The state of opinions

Thomas Helwys said the king wasn’t God and it got him a prison term that ended in death. He could have changed his mind and said that maybe James was God, but Thomas refused.

When the Puritans came to American in the mid 1600’s, they were escaping religious persecution in England. In England they weren’t the state church but they eagerly accepted that title whenever they could after moving to the colonies. Nestling under the wing of the government had great perks.

Roger Williams, in 1641, claimed biblical basis for the right to hold church apart from the government: “It is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries.”

It was Isaac Backus in the 1700’s, as a Baptist, who pointed out that he had to pay taxes to the state church even though he wasn’t a member of that church. He lobbied for religious freedom, which to Isaac meant the right live by his own beliefs and worship at his own church without the government’s interference.

John Leland, a contemporary of Backus, argued that government had no right to rule on what he called principles of conscience. He claimed that religion established by law always damages the religion.

Governments of those days assumed they had the right and obligation to pass laws regarding religious conduct. The American Bill of Rights broke new ground in religious freedom. Part of the assumption of the Bill of Rights is that the government is the ultimate power and authority, that a government should have limitations. Leland contended that “... government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men, than it has with the principles of mathematics.”

Today we hear “separation of church and state” to mean the church must not meddle in state affairs. However, that phrase began as a long-shot attempt to disentangle the government from ruling churches. It meant the state must not meddle in church affairs.

It means believers have the right to live by our conscience.

Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

Matt 22:21