp contrast to
the liberal order of acquisitiveness and self-interest that had begun to
show signs of taking root in America. 76 Nor, in Backus's view, did
men's unfettered pursuit of self-interest-by some invisible calculus of
Providence-lead to the well-ordered and happy community.77 But
this notion of happiness itself required definition, for it too was subject
to misunderstanding and abuse.
HAPPINESS AND THE "GREAT END OF GOVERNMENT"
John Locke had posited that "Nature... has put into man a desire
of happiness, and an aversion to misery". .. and that "men... must be
allowed to pursue their happiness .... ."The context of his remarks
underscored the position that this "right to the pursuit of happiness"
carried with it no corresponding duty on the part of individuals.78 Mc-
Loughlin's remarks on a comment Backus made at the end of one his
later tracts seem to align Backus with what some critics have identified
as a nascent modernist autonomous individualism in Locke, and with
its manifestations in the writings of Jefferson. In this view, Backus's
75. After a brief survey of the statements by Backus that appear to evince an excessively
conservative position on religious liberty, Stanley J. Grenz concludes "that Backus does In-
deed favor a more liberalized concept of religious liberty than that with which some of his
modem critics are willing to credit him." Grenz, Isaac Backus and Religious Liberty, 357.
76. Shain, Myth of American Individualism, 141-50.
77. Garry Wills has attempted to link Jefferson and the principles of the Declaration to the
"moral sense" philosophy of Frances Hutcheson, downplaying the influence of Locke. At
first glance, Hutcheson's ideas might appear to provide a closer affinity to Backus, for
Hutcheson and his progeny positively described the role of political obligation and responsi-
bility as a function of the moral sense. But it is precisely here that the moral sense philoso-
phers diverge from the orthodox religious tradition most fundamentally. For they saw a
rational self-interest as the only sure guarantor of the felicity of the civil society. Thus, as
Wills summarizes the thinking of Adam Smith: "this promotion of happiness arises, by the
work of the invisible hand of providence, when men are freest to pursue their own happi-
ness." Garry Wills, Inventing America:Jefferson's Declarationof Independence (New York:
Vintage Books, 1979), 248-55. Though Backus did see some connection between individual
happiness and the happiness of the corporate body, he perceived the link to be not the
product of rational necessity, but of divine grace: "The reason why piety, religion, and mo-
rality, are essentially necessary for the good order of human society, is because they are as
much above the commanding power of man, as the showers and shines of heaven are."
Backus, The Kingdom of God, 16-17. Backus may have unconsciously borrowed from the
popular language of the moral sense philosophers, but his purpose thereby was to reassert
the ethical categories of the Christian gospel, not to assist them in the subversion and secn-
lar rearrangement of those categories.
78. Strauss, Natural Right and Histonj, 226-27.
formulation, "happiness is the great end of good government,". seems

to verify the existence of a tacit agreement between Calvinistic Baptists
and deistic Jeffersonians "that at the moment the most important issue
for the new republic was its commitment to an individualistic rather
than a corporate pursuit of happiness."80 Thus, Back-us and other Cal-
vinistic Baptists, deluded by Jefferson's apparent support of "religious
voluntarism against an established-church system and of decentralized
democracy against an oligarchic, stratified political system," formed
"the great bulwark of the party" of the anti-Cainistic and deistic Jef-
ferson. Backus, as the foremost representative of this influential strand
of separatist churches, stands in the middle of a line from Locke to
Jefferson as the somewhat naive carrier of an increasingly unmediated,
reductionistic individualism-a principle with far-reaching political and
social effects. Lockean and Jeffersonian echos are clealy evident in
the draft Bill of Bights Backus that Backus authored in 1779 in the days
leading up to the Massachusetts constitutional convention. The docu-
ment begins with the statement that "all men are born equally free and
independent, and have certain natural, inherent and unalienable rights,
among which are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring,
possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happi-
ness and safety."8s McLoughlin provides an illuminating comparison of
the second paragraph, devoted to religious liberty,' with the corre-
sponding language in George Mason's statement on religious freedom
in the Virginia Constitution: "Backus' tone was that of a New Light
pietist; Mason's that of an Enlightened latitudinarian.... The different
was obvious and fundamental. The Virginia separationists were inter-
ested in leaving the mind free to follow its own rational direction. The
Massachusetts pietists believed that separation was necessary in order
to leave the 'rational soul' free to find 'true religion' as expressed in the
Bible, 'the revealed will' of God. Implicit in both statements was a
belief in God, in natural law, in man's ability to find them. But the
79. A Door Openedfor Equal ChristianLiberty (Boston, 1783), in McLaughlin, ed., Pam-
phlets, 438.
81. Backus's "Draft for a Bill of Rights for the Massachusetts Constitution. 1779." is pro-
vided in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, Appendix Three. 487-,59.
82. The text of this paragraph reads: "2. As God is the only worthy object of all religious
worship, and nothing can be true religion but a voluntary obedience unto his reveaded ,ill.
of which each rational soul has an equal right to judge for itself, every person has an unalien-
able right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of his own mind,
where others are not injured thereby. And civil rulers are so far from having any right to
empower an) person or persons, to judge for others in such affairs, and to enforce their
judgments with the sword, that their power ought to be exerted to protect all persons and
societies, within their jurisdiction from being injured or interrupted in the free enjo)mient of
this right, under any pretense whatsoever." Ibid.
deistic separationists of Virginia trusted entirely to man's reason and

