No Armor for the Back: Baptist Prison Writings, 1600s–1700s (review)

Baptists began as a people of dissent, grounded in the concept of a Believers' Church and the role of conscience in discerning religious faith and practice. Their idea that faith must be uncoerced by state or established church set them at odds with establishmentarian governments in England and New England from the beginning of the movement in 1609. Baptist historians have given significant attention to the nature of dissent and the role of Baptists in shaping freedom of religion in church and state. Few, if any, have brought together the collective stories of prominent and lesser-known Baptist dissenters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historian Keith E. Durso has done just that, in a fine volume that surveys the nature of Baptist dissent and the response of various establishmentarian communities to Baptist ideals and individuals. Durso brings together multiple primary sources from or about the dissenters themselves. His work surveys the nature of the persecution and the response of the Baptists to such harassment. The materials indicate that much of the Baptist response to religious establishments was not simply about conscience but also about class. The seventeenth-century Baptist John Murton demanded that the church be composed only of believers, those who could testify to a work of grace in their hearts (the central tenet of a Believers' Church), and insisted that, in Durso's words, "the Holy Spirit is not the possession of a select minority of educated ministers" (p. 37). Indeed, Murton himself wrote that "'the Spirit bloweth where it listeth' (John 3:8), and is not tied to the learned" (p. 37).

Durso's work also demonstrates something of the fluidity of individuals who participated in multiple dissenting movements of the seventeenth century. So many sectarian movements appeared during this time that it was inevitable that individuals would be impacted by multiple ideologies. Richard Overton was such a person—"ambiguous" in his Baptist contacts, Durso suggests (p. 81), but strongly concerned to challenge establishmentarian ideology. Overton had Leveller sentiments that reflected on his response to Baptist issues, as evidenced in his concern for "possessive individualism"—the idea "that everyone possesses a 'self-property' or right of property in their own person. This self-property is inalienable…" (p. 91). In reading these dissenters one is impressed with these insights in a pre-enlightenment era.

The book deals with the nature of the persecution visited upon these dissenters, largely related to imprisonment, fines, and exile in both England and New England. Thomas Helwys, perhaps the first of the early Baptists to write clearly about religious liberty, died in prison, probably in 1616. Perhaps the most famous of the seventeenth-century Baptists was John Bunyan, languishing and writing all those years in Bedford jail. Durso includes Bunyan among the "prison poets" with lesser-known but fascinating individuals such as Henry Adis and the "children's poet" Abraham Cheare.

Thomas Hardcastle, imprisoned multiple times for his Baptist, anti-establishment views, gives the book its title, with his insistence that dissenters were "duty-bound to be constantly on the offensive and never in retreat.… There is no armor for the back" (p. 133).

Durso has developed an excellent survey that captures the content and passion of early Baptist views on religious liberty and their willingness to stand on their consciences even when it meant punitive action from an unfriendly state and an established church convinced of its inherent privilege. It is a fine study, with great value for students of the nature of Protestant dissent in general and Baptist history in particular.