Baptists and religious freedom

Have you ever wondered why the United States has more religious freedom than Europe and why Ukraine has more religious freedom than the rest of the former Soviet Union? I will bet you never thought it had something to do with Baptists.

Baptists started in Germany as a movement of Ana-Baptists, which means re-Baptizers, since they were re-baptizing both Catholics and Lutherans in Germany as adults and by full immersion, as it is in the Bible.

Baptists were persecuted in Germany, so they spread to Britain and Ukraine. (I am not sure if more went to one or the other.) They weren't very well accepted in Britain either, so some of them moved on to America, where they grew through evangelism, especially during the Second Great Awakening in US.

During the Russian Empire years, ethnic Germans were allowed to be Baptists, but ethnic Ukrainians were not and were persecuted by both the Orthodox Church and the Tsarist governments. As a result, many Ukrainian Baptist leaders were sent into exile into Kuban and Northern Caucases (which was the Russian Empire's "Siberia" at the time) and began evangelizing there. That's how Baptism got started in Russia. And that's why Southern Russia is still the area with the biggest number and concentration of Baptists in the Russian Federation.

Many Ukrainian Baptists were ethnic Germans who were evacuated out of Southern Ukraine to Kazakhstan during WWII by the Soviet government, but by then Baptism had long before caught on among ethnic Ukrainians. (From Kazakhstan most of the German Baptists went on back to Germany after the Soviet Empire fell apart, after spreading their faith among the Kazakhs as well.)

Today, Ukraine is second only to the United States by the number of Baptists inside of its borders! Great Britain is number three. (It used to be number two, but there was a switch sometime in the 1990s because of growth in Ukraine.)

Much like American Baptists in US, Ukrainian Baptists are the most vocal group in support of religious freedom in Ukraine. The Reason for that is that the Baptist history from the very beginning was filled with persecution by both the governments and the official churches. So, the thirst for religious freedom was encoded in the DNA of the Baptist movement from the very beginning.

In United States, especially, we can point to a specific point at which young America's Baptists influenced it in the direction of religious freedom. Religious freedom is considered the unique contribution of United States to the world. It never really existed anywhere before. The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom was the first democratically passed legal document on the face of the earth to legally guarantee full religious freedom, and it was written by Jefferson and Madison (mostly Jefferson) and passed with the help of the Virginia Baptists. (Jefferson considered it one of his three great achievements in life to be put on his grave. It is on his grave to this day - I saw it! :) You can read it here: http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/vaact.html (Note the religious basis of it - it is based on the premise that God created the mind free.)

Other states then simply ended up copying it and it was later copied by the Federal Government. So that's how we ended up with religious freedom in the entire United States.

In Kazakhstan today, there are attempts by the government to drastically limit religious freedom, and Kazakhstan's Baptists are praying and working hard to stop these encroachments and preserve some measure of religious freedom in their nation.