How can Baptists defend religious liberty when Islam is on the rise?

Question 12045.

Defending religious liberty while believing that idolatry is a sin against God feels, to a lot of people, like holding two contradictory positions at once. I get asked this most often when the conversation turns to Islam in Britain, and the question underneath it is usually sharper than the words used: why should we protect the freedom of a faith we believe to be false?

It is a fair question and it deserves a proper answer rather than a slogan. As a Baptist I hold to religious liberty not despite my convictions about truth but because of them, and I want to show you why those two things belong together.

Why religious liberty is a Baptist conviction, not a modern compromise

Long before anyone spoke about human rights, Baptists were arguing for freedom of conscience, and they were doing it while being fined, imprisoned and drowned for their trouble. Thomas Helwys wrote to King James in 1612 that the king had no authority over the souls of his subjects, that heretics, Turks or Jews should not be punished for their religion. He wrote that from conviction and he died in Newgate prison for it.

That is the root of Baptist thinking on religious liberty. It was never a strategy for surviving in a pluralist society. It grew out of a doctrine of the church as a gathered body of believers, entered by personal faith and believer’s baptism, which is why our position on who should be baptised and our position on baptism are the same doctrine wearing different clothes.

If faith cannot be inherited, coerced or legislated, then a state church is a category error and compulsion in religion is worse than useless. It produces hypocrites, not converts. Roger Williams put it starkly when he described forced worship as a stench in God’s nostrils. He was not being provocative for effect. He was reasoning from what the New Testament says a church actually is.

What Scripture authorises the state to do, and what it does not

Romans 13 gives the civil authority a real but bounded commission, Romans 13:1-7. The magistrate bears the sword to restrain evildoers and to commend those who do good. Notice what is absent. There is no mandate to adjudicate doctrine, to suppress false worship or to enforce the first table of the Law.

Peter’s charge is similar, that governors are sent to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good, 1 Peter 2:14. Evil there is behaviour, not belief. When the state starts punishing belief it has stepped outside its brief, and history shows it never steps back voluntarily.

Jesus draws the line Himself when He tells Pilate that His kingdom is not of this world, and that if it were, His servants would fight, John 18:36. The weapons of our warfare are not fleshly. A faith that needs the state’s coercive power to survive has already conceded that it cannot persuade.

Israel was a theocracy and the Church is not

This is where a great deal of confusion enters, and it is a historical and dispensational question. Israel under the Mosaic covenant was a theocratic nation with divinely given civil sanctions. Idolatry there was not simply sin, it was treason against the covenant King of that nation, and the penalties reflected that constitutional reality.

The Church is not a nation and has no territory, no army and no civil code. We are a people scattered through every nation, described as sojourners and exiles, 1 Peter 2:11. The Mosaic Law was given to Israel as a covenantal package and the believer is not under it in any part, which is why importing Deuteronomy’s civil sanctions into modern statute is a serious misreading of where we stand in God’s programme.

Keeping Israel and the Church distinct saves us from two errors at once. It stops us treating Britain as though it were Israel, and it stops us pretending that God has no future purpose for ethnic Israel. Paul insists that the promises made to the fathers still stand and that the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable, Romans 11:28-29, which is the covenantal detail this argument keeps running into.

Does defending religious liberty mean approving of idolatry?

No, and the distinction matters enormously. To defend a person’s legal freedom to worship as they choose is not to say that all worship is equally true or equally pleasing to God. I believe idolatry is a grievous sin. I also believe that God Himself, in this age, permits it, endures it and calls people out of it by persuasion rather than by force.

Paul in Athens was provoked in his spirit when he saw the city full of idols, Acts 17:16. He did not petition the council to have the shrines demolished. He reasoned in the synagogue and the marketplace, he quoted their own poets, he preached the resurrection. His answer to idolatry was proclamation.

So religious liberty is not moral relativism. It is a recognition that God has not given the church coercive power in this age and that faith which is not free is not faith at all. The Greek word for faith, pistis, carries the sense of personal trust and persuasion. You cannot legislate trust into a heart.

Islam, fear, and thinking clearly under pressure

Let me name the anxiety honestly, because pretending it is not there helps nobody. Many British Christians look at demographic change, at the growth of Islam in our cities, and they wonder whether religious liberty is a door we are holding open for people who will one day close it behind us. That fear is not irrational. In much of the Islamic world, conversion away from Islam carries severe consequences, and I have friends who live with that reality.

Yet fear is a poor guide for doctrine. If I abandon religious liberty because I am afraid of what a future majority might do, I have surrendered the principle at the exact moment it costs something, which is the only moment when a principle is worth anything. Helwys did not argue for religious liberty for Turks and Jews because he expected it to be popular or safe.

There is also a hard practical point. Every argument for restricting the freedom of Muslims is an argument that can be turned against evangelical Christians, and in this country it increasingly is. The protections that allow a mosque to be built are the same protections that allow me to preach that Jesus is the only way to the Father. Dismantle one and you have dismantled the other. My related answer on whether Islam and Christianity are compatible works through some of that ground.

Where liberty ends and law begins

Religious liberty is freedom of belief and worship, not immunity from law. The state may and should prosecute violence, coercion, forced marriage, the abuse of women and children, incitement and intimidation, whoever commits them and whatever their religious justification. Romans 13 gives the magistrate exactly that authority.

That distinction does the work that vague talk about tolerance cannot. I do not have to tolerate criminal behaviour in order to defend freedom of conscience. Nor do I have to pretend that all religions are the same in order to defend the right of their adherents to gather and to speak. Equal legal freedom is not theological equivalence.

