Baptists have never been party to oppression of conscience. Our contention is not for more toleration, but for absolute liberty. There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that someone falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration...
No king nor bishop can or is able to command faith. That is the gift of God. To constrain princes and peoples to receive the one true religion of the gospel is wholly against the mind and merciful law of Christ.
Magistrates are not by virtue of their office to meddle with religion or matters of conscience, to force or compel people to this or that form of religion.
It is the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced.
For in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor, and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people. from Canton, OH anti-war speech (1918)
Every religion's God talks about humanity. But in the name of God, in the name of religion, humans do all the inhumane things in the world.
When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority...
As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures,...
Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could anything be more true of our churches? They would be shocked at the proposition of...
The dominant religion on the planet is not Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Judaism but the pervasive faith in violence.