While most everyone knows today as Halloween or maybe All Hallow’s Eve, today is also a holiday for protestant Christians known as Reformation Day. It is the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his “Ninety Nine Theses” to the Door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg — now more than 500 years ago. While we Baptists are not directly descended from the Lutheran tradition, we emerged in history out of the Reformation that Luther and others of his era sparked.
In honor of Reformation Day, I thought I’d share about one of our Baptist forebears that is less well known: Obadiah Holmes. One of my seminary professors described Holmes as “the most famous Baptist you’ve never heard of.” He is probably right. Holmes was born in England in the first years of the 17th century, about the same time that the Baptist movement was getting started. He converted to puritanism, and like many other Puritans ended up moving to the New World colonies so he could practice his faith without the government of England interfering and persecuting them. His vocation was a glass maker. But before long, he found his fellow puritans — themselves refugees in the colonies — persecuting those who differed religiously.
Holmes began experiencing this personally after he became convinced of the Baptist way of faith in Jesus, and he was baptized by immersion in 1650. In July of the following year, he was arrested and convicted of crimes against the colony — his crime was preaching without a license, a seemingly innocuous law intended to prevent unauthorized religious opinions from taking root. As an act of civil disobedience, Holmes chose to remain in jail rather than pay the absurdly high fine, and around six weeks later he was publicly whipped.
He was beaten in such an unmerciful manner that Governor Jenekes wrote: “Mr. Holmes was whipt thirty stripes, and in such an unmerciful manner, that in many days, if not some weeks, he could take no rest but as he lay on his knees and elbows, not being able to suffer any part of his body to touch the bed whereon he lay.”
And yet the accounts of Holmes’ whipping indicate that he seemed to feel no pain at the time. When the whipping was finished and Holmes was untied from the post, he turned to the magistrates and said, “You have struck me as with roses.” For the rest of his life, he insisted that he has never had so strong a manifestation of God’s presence as he did when he was whipped.
There’s more to Obadiah Holmes than what I have shared here. But it seems helpful to remember what religious persecution looks like. It is worth recognizing that the Puritans in the colonies persecuted others with more zeal and violence than anything they themselves were fleeing in England. And it is also worth seeing how the Puritan’s cries of religious liberty are actually contrary to true religious liberty that opens up space for each person to practice their faith or no faith without interference from the government (to paraphrase a contemporary of Holmes). All these lessons seem remarkably relevant today.
Holmes’s own journey ended up taking him to the Rhode Island Colony, where he connected with some of the “more famous Baptists you might’ve heard of”: John Clarke and Roger Williams to name two. Obadiah Holmes was the pastor of the Newport, RI, church when it baptized its first African American, named in the church roll as “Jack, a colored man” (1652). He is an ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln as well.
Here’s the thing: Obadiah Holmes could easily have afforded to pay the fine. It was an affront to his convictions and was an insult in its sum, but he could have paid it and simply moved on with life and business and put all of this behind him. But what Holmes knew is that once the line of human rights was crossed by a government, it would be forever crossed until that government was held in check by its people. Those rights, he believed, were both intrinsic to every human being and given by God; and Holmes was willing to put his business, his economics, his safety, and his body on the line in order to do so — even if he was the only one who resisted.
Ours is a rich heritage, worth remembering in times such as these.
Remember, we’re all in this together.