Most Baptists know very little about history—and care even less.

In particular, most Baptist know very little about their own history. They are part of a significant denomination that has spread through many countries around the world, and they have no idea how the whole thing got started. Some just assume their denomination goes back to John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus.

The truth is that Baptists trace their origins back to a different John, John Smyth. Smyth (occasionally spelled “Smith” since he lived in a largely oral culture before the development of dictionaries) was a Cambridge-trained clergyman in the Church of England, serving in Lincolnshire in the early 17th century.

James I became King of England in 1603. (He was also known as King James VI of Scotland because the English and Scots rarely agree on anything.) Even though he has a Bible named after him, James was a crude, immoral, cruel, and arrogant man. Shortly after he became king, James demanded that all clergy in the Church of England subscribe to his particular version of Protestantism (which we might today call High Anglicanism, although that is not completely accurate and was not a term used then). This was in contrast to his predecessor, Elizabeth I, who had allowed a little more diversity in the state Church. A number of clergy (whom we might today call Puritans, although that is not completely accurate and was not a term used then) refused to sign on to James’s prescribed theology and were expelled from the Church. Among them was John Smyth.

These well-trained clergy then gathered congregations of like-minded individuals and continued to worship together. This was not at all what James had had in mind (he wanted to control all religion and all people in his kingdom), and so he began persecuting these congregations. As a result, several of them secretly fled England (which James’s government, like communist governments today, also tried to prevent).

Many of these religious refugees went to the Netherlands, where there was toleration. The Dutch, before anyone else in Europe, had discovered that persecution was bad for business—and became rich as a result.

The refugees reorganized into new congregations in Amsterdam, with John Smyth being one of the leaders in one of them. Being precursors to Baptists, they did not remain united for long. One large group broke away and moved to another Dutch town, Leiden, and later formed the nucleus of the group that journeyed to North America on the Mayflower, but that is another story.

While in exile, John Smyth pondered how it was that the Church of England was persecuting true believers such as himself. He concluded that the root of the problem was infant baptism, which brought everyone in society into the church and filled the church with unbelievers. Seeing no alternative, he rebaptized himself and his congregation, reinstating believer’s baptism and founding the first Baptist church.

In time, partly because there was not much future for a small, isolated congregation (there being a shortage of eligible spouses for children growing into adulthood, for instance), Smyth and his congregation merged with another believers’ church, a Mennonite group.

Being Baptists, Smyth’s congregation did not remain united. Four families decided that they did not want to give up their English citizenship and be submerged into Dutch culture. About 1615, they returned to England. There, one of the men, Thomas Helwys, wrote a book telling King James that he should stop interfering in religion. This made an impact on King James. He put Helwys in prison. Another man in the small group, John Murton, also wrote some books telling king James pretty much what Helwys had said. There is some evidence that James, predictably, also had him imprisoned.

The small group of four families (with its leader in prison) then disappeared—for ten years anyway. No one knows how, but when the group resurfaced a decade later, it had grown to five congregations. The Baptist Church survived, joined in time by groups with similar beginnings, and spread throughout the world.

John Smyth was an insightful man, who had some helpful things to say on a number of topics. Among them is the principle that we now know as the separation of church and state. He taught an important lesson that is still valid today: When the Christian church tries to gain control of the state, most often unscrupulous men will seize control of the church in order to gain control of both church and state.

More information on John Smyth is contained in my doctoral thesis, published as John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separatism, Mennonite Influence, and the Elect Nation (Herald Press, 1991). It is a well-written, detailed, densely argued, and generally well-received volume, primarily of interest to historians.