free will. The pietists insisted that only through the supernatural grace
of God would men find the Truth that is in Jesus Christ. Though both
views were individualistic, the deist was anthropocentric, the pietist
theocentric."8s Moreover, Backus's theocentrism mitigated the individ-
ualistic tendencies that clearly come to the fore here. His biblical the-
ology and his doctrine of the church provide a larger context for such
statements. His development of the notion of "happiness," as he used
the term in his sermons and tracts, provides a helpful barometer of the
extent to which his individualism was conditioned and circumscribed
by other larger concerns.
Backus exercised great care in framing his usage of the word "hap-
piness." In the Appeal to the Public, Backus had tied true self-interest,
honor, and happiness to the obedience that is the corollary of authentic
liberty: "Each rational soul, as he is a part of the whole system of ra-
tional beings, so it was and is both his duty and his liberty to regard the
good of the whole in all his actions. To love ourselves, and truly to seek
our own welfare, is both our liberty and our indispensable duty; but the
conceit that man could advance either his honor or happiness, by diso-
bedience instead of obedience, was first injected by the father of
lies. ...84 Again, it was a distortion of the proper understanding of
happiness to dislodge it from the composition of related notions. The
proportions and limits Backus attached to a term such as happiness
were determined by prior theological commitments. Here, Backus tied
the confusion and abuse surrounding the term happiness to the fall of
man. To a charge that Backus was thereby forcing a suffocating theo-
logical straitjacket over a neutral idea, he would likely have responded
that his opponents, in hitching the notion of happiness to their sense of
unbridled license, at the same time tied it to a philosophical position
that ultimately undermined even the enjoyments they sought to extract
from it. Like the case of the swelling frog or the diving "beast or fowl,"
such scorn for the limits imposed by God in nature only issued in de-
struction. This view comports with Backus's use of the statement from
A Door Openedfor ChristianLiberty emphasized by McLoughlin.5 To
83. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition, 144.
84. Backus, An Appeal to the Public, in McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 309-10.
85. The statement comes from a passage in which Backus lists reasons that convinced him
God had "now set before us an open door for equal Christian liberty which no man can
shut:" for, "reason and revelation agree in determining that the end of civil government is
the good of the governed by defending them against all such as would work Ill to their
neighbors and in limiting the power of rulers there. And those who invade the religious
rights of others are self-condemned, which of all things is the most opposite to happiness,
the great end of government, Rom. xiii, 3-10; xiv, 10-23." The next item in Backus's list
stated that "if men refuse to be happy themselves, yet their power to enslave others is now
his assertion about happiness being "the great end of government,"

