Preserving Scott County
Ann Bevins
Georgetown News-Graphic
There’s a strong likelihood in this salutary 400th anniversary year of the Baptist faith that many, if not most of us with British and north European ancestry, have at least some ancestors who were Baptist.
To these astute Baptist ancestors, we direct our deep felt tribute, recognizing in their day they were considered radicals — not exactly subject to reverence by non- and anti-Baptist peers.
The fact of Baptist beginnings will be recognized on Aug. 1 when the Baptist World Alliance meets in the Netherlands to pay homage to the historic dunking of people in water before crowds of people.
That location reminds us that the forsaken British Baptists were not persecuted in that country as they mingled among the Anabaptists, similarly committed to the form of baptism vernacularly called “dunking.”
Our very early Baptist ancestors emerged during the British Reformation as a gutsy and zealous people, determined to think and act for themselves. They were antagonistic to a government bent on forcing them to support a state church and thus their own repression.
Thus the early Baptists willingly faced rejection, physical and mental brutality, poverty and death in their stand for intellectual and spiritual freedom.
Of course Baptists weren’t the only nonconformists on the British scene. It took the same toughness in that Anglican nation to remain Roman Catholic, to follow the teachings of John Calvin, to puritanize the Church of England, or to enliven the latter with pentacostalism as did the followers of John and Charles Wesley.
That great international celebration will serve as a prelude to next year’s 200 anniversary of the Georgetown Baptist Church. Counting years makes one wish that the local Baptists had fudged a year or so and thus have a contrived bicentennial coincidence.
The past March 7, I joined other alumni and friends of Georgetown College at one of the college’s “College for a Day” events. During the day, we attended classes with various professors and also enjoyed lunch and a concluding reception and discussion. One of my class choices was a review of early Baptist history taught by Sheila Klopfer of the religion department.
Keep in mind that I am a member of First Christian Church, in fact and in theology. One of the people I most honor among history’s figures is Barton Warren Stone, a founder of the body earlier known as the Christian churches and of the Georgetown congregation. His teaching on numerous points I, many years ago, made my own.
Nevertheless I have huge pride in my Baptist heritage and of my grandfather, C.J. Bolton, who in the year 1900 rode his bicycle from Fincastle, Va., to Louisville to attend the Baptist seminary. Granddaddy Bolton ultimately located in the Meade-Hardin county of Kentucky, marrying a tiny (5-feet tall) Eugenia Brashear of French Huguenot ancestry.
People by the name of Bolton all are said to have descended from the Norman Ughtred Bolton, who was part of the invasion of Britain led by William the Conquerer. Boltons were active in most of the phases of the Reformation in England. You find their names among Catholic and Anglican clergy and laity as well as among the various bodies of dissenters.
My first ancestor in America, Henry Bolton, who came here as a young man in 1776, was said to have carried a card with him attesting to his having studied under John Wesley in London. The Fincastle Boltons were firmly associated with the Baptist faith.
Klopfer entitled her lecture “The Dippers Dipt, Duck’d and Plung’d over Head and Ears.” Her handout for us was two pages of quotes chronicling the very early Baptist movement. The quote from which she drew her title was derived from a 1646 statement by Anglican cleric Daniel Featley, who plainly disliked Baptists.
Featley wrote, “ . . . they defile our rivers with their impure washings, and our pulpits with their false prophecies and fanatical enthusiasms, so the presses sweat and groan under the load of their blasphemies.”
The birthday of the Baptists dates to the 1609 baptism of John Smyth, who became an Anabaptist, declaring, “For baptism is not washing with water [alone], but it is the baptism of the Spirit, the confession of the mouth, and the washing with water.” Anabaptists were among Baptists’ spiritual ancestors, along with the Waldenses and Albigense and others.
Between 1650 and 1689, Klopfer attested, Baptists faced the most persecution with the return of the British monarchy and Episcopal ecclesiology along with the Clarendon Code. In 1689, a major exodus to America accompanied the British Act of Toleration.
The Great Awakening with birth in the early 1700s marked an era of growth for Baptists. To many in the Colonies, affirming one’s faith as a Baptist was a decided way of disassociating oneself from the Crown.
Baptists became avowed advocates for religious liberty. Explained Klopfer, “Baptists were one of the first lobbies in the United States to agitate for religious liberty.”
The Revolutionary War, she continued, “was about political and religious freedom.”
It will do us all well to pay attention as this remarkable observance progresses this year. It has very much to do with who we are.
Ann Bevins is a Scott County historian.
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