How can Baptists defend religious liberty when Islam is on the rise?
Question 12045
Baptists hold a remarkable and often underappreciated distinction in the history of Western civilisation: they were among the earliest voices in the English-speaking world to call for universal religious freedom. Not mere toleration for their own group, but genuine liberty of conscience for all people, including those whose beliefs they considered deeply wrong. This heritage raises searching questions for modern believers, particularly as the religious landscape of the United Kingdom and the wider West shifts dramatically. What happens when the religious freedom Baptists championed makes space for a faith system that, given sufficient influence, may not return the favour? And how does the Bible’s own fierce condemnation of idolatry and its warnings of national judgement fit alongside a commitment to liberty of conscience? These questions demand honest engagement with both Baptist history and biblical theology.
The Baptist Pioneers of Religious Liberty
The story begins in the early seventeenth century, in the turbulent years when dissenting from the Church of England could cost a person their freedom or their life. Thomas Helwys (c. 1575-1616) was an English barrister who joined the Puritan movement and, along with John Smyth, became convinced that baptism should follow a personal profession of faith rather than being administered to infants. This conviction, together with their insistence on congregational self-governance, put them at odds with both the established church and the state that enforced its authority.
After a period of exile in Amsterdam, where the early Baptist theology took shape among English refugees, Helwys made a decision that would cost him his life but change the course of history. He returned to England in 1612, establishing what is widely regarded as the first Baptist congregation on English soil near Spitalfields in east London. He brought with him a book he had written in Amsterdam: A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. Church historians recognise this as the first English-language book to defend the principle of universal religious liberty.
What made Helwys’s argument so radical was its scope. He was not asking for toleration for Baptists alone. He sent a personal copy to King James I with a handwritten inscription that included these remarkable words: “The King is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them.” Even more striking, Helwys extended his argument to cover everyone: “Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.” The reference to “Turks” meant Muslims. In an age when religious uniformity was considered essential to social order, Helwys was arguing that even adherents of Islam had the right to believe and worship according to their own conscience without state punishment. King James responded by having Helwys thrown into Newgate Prison, where he died around 1616 at approximately forty years of age.
Leonard Busher, a lay member of Helwys’s congregation, continued this advocacy in 1614 with Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, the earliest English publication dedicated entirely to defending religious freedom. John Murton, who succeeded Helwys as pastor, carried the torch further. These early Baptist voices anticipated arguments that would not gain widespread acceptance for another century and a half.
Across the Atlantic, Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) pressed the case further still. After being expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his radical views on religious liberty and the separation of church and state, Williams founded the colony of Providence in what is now Rhode Island. In 1638, he helped establish the first Baptist congregation in America. His great work, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644), argued passionately that forced worship offended God and that civil government had no authority over the human soul. Williams coined the concept of “soul liberty,” and his colony became the first place in the modern Western world where citizenship and religion were formally separated. Rhode Island became a haven for Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and all manner of religious dissenters.
What is essential to understand is that Williams and Helwys were not proto-secularists or religious relativists. They were passionate Christians who believed that forced religion produced hypocrites, not genuine disciples. Their argument was fundamentally theological, not political. Williams wanted to protect the church from corruption by the state, not to diminish the importance of the gospel. As he saw it, mixing religion and politics produced politics, not godliness. He continued to engage vigorously in theological debate, including extended disputes with Quakers, even as he defended their right to believe differently. The Baptist commitment to religious freedom was born from the conviction that genuine faith must be freely chosen, because God Himself does not coerce belief.
The Theological Foundations of Baptist Religious Liberty
The early Baptist case for religious freedom rested on several interconnected biblical convictions. The most fundamental was that every human being stands individually accountable before God. Helwys argued that reality consists of two spheres: the earthly and the spiritual. The king rules only over the earthly kingdom. He will not answer before God for his subjects’ souls, and therefore he has no authority to dictate what they believe. This was a direct application of passages like Romans 14:12, “So then each of us will give an account of himself to God,” and the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 22:21, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Connected to this was the Baptist understanding of the church as a regenerate community. If the church consists only of those who have genuinely trusted in Jesus through personal faith, then compelling anyone to join or conform serves no spiritual purpose. A state-enforced religion fills churches with unregenerate members, corrupting the very institution it claims to protect. Believer’s baptism, the distinctive Baptist practice, embodies this principle: only those who can make a personal, conscious profession of faith are baptised, because belonging to the people of God requires a genuine relationship with God that cannot be manufactured by legislation.