Backus appended a pair of citations from a perennially fruitful biblical
source of thinking about government: the thirteenth (and fourteenth)
chapters of Romans.86 These particular quotations seem at first to be
an oddly inappropriate means of linking the notions of happiness and
good government. But this is only because the word "happiness" has
greatly weakened. And a faithful improvement of our privileges will weaken it more and
more till there shall be no more use for swords because there shall be none to hurt or
destroy in all God's holy mountain, [quotations omitted]. And who would not be in earnest
for that glorious day?" Clearly, Backus was guilty here of an overrealized eschatology. But
the passage demonstrates Backus's primary concern wvith the establishment of God;s king-
dom-a pastoral concern, not a political one.
86. Rom x)ii, 3-10: "For rulers are not a terror to good worls, but to the evil. Wilt thou
then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and though shalt have praise of tile
same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be
afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of Cod, a revenger to
execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for
wrath, but also for conscience sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are Cod's
ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues:
tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to
whom honour. Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another
hath filfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou
shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be an),
other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of
the law." Such a passage could not be further away from tie modernist notion of happiness
as individual self-fiulfillment or indulgence. The second passage quoted by Backus, complet-
ing the context that he himself sought to provide for his gloss on te tenm, "happiness," is
Rom. xiv, 10-23: "But why dost thou judge thy brother? Or why dost thou set at nought ty
brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. For it is written, As I
live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to Cod. So
then every one of us shall give account of himself to Cod. Let us not therefore judge one
another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion
to fall in his brother's way. I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is
nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any tfiing to be unclean, to him it is
unclean. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now wvalkest thou not claritably.
Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died. Let not then your good be eil
spoken of For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness and peace, and
joy in the Holy Ghost For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and
approved of men. Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things
wherewith one may edify another. For meat destroy not the work of Cod. All things indeed
are pure; but it is evil for that man who eateth with offence. It is good neither to cat flesh,
nor to drink ,ine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made
weak. Hast thou faith? Have it to thyself before God. Happy is ie that condemneth not
himself in that thing which he alloweth. And he that doubteth is damned if lie eat, because
he eateth not of faith: for whatsoever is not of faith is sin." A "happiness" more tightly
connected to the greater common good, to the community of trie crurcl, to tire notions of
self-limitation, of unselfishness and of self-restraint, would be difficult to imagine. To tie
Backus's use of the word here to a bourgening Jeffersonian conception of individual auton-
omy is to deliberately ignore the explicit context of the word whici Backus himself sought to
preserve for it.
come to connote an idea so widely divergent from the uses to which

Backus sought to put it. Indeed, Backus was seeking to interrupt or
reverse changes in usage that were under way at the time he wrote in
the latter half of the eighteenth century.8 7 For Backus, happiness was
usually engrafted to the notion of the good of a particular corporate
community, i.e. the church, which Backus envisioned in ascending tri-
umph, or given an explicit theocentric orientation. It was a principle
set in marked opposition to the will "to enslave others," and to the
desire of those who would "work ill to their neighbors." It is simply
incorrect to extrapolate an individualistic agenda from the associations
Backus deliberately sought to emphasize here. Such associations
would have resonated with a biblically literate audience, like those
Backus addressed, in a way that is difficult to recapture in a culture that
has been so fundamentally reshaped by the successors of Locke and
Hobbes. The context of Backus's remarks elucidates the theologically
determined direction of his thinking. The vision of final beatitude was
not to be the result of political maneuvering but rather the conse-
quence of an ultimate spiritual relinquishment of all lesser authorities
to the one Backus's text identified as the King of Kings.
Perhaps fitting synonyms for Backus's most common use of the
word happiness would be beatitude or blessedness. The term was a
familiar enough expression among eighteenth-century preachers."
That a general agreement on the theological associations attached to
the word "happiness" obtained among the prominent Congregational-
ist, Presbyterian, and Baptist orators of the day surely suggests the pos-
sibility that there was nothing unique about Backus's usage, such as to
serve as evidence linking him to an ascendant atomistic conception of
the social order. It is true that Backus attached the term to discussions
of political realities, but this is surely in large part because in the eight-
eenth-century New England that he inhabited, there existed a greater
87. Garry Wills, e.g., argues that in the eighteenth century, "secularizers" were "taking
over" happiness, a word that had once been "the preserve of theology," and turning it Into a
concept to which the rational measures of quantity and sum could be applied, Thus, by
Backus's time, men had begun to talk of happiness in such a way as to pit "public happiness
against celestial bliss." Wills, Inventing America, 151.
88. One commentator states that "the belief that happiness was a chief end of existence
was characteristic of the eighteenth century. It was very prevalent in both political and
religious thought. [Jonathan] Edwards defines God as a supremely happy being, as One
who is free from anything that is contrary to happiness. He also says that all God has done
or does is for his own happiness .. " He goes on further to say that, "in regard to happi-
ness, as in his general theological position, Backus was not quite as theocentric as Edwards."
Maston, Isaac Backus: Pioneerof Religious Liberty, 49, n. 8. Though this Is surely a matter
of degree. Few theologians can be considered as theocentric as Edwards was. See also The
Sermons of the Rev. Samuel Davies, A.M., Presidentof the College of New Jersey (Morgan,
Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1995).
overlap between political and ecclesiastical communities. If political

