Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

In general, Baptist churches between 1680 and 1740 received greater respect and less persecution than they had in the early colonial period. As a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, the new English monarchs William and Mary championed the Act of Toleration (1689), which relieved persecution against dissenters like the Baptists. King James II had revoked Massachusetts’s charter in the 1680s, but William and Mary granted a new one in 1692. It returned much of the colony’s political autonomy but required it, in accordance with the Toleration Act, to give freedom to all Protestant Christians, including Baptists. The era of exclusive Puritanism had come to a close. Baptists could now worship in relative peace and quiet, but they still had to pay taxes to support the established state churches.7 At the same time that persecution was declining, Baptists also sought greater levels of respect in colonial American society. Whereas the original Baptist churches of the seventeenth century had depended on largely uneducated but militant leaders, in the eighteenth century highly educated pastors such as Jeremiah Condy were more common. In 1718, Elisha Callender became the first Harvard-educated pastor of Boston’s First Baptist Church, and Congregationalist stalwarts Increase and Cotton Mather even participated in his ordination. In a few short years, Baptist pastors had achieved an unprecedented level of prestige.