The early Baptists also drew on the example of Jesus Himself, who never used political power or physical force to advance His kingdom. When Peter drew a sword in Gethsemane, Jesus told him to put it away (John 18:11). When asked whether He was a king, Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting” (John 18:36). The weapons of Christian advance are spiritual, not carnal: the preaching of the Word, the testimony of transformed lives, prayer, and the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. Paul says as much in 2 Corinthians 10:4: “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.”
This did not mean the early Baptists considered all religions equally valid. They emphatically did not. They believed that salvation is found only in Jesus and that all other religious systems are ultimately false. But they recognised that using the state to enforce this truth was both ineffective and contrary to the nature of the gospel itself. You cannot legislate someone into the kingdom of God. Genuine conversion is a work of the Holy Spirit, not of the magistrate’s sword.
Islam on the Ascendancy: The Modern Challenge
The Baptist commitment to religious liberty now faces a test that Helwys himself anticipated in broad outline when he included “Turks” in his plea for freedom. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United Kingdom and across much of the Western world. Mosques are being built in cities and towns that a generation ago had none. The Muslim population of Britain has grown substantially, and with it has come increasing cultural and political influence. This growth is driven by immigration, higher birth rates within Muslim communities, and a degree of conversion.
For Christians committed to religious freedom, this raises genuinely difficult questions. Baptist principles require us to affirm that Muslims have every right to believe, worship, and practise their faith without state interference, just as Helwys argued four centuries ago. Freedom of conscience is not a principle that applies only when we are comfortable with who is exercising it. If we believe in soul liberty, we believe in it for everyone.
The difficulty is that Islam, considered as a theological and political system, does not historically share this commitment. Classical Islamic jurisprudence, drawn from the Qur’an and Hadith, envisions a society in which sharia (Islamic law) governs public life. Under traditional Islamic law, apostasy from Islam is punishable by death. Non-Muslims living in Muslim-majority lands are historically assigned dhimmi status, a category of tolerated second-class citizenship that involves restrictions on worship, dress, and public expression of faith. The Qur’anic injunction in Surah 9:29 instructs Muslims to fight People of the Book (Jews and Christians) until they pay the jizya (a tax levied on non-Muslims) “while they are in a state of subjection.” While many individual Muslims are peaceable and do not seek to impose sharia on their neighbours, the theology behind these positions remains part of mainstream Islamic scholarship and is practised in varying degrees across the Muslim-majority world today.
This creates what we might call the paradox of tolerance applied to religion. Baptist principles of liberty protect Islam’s right to exist and grow in Western societies. But the theological and legal framework of Islam, taken on its own terms, would not extend the same liberty to Christians if the positions were reversed. We can see this playing out in real time: in countries where Islam holds political power, Christians face severe persecution, restrictions on worship, and in some cases the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy. The charity Open Doors consistently ranks Muslim-majority nations among the worst persecutors of Christians worldwide.
How should Christians respond to this? The answer is not to abandon our commitment to religious liberty. That would betray both our Baptist heritage and our theological convictions. The moment we use state power to suppress the religious freedom of others, we become what Helwys and Williams spent their lives opposing. Instead, the response requires several things working together.
We must maintain the principle of religious freedom whilst insisting that it applies equally in all directions. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to share our faith, to criticise religious ideas respectfully, and to convert from one faith to another without penalty. These freedoms must be vigorously defended against any ideology, Islamic or otherwise, that would restrict them. The same liberty that allows a mosque to be built in London must protect a church’s right to preach the exclusive claims of Jesus and must protect a Muslim’s right to leave Islam and follow Jesus without threat or reprisal.
We must also be honest about the distinction between welcoming individual Muslims as neighbours, colleagues, and friends and naively assuming that Islamic theology, when given political power, will respect the liberties we extend. Hospitality and discernment are not opposites. Jesus told His disciples to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). We can love our Muslim neighbours with genuine warmth whilst remaining clear-eyed about the political implications of Islamic theology when it gains cultural dominance.