actors more savvy than Backus and the Baptists exploited the term for
purely secular ends, it was not because Backus or the Baptists had first
distorted it themselves to promote a radically individualistic vision of
the social and political order6a Backus can certainly be charged with
an overrealized eschatology, a zealous triumphalism at times. But
there is nothing unique about this vision of the church triumphant to
distinguish it from myriad other sermons of the day.
Backus provided his most extended discussion of happiness at the
end of a discourse entitled, Family Prayernot to be neglected, in which
he directly linked the notion of happiness to the theological pursuit of
wisdom and obedience. The deceit and vanity of sin so easily blinded
young people to the reality of things that they failed to see the true
source of happiness: "What conduct can be more absurd, than for a
creature, who wants to enjoy the good things of the Creator, to take a
course of contrariety to him to obtain them?" He directed his hearers
to the testimony of the apostle Paul, who, having "fought the good
fight,"
n
looked to the imminent enjoyment of "a happiness worth striv-
o inded
for indeed! He finished the discourse with a poem, apparentl
composed by himself, which describes "a truly happy man," in consid-
eration of the fact that "every soul is pursuing after happiness, tho'
most of the children of men take the way that leads directly from it." °
For the context it provides in setting out Backus's conception of true
happiness, the poem is worth rendering in its entirety:
I.
The happy man is born of God;
A penitent indeed:
His soul is wash'd in Jesus' blood,
And follows him with speed.
II.
His mind is taught by truth divine,
His will is rul'd thereby;
And his affections therewith join
In sweetest harmony.
III.
Christ's yoke upon his neck he wears;
He yields his a lto Cod
89. Note the illuminating contrast, again, with Leland, who "turned a quest for self-reli-
ance into a godly crusade. He believed that individuals had to make a studied effort to free
themselves of natural authorities: church, state, college, seminary, even family. Leland's
message carried the combined ideological leverage of evangelical urgency and Jeffersonian
promise. Using plain language and avoiding doctrinal refinements, he proclaimed a divine
economy that was atomistic and competitive rather than wholistic and hierarchical." Hatch,
Democratizationof American Christianity, 101.
90. Backus, Family Prayer not to be neglccted (Newport, 1766), 26, 27.
This empty world, with all its cares,
Under his feet are trod:
IV.
His father's precepts he obeys,
Still with a ready mind;
And unto all his sov'reign ways
Lies chearfully resign'd.
V.
His morning and his evening cries,
Come up before the throne,
Perfum'd with Jesus' sacrifice,
In whom he trusts alone.
VI.
The great concern upon his mind
Is how to honour God;
And for to benefit mankind,
Upon this earthly clod.
VII.
This is the end for which he lives;
All other things look vain:
This is the prize for which he strives;
While life or breath remain.
VIII.
Humility his soul doth cloath,
Contentment fills his mind;
And he within his heart doth loath
All sin of every kind.
Ix.
His tho'ts do often mount the sky,
And view the world above:
He sees the glorious bride room nigh,
Which fires his heart with love.
X.
God is his portion and his guide
Thro' this dark wilderness;
And when this flesh is laid aside,
His soul has endless rest.
XI.
And when the judge shall from his throne
Pass sentence upon all,
He'll rise to dwell with th' HOLY ONE,
Free from all sin and thrall.
XII.
O Lord of hosts, unto my soul
Much of this pleasure grantl
This is the all; this is the whole;
What else then can I want 91
91. Ibid., 28-30. The poem is also included as part of an entry in Backus's diary, w mere
Backus describes it as "the first that ever I composed in my life in such a way." Isaac
Backus, diary entry of 7 March 1766, in The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols., ed, William G.
McLoughlin (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1979), 2: 625-27.
But the meaning of happiness was not exhausted by its extension to