Where a religion or an ideology seeks to remove liberty from others, the answer is to enforce the law that protects everyone, not to create a special category of restriction. Once a government starts ranking beliefs by acceptability, evangelicals will not stay near the top of the list for long.

What the church actually has to work with

Here is where I want to lift the tone, because this question is often asked in a defensive crouch. The church has never grown by legislation. It grew under Nero, under Diocletian, under Mao, under regimes that made Britain’s cultural pressures look like a mild breeze. Our weapons are the Word, the Spirit, prayer and love that costs something.

The presence of large Muslim communities in British cities is, from a mission perspective, an extraordinary opportunity. People who would have been almost unreachable a generation ago now live down the road. Many have never had a Christian friend, never been given a Bible, never heard anyone explain the cross without a caricature attached. Religious liberty is what makes that conversation legally possible, and hospitality is what makes it humanly possible.

I also want to say plainly that Muslims bear the image of God and are to be treated with the dignity that carries. My conviction that Islam does not lead to the Father does not permit me a single unkind word about my neighbour. Truth without love is not faithfulness, it is just noise.

How I would counsel a church member

If you are anxious, feed on Scripture rather than on the algorithm that profits from your anxiety. The internet will happily supply you with a daily dose of outrage about Islam, and it will leave you angrier, less prayerful and no more useful to the kingdom than you were yesterday.

Engage as a citizen. Vote, write to your member of parliament, support organisations that defend freedom of conscience for everyone. I say more about the wider question in whether Christians should be involved in politics. Do it as someone who does not expect politics to save the country, because change at the deepest level comes through conversion, not through legislation.

Then do the harder thing. Learn a name. Invite someone in. Answer questions honestly. Be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you with gentleness and respect, 1 Peter 3:15. That verse was written to Christians living under a hostile empire, and it assumed they would be asked.

Objections worth taking seriously

The strongest objection I hear is that religious liberty is a Christian invention that only survives in a Christian culture, and that as the culture de-Christianises the freedom will be eaten by whichever ideology is hungriest. There is real force in that. Freedom of conscience did emerge from a particular theological soil, and soil can be exhausted.

My answer is that the argument cuts the other way. If religious liberty depends on a Christian foundation, then the work of the church is to keep making Christians, not to keep passing laws. The moment we try to preserve the fruit by legislation while neglecting the root, we get the worst of both worlds, a coercive establishment that produces nominal believers and resentful outsiders. Britain has already run that experiment.

A second objection comes from within the church, from brothers who argue that a nation which honours God’s Law will be blessed and that public idolatry invites judgement. I understand the instinct, and I agree that nations are morally accountable, as I set out in whether a nation can sin. What I cannot accept is the move from national accountability to the claim that the Church has been given the machinery of the state to enforce the first commandment. That machinery was given to Israel under a covenant that has ended, and it was never handed to us.

A third objection is more practical. Does religious liberty not simply hand a platform to error? Yes, it does, and the New Testament seems remarkably relaxed about that. Paul preached in a city stuffed with shrines and expected the truth to do its own work. Error has always had a platform. What it has never had is the Spirit of God driving it home to a conscience.

What this looks like in a local church

I try to teach this before it is needed rather than in the middle of a controversy. When a congregation has thought about religious liberty in calm weather, it is far less likely to panic when a planning application or a news story arrives. Fear tends to arrive faster than theology, and the only remedy is theology that got there first.

Practically, that means our people know why we baptise believers rather than infants, why we govern ourselves congregationally rather than by bishop or magistrate, and why those two convictions produce a church that cannot be co-opted by the state. It also means we pray for those in authority, as Paul instructs, so that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way, 1 Timothy 2:1-4. Notice the goal there. Not dominance. Not even comfort. A settled life in which the gospel can travel.

One more thing is worth saying about the long view. The New Testament expects religious deception to increase rather than decrease as the age closes, and it never once suggests that the remedy is legal suppression. The remedy is a church that knows what it believes, holds it under pressure, and keeps preaching. If you want to think that through further, my answer on a coming one world religion covers the prophetic side of it. I would rather prepare a congregation to stand than persuade a government to shield us, because one of those is promised and the other never has been.

So, now what?

Hold your convictions about truth and your commitment to religious liberty in the same hand, because they were forged together. Baptists did not arrive at freedom of conscience by softening their doctrine. They arrived at it by taking seriously what the New Testament says about faith, about the church and about the limits of the sword.

This week, pray for a Muslim you actually know by name rather than for Islam in the abstract. If you do not know one, that is worth noticing. And when the conversation at church turns to demographics and decline, be the person who redirects it towards the gospel, because the gospel is the only thing we have that changes anyone.

If the freedom we defend for others is the same freedom that protects our own pulpits, are we defending it as people who trust the King, or as people who are quietly afraid?

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

2 Corinthians 10:3-4, ESV

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s treatment of the distinction between Israel and the Church remains the clearest short introduction to why theocratic sanctions do not transfer to the present age, and J. Dwight Pentecost develops the same ground at length in his study of biblical prophecy. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s systematic work sets out the position of the believer under grace rather than under the Mosaic covenant, and Millard Erickson provides a careful survey of the wider evangelical discussion of church and state. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is worth reading on Israel’s covenants and their literal fulfilment. For the Baptist historical material, Thomas Helwys’ own short treatise and the writings of Roger Williams repay direct reading, since both men paid for their convictions in ways that make later arguments look comfortable.