Above all, we must recognise that the ultimate answer to the growth of Islam is not political but spiritual. Helwys and Williams understood this instinctively. The weapon of the church is the gospel, proclaimed faithfully and lived out authentically. If Christians in the United Kingdom are concerned about the growth of Islam, the answer is not legal restriction but spiritual renewal, vigorous evangelism, confident proclamation of biblical truth, and churches that demonstrate the transforming power of Jesus in ways that draw people of all backgrounds to faith in Him.
Idolatry, National Judgement, and the Sovereignty of God
This brings us to the deepest and most uncomfortable dimension of the question. Scripture is absolutely clear that idolatry is an abomination in the sight of God. The very first commandment declares, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), and the second forbids the making or worshipping of any image or likeness (Exodus 20:4-6). These are not optional preferences; they reflect the fundamental nature of reality. There is one God, the God of the Bible, and all other objects of worship are false. Islam, whatever its claim to monotheism, worships a God whose character and nature differ substantially from the God revealed in Scripture as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The denial of the Trinity, the rejection of Jesus as divine, and the repudiation of the cross place Islamic theology in direct conflict with the central truths of Christianity.
Scripture also teaches plainly that God judges nations for idolatry and moral corruption. The extermination of the Canaanites was explicitly connected to their religious practices, including child sacrifice, divination, and sexual depravity associated with their worship (Deuteronomy 7:1-5; 12:29-31; 18:9-14; Leviticus 18:24-28). God told Abraham that the iniquity of the Amorites was “not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16), indicating that He was patiently allowing time before executing judgement, but that judgement would eventually come. The prophets pronounced doom upon nation after nation for their rebellion against God. Isaiah 13-14 and Jeremiah 50-51 condemned Babylon. Ezekiel 25-32 pronounced judgement on Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt. Nahum foretold the destruction of Nineveh. Obadiah declared judgement on Edom. In each case, the nations were held accountable for their sins, including their idolatrous worship.
In the New Testament, Paul explains that God had been patient with the idolatry of the nations during past ages but that, now that Jesus has been raised from the dead, “he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed” (Acts 17:30-31). This confirms that idolatry is not a matter of indifference to God but stands under His judgement. Romans 1:18-32 traces the downward spiral of societies that suppress the truth about God and exchange His glory for created things, showing that idolatry leads to moral degradation and, ultimately, to divine judgement expressed through the natural consequences of rebellion.
So we face an apparent tension. God condemns idolatry and judges nations for it. Yet the Baptist tradition, rooted in biblical principles, argues that the state should not punish people for their religious beliefs. Are these positions contradictory?
Resolving the Tension: Two Kingdoms and the Age of Grace
The resolution lies in understanding the distinction between God’s prerogative and human authority. God has every right to judge idolatry, and He will do so in His own time and in His own way. The kings of Israel were responsible for maintaining true worship within the theocratic nation because Israel had a unique covenant relationship with God. She was His chosen people, governed directly by His law, with the Torah as her constitution and God Himself as her King (1 Samuel 8:7). Idolatry within Israel was, as it were, treason against the Head of State.
No modern nation occupies this position. The United Kingdom is not Israel. No Gentile nation ever has been, nor ever will be, a theocracy in the Old Testament sense. This is a point that dispensational theology makes with particular clarity. God’s programme for Israel was unique to Israel. The church, composed of believers from every nation, operates under a different set of arrangements during this present age. We are not called to establish a Christian state or enforce Mosaic civil law upon unbelieving populations. The Great Commission sends us to make disciples through preaching and teaching (Matthew 28:19-20), not to conquer nations through legislation.
Jesus made this explicit when He said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The kingdom of God in its present form advances through the proclamation of the gospel, not through political coercion. The parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43) teaches that God will sort the righteous from the wicked at the final harvest. It is not the church’s job to pull up the tares prematurely. God is patient, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The same patience that delayed judgement on the Amorites in Abraham’s day operates now on a global scale.
This does not mean God is indifferent to the spiritual state of nations. The growth of false religion, the promotion of idolatry, and the cultural abandonment of biblical truth all carry consequences. Romans 1 describes a pattern in which God “gives over” societies to the consequences of their own choices when they persistently reject Him. The moral decay, confusion, and social fragmentation visible in the modern West may well be evidence of this pattern at work. God does not need to send fire from heaven to judge a nation; He can simply withdraw His restraining grace and allow human rebellion to run its natural course.