solitary individuals in their relation to God. The "universal rule of eq-
uity," selflessness, and true happiness in the community- "the whole
system of rational beings"-could not be understood in isolation from
one another. The biblical doctrines of law and gospel provided the lens
through which a proper perspective on true human happiness and
human interactions could be gauged: "As to the law, our Lord has given
us a summary of it, in as clear terms as can be used: 'Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.-This
do and thou shalt live," Luke x. 27, 28. Love is the temper of happi-
ness, and without it there can be none, and the nobler its object the
greater the happiness, and the easier to obey the precept; how holy,
just, and good, then is this law, which requires our highest love to the
supreme fountain of being and excellency, and our subordinate love to
all other beings; according to their relation and connexion to him and
to us? This lawv then constituted an union of heart between the whole
system of rational beings, which influenced to all right behaviour to-
ward each other, according to their several stations and relations; and
the fruit of such behaviour is, This do and thou shalt lice." 2 To rebel
against such a law, by "turning aside to our own crooked, perverse 43
ways," was to "miss the mark of both our duty and happiness."
In another late sermon, Backus elaborated on the notion of the
Kingdom of God, and on "its infinite benefits to human society."-" The
sermon is important for its elucidation of the notion of happiness or
beatitude as Backus saw it in the context of redemptive history. Con-
spicuously absent from Backus's catalogue of the characteristics of the
Kingdom of God was any hint of a millennial reign brought about by
religious adjustments to or hijackings of the political framework of
human governments. The Kingdom of God was not a revolutionary
rearrangement of the human political order. It existed in "the procla-
mation of the gospel to a sinful world," and in the "change of heart
which is produced thereby." Likewise, God's Kingdom could be seen
in "his government of his visible church." It was illustrated by Backus's
favorite parable of the wheat and the tares. And it would finally
culminate in "his coming in the last day, to judge the world in right-
eousness; when the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment,
and the righteous be received into life eternal."9 5' None of these mean-
ings contained any hint of the theocratic political agenda that Backus
92. Backus, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace, Opened and Vindicated, 49-50.
93. Ibid., 50.
94. Backus, The Kingdom of God.
95. Ibid., 8, 9, 11, 12, 13.
has been accused of advancing,96 Here, Backus described "the essence

of all government of mankind" as "known laws, well executed, within
certain limits." 97 Backus's understanding of biblical doctrine led him to
the conclusion that such limits precluded the imposition of the King-
dom of God by political means. On the other hand, the surest founda-
tion for human community, the divine mandate to "love thy neighbor,"
showed little promise of fulfillment if viewed purely as a product of the
political arrangements of the City of Man. The strands of human hap-
piness, selflessness, true liberty, and the Kingdom of God would only
finally and completely converge with the culmination of history prom-
ised in the Book of Revelation: "Safety and happiness is the desire of all
nations; and this will be gloriously enjoyed when the witnesses shall be
raised above all earthly powers, and the kingdoms of the world are be-
come the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ... [quoting Rev. xi.
11_19]."98
CONCLUSION
Scholars such as Barry Alan Shain, Kenneth Craycraft, and Stanley

Hauerwas, among others, have called into question some longstanding
liberal "myths" regarding the respective roles of the state and of the
Christian religion in the unique circumstances and historical conditions
of the American polity. Given their conclusions on the complexity and
difficulty surrounding "the problem of church and state," it should be
no surprise that a personage like Isaac Backus fails to tie up the prob-
lem in a tidy package satisfactory to both liberal secularists and latter-
day Christian apologists. If it is true, as Craycraft asserts, that "any
kind of Christianity that understands itself not simply as the naked
Iproduct of free and voluntary choice,'9 but as the product of the per-
suasive gift of grace and faith from God, is exclude&' from the liberal's
political and legal respect-and thus from an equal standing with secu-
larism in the liberal regime established under the Constitution-then it
is fair to conclude that "it is the mandate of the theologian (and the
religious believer more generally) to leave the question [of church and
state] profoundly unresolved.c0 Backus's consistent, unequivocal vin-
dications of the grace of God against those he deemed to be its detrac-
96. Michael Zuckert, for instance, singles out Backus's Appeal to the Public for its "theo-
cratic tendencies." Michael Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame, Ind.: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 270, n. 47.
97. Backus, The Kingdom of God, 22.
98. Backus, The Atonement of Christ, Explained and Vindicated, 25.
99. The quoted phrase is from Justice John Paul Stevens's opinion in the Alabama school
prayer case, Wallace v. Jaffree, 105 Sup. Ct. 2479 (1985) at 2488.
100. Craycraft, American Myth, 26.
tors, indeed, the manner in which he approached the issues he faced as

a pastor and theologian, meant that he could not, in the end, produce
such a resolution. His chiliastic confidence in the imminent ascen-
dancy of the final and perpetual reign of Christ may have deluded him
into thinking that the resolution was close at hand. Nevertheless, as we
have seen, it did not ultimately distort his, for the most part, consist-
ently sustained and principled adherence to the Augustinian divide be-
tween the City of God and the City of Man.
Backus's unsatisfactory resolution has been represented in recent
scholarship as a failure to follow through on the democratic, individual-
istic liberal impulses that are said to provide the mainstay of his argu-
ments for liberty of conscience.101 However, as I have attempted to
show in this essay, such interpretations of Backus as the hesitant, proto-
liberal pastor-advocate for separationism fail to give sufficient credit to
the carefully wrought contextual fabric within which Backus unfolded
his understanding of liberty. Projections of a view of liberty shaped by
modernistic radical individual autonomy onto the arguments and prin-
ciples that Backus sought to develop in his writings finally distort the
tightly circumscribed definitions that Backus deliberately and consist-
ently employed. He never developed a systematic, abstract theory of
church-state relations.102 His practical concerns as a pastor and later,
as an agent for the Warren Association for the status of New England
Baptists, forced him to deal with specific issues as they came his way:
the new Massachusetts constitution, the issues surrounding the taxation
and certification of churches. But his teachings consistently gave pri-
macy to the evangelical church's Reformation tradition, to its doctrines
and to its mission in the conversion of individual souls-not, finally, to
the establishment of theocratic principles of state. Backus's vision of
religious liberty cannot be isolated as an early modem avatar of the
content-free, religion-neutral liberty of conscience that prevails in con-
temporary discourse. 103 As unsavory as the prospect might be for mod-
101. Thus, Curry, for instance, finds that Backus and the majority of Baptists weakened
their own posture by holding positions "that were difficult to reconcile with each other," that
is to say, they did not hesitate to deny to others, (i.e., Roman Catholics, Muslims, atheists),
the liberties for which they fought so strenuously for themselves. Curry finds in John Le-
land (see n. 35), a better model for "a broader view of Church and State." Curr) First
Freedoms, 176-77.
102. This is most probably due to the nature of the debate in Massachusetts at the time.
The terms of discussion were narrowly fixed. "Massachusetts's voluminous discourse on
Church-State matters during the revolutionary period focused almost entirely on the mean-
ing of freedom of religion." Curry, First Freedoms, 172.
103. Perhaps the most notorious and momentous recent formulation of this version of
liberty can be seen in the so-called "mystery passage" from the Supreme Court's joint opin-
ion in PlannedParenthoodv.Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's owvn
concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." See
em liberal scholarship, it must be acknowledged that it is simply