There is also a prophetic dimension. Scripture teaches that the trajectory of this present age is not toward the gradual Christianisation of the world but toward increasing apostasy and the eventual rise of a global system of false worship under the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:3-12; Revelation 13). The growth of Islam and the simultaneous decline of Christianity in the West may well fit within this larger prophetic framework, though we must always be cautious about making specific prophetic identifications of current events. What Scripture does make clear is that the end of this age will see the full outpouring of God’s judgement upon all forms of rebellion against Him, including every system of false worship that has ever existed (Revelation 19-20).
Practical Implications for Today
Bringing all of this together, how should Bible-believing Christians in the twenty-first century navigate the intersection of religious liberty, the growth of Islam, and the Bible’s clear teaching on idolatry and judgement?
We should maintain our historic Baptist commitment to religious freedom, not as a compromise of our convictions but as an expression of them. We believe that genuine faith cannot be compelled, that the church thrives best when it is free rather than propped up by state power, and that God is sovereign over the nations even when they do not acknowledge Him. This means defending the rights of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and all others to worship freely, whilst insisting with equal vigour on our own right to proclaim the gospel, to call idolatry what it is, and to invite all people to repent and believe in Jesus.
We should be honest about what Islam teaches and what history demonstrates about the treatment of Christians under Islamic political authority. This is not bigotry; it is truth-telling. We can speak these truths without hatred or malice, motivated by genuine love for Muslim people and concern for the freedom of all.
We must resist the temptation to look to political power as the solution. The early Baptists understood that when the church grasps political power to enforce religious conformity, it corrupts itself in the process. The state churches of Europe, enforced by the magistrate’s sword, produced centuries of nominal Christianity that was Christian in name only. Helwys and Williams saw this clearly, and the lesson has not changed. The answer to Islam is not legislation but proclamation. The answer to idolatry is not the state but the Spirit.
We must also recognise that the growth of Islam in the West represents, in part, a judgement upon a church that has lost its confidence in the gospel. Where Christianity retreats into timidity, cultural accommodation, and theological liberalism, a spiritual vacuum is created. Islam, with its certainty and its demands, fills that vacuum. The most effective response to the growth of any false religion is a church that actually believes and lives what it professes: churches full of people who know their Bibles, who pray with fervour, who share their faith with boldness, and whose transformed lives demonstrate that Jesus is alive and His gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16).
And we should hold fast to the prophetic hope that God’s purposes will not be thwarted. Islam will not ultimately triumph. No false religion will. The day is coming when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11). The growth of Islam is a reality we must engage with wisdom and courage, but it is not a reality that should fill us with fear. The sovereign God who holds the nations in His hand is working all things according to His eternal purpose, and that purpose culminates in the return of Jesus and the establishment of His kingdom, before which every rival will be brought to nothing.
Conclusion
The early Baptists gave the English-speaking world a priceless gift: the principle that religious belief must be free from state coercion. They did so not because they were indifferent to truth but precisely because they understood that truth advances through persuasion, not force. Thomas Helwys died in prison for this conviction. Roger Williams was banished into the wilderness for it. They paid a steep price because they understood something that too many Christians have forgotten: the gospel does not need the state’s sword, and it is diminished every time the state’s sword is drawn on its behalf.
The challenge of Islam’s growth in the modern West does not overthrow this principle; it tests it. And it should drive us not to panic or political manoeuvring but to our knees and then to our feet, with the Word of God in our hands and the love of Christ in our hearts, ready to give an answer to everyone who asks for the reason for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15). God will judge the nations in His time and in His way. Our calling is to be faithful witnesses in the time He has given us, trusting that the same God who sustained Helwys in Newgate and Williams in the wilderness will sustain His people until Jesus comes.
“For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” 2 Corinthians 10:4
Bibliography
- Helwys, Thomas. A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. Edited by Richard Groves. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998.
- Williams, Roger. The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience. Edited by Richard Groves. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001.
- Estep, William R. Revolution Within the Revolution: The First Amendment in Historical Context, 1612-1789. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.
- Wilken, Robert Louis. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
- King, Jonathan A. Every Man’s Conscience: Early English Baptists and the Fight for Religious Liberty. Welwyn Garden City: H&E Academic, 2024.
- Ryrie, Charles C. Dispensationalism. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2007.
- Pentecost, J. Dwight. Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1958.