impossible to come to grips with what Backus sought to accomplish in
his writings without taking seriously the biblical text which provided
the context for his every endeavor. Thus, first and foremost, liberty for
Backus meant the spiritual liberty of the soul that is released from the
bondage of sin and death through the power of the Gospel. This
meaning becomes apparent as the texture of his arguments is seen to
reveal again and again a theological fixity of gaze, to which political and
social concerns are merely derivative and ancillary. The same emphasis
adheres to his use of other related terms that were undergoing
profound and far-reaching shifts in meaning in the late eighteenth cen-
tury. Liberty, self-interest, and happiness became meaningless abstrac-
tions, seductive and destructive baubles when detached from the
"divine and knowable moral end or telos" which alone provided them
with limits and legitimacy.'0 4 It was Backus's orthodox, biblical relig-
ion 105 that gave definition and purpose to his efforts to secure religious
liberty for his fellow Baptists. Political institutions required the leaven-
ing influence of the gospel, 106 but the gospel's utility to the political
order did not begin to explain its relevance and significance. Backus's
prior theological and doctrinal commitments set clear limits on his will-
ingness and ability to succumb to new and influential, increasingly an-
thropocentric, even atomistic conceptions of the social order. Of
course, it cannot in fairness be said that Backus held himself com-
pletely aloof from such theories. The influence of John Locke most
certainly appears in Backus's writings. 0 7 But it is one thing to say that
in his own work Backus engaged himself with "the great theorist of
freedom of conscience and religion," 10 8 Locke.10 It is another thing
Planned Parenthoodv. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), 851. In elucidating the transformation
of meaning to which the term, "liberty of conscience," has lately succumbed, Barry Alan
Shain states that "liberty or freedom of religious conscience, indeed has proved a most valu-
able tool in the undermining of the very grounds upon which it traditionally stood-the
centrality of religion to the lives of its most ardent defenders." See Barry Alan Shain, "Lib-
erty and License: The American Founding and the Western Conception of Freedom," In
Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition, ed. Gary L. Gregg III
(Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 1999), 218.
104. Ibid.
105. Hatch states, "Backus clung to the theology of Jonathan Edwards, the issue of Infant
baptism excepted," in his Democratization of American Christianity,99.
106. "The reason why piety, religion, and morality, are essentially necessary for the good
order of human society, is because they are as much above the commanding power of man,
as the showers and shines of heaven are." Backus, The Kingdom of God, 16-17.
107. As Maston notes, "quotations from Locke are unusually frequent in his Seasonable
Pleafor Liberty of Conscience (1770), A Letter to a Gentleman in the MassachusettsGeneral
Assembly (1771), and Ordination Sermon of Mr. Asa Hunt (1772)." Maston, Isaac Backus,
Pioneer of Religious Liberty, 55, n. 2.
108. Craycraft, American Myth of Religious Freedom, 69.
altogether to say that in so doing, Back-us embraced a "godly crusade"

for self-reliance to the point where history designates him and his the-
ology to have served as "a bridge between Edwards and [Charles] Fin-
hey,"110 or that he half-heartedly embraced, in attenuated form, what
Craycraft calls Locke's reduction of the teachings of Christianity to a
simple law of toleration.""h' Despite his (initially reluctant) eschewal
of infant baptism, his nevertheless robust and orthodox Reformational
view of the church-which he saw as an institution with sufficient au-
thority to assist in elevating individuals beyond mere self-interest and
assist too in their collective sanctification as the "Body of Clhrist"-
alone prohibited such a reductionism from entering into his thinking.
To the charge that he was undermining the whole notion of community
by diverging from the Congregational churches on the subject of infant
baptism, his reply would have been that a community founded on a
defective, unbiblical principle would not in the end be a faithful bibli-
cal community worthy of the name of Christ. He believed that he
could prove the truth of his assertion by pointing to the decline of piety
in the New England churches since the founding generation. Back-us's
understanding of the social order developed out of his prior theological
commitments. The two strands of argument went in tandem. Where
other ministers were engaged in the "Lockeanization of Protestant po-
litical thought,"-" Backus sought to stem the tide, drawing his audi-
ences back to the search for scriptural purity of the New England
"fathers," settling, ultimately, for an uncomfortable and ambiguous co-
existence between church and state. 13 Such a view necessitated an
109. At the same time, it is helpful to remember the observation of Donald Lutz: "For all
the resonance with Locke's ideas, many of the principles and assumptions of American con-
stitutionalism were operative before Locke published his Second Treatiseon Ciril Govern-
ment. In temporal terms, it makes more sense to call Locke an American than it does to call
America Lockean." Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton
Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 10-11. See also, footnote 34, supra.
110. McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 59. For a perceptive critique of the transition from the
theocentric impetus of the First Great Awakening under Jonathan Edwards to te anthropo-
centric "revivalistic" techniques of Finney in the Second Great AwAening, see lain H. Mur-
ray, Revival and Revivalism (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994). Backus would
have been horrified to see himself characterized as a theological half-uay station between
the great orthodox defender of Calvinism, Edwards, and the Pelagian Finney.
111. Crayeraft, American Myth of Religious Frecdom, 28-68.
112. "Such "Lockeanizing" ministers were able to render "the political sphere, the King-
dom of the World, not merely institutionally autonomous, but theoretically autonomous as
well, open to rational adumbration in its owvn terms, subject only to the loosest supervision
from scripturally and theologically grounded argument." Zuckert, The Natural Rights Re-
public, 191.
113. In the words of historian Edwin Gaustad, "Not the thoroughgoing Jeffersonian that
Leland was, not the zealous purist regarding the church and its ministry that Roger W\illiams
was, Isaac Backus fought for a liberty within limits-limits essentially of a Protestant prov-
atavistic, backward-looking conception of liberty. And so the circum-

scribed depiction of liberty set forth here-a stream running in a "clear
and steady channel," rather than a boundless, universal ocean-could
well contribute toward the consignment of the Massachusetts Baptist
and his writings to an even more profound oblivion than before. Per-
haps. On the other hand, however, it may be that some elements of
Backus's design will appear to have been worthy of preservation. This
much is certain: his failure to resolve the church-state problem-at
least in a manner satisfactory to modem apologists for the liberal or-
der-was inevitable, for the relativization of politics was part of the
ineluctable logic of his theology.
ince. It is a distinction, and it does make a difference." Edwin Scott Gaustad, "Religious
Liberty: Baptists and Some Fine Distinctions," American Baptist Quarterly 6 (December
1987): 220.

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in recent years, scholarship on revolutionary America has focused

o PETER JUDSON RICHARDS (A.B., University of Michigan; J.D., University of North

1. Ellis Sandoz, ed., PoliticalSermons of the American FoundingEra: 1730-1805 (Indian-

no single separatistic convert augured larger consequences for New

greater detail the principle of liberty that Back-us sought to enunciate

DUTY, OBEDIENCE AND LIBERTY

hierarchy of creation. While carefully preserving the distinction be-

of "rules of government" already in existence. Government-defined

grandfather, Solomon Stoddard,21 had compromised and sullied the

cropping out in Backus's works and which the Revolution brought to

24. McLoughlin, ed., Pamphlets, 30.

stood when viewed in the contextual light of a long history of classical

"the respect for voluntarism," always a feature of the Protestant

political or economic slavery. 41 Backus deliberately set out to shift the

ordained institution of government.4 Within this framework, Backus

dom to sin.4 7 Theologically speaking, it was impossible to consider

SELFISHNESS AND GOOD GOVERNMENT

51. Backus, The Doctrine of Sovereign Grace, 49-50.

might of the British military.- And it comprised the essence of the

quired the vigilance and diligence of an active reformative ministry.

license." Backus also praised the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution for

Backus repeatedly returned to Christ's summation of the law, empha-

HAPPINESS AND THE "GREAT END OF GOVERNMENT"

formulation, "happiness is the great end of good government,". seems

deistic separationists of Virginia trusted entirely to man's reason and

his assertion about happiness being "the great end of government,"

come to connote an idea so widely divergent from the uses to which

overlap between political and ecclesiastical communities. If political

But the meaning of happiness was not exhausted by its extension to

has been accused of advancing,96 Here, Backus described "the essence

Scholars such as Barry Alan Shain, Kenneth Craycraft, and Stanley

tors, indeed, the manner in which he approached the issues he faced as

em liberal scholarship, it must be acknowledged that it is simply

altogether to say that in so doing, Back-us embraced a "godly crusade"

atavistic, backward-looking conception of liberty. And so the circum-

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