A SCHISM WORTH HAVING.

I've cracked wise about how those present in New England ("New England town clusters (East Millpond, Millpond Centre, Millpond Hall, Millpond Heights) represent an irreconcilable breakdown of consensus among relatively like-minded people") and sometimes congregations fret over the hymnal.

Then there was the creation of the American Baptist Assembly.

Jennifer Cromack was combing through the American Baptist archive when she uncovered a slim box among some 18th and 19th century journals. Opening it, she found a scroll in pristine condition.

A closer look revealed the 5-foot-long document was a handwritten declaration titled “A Resolution and Protest Against Slavery," signed by 116 New England ministers in Boston and adopted March 2, 1847. Until its discovery in May at the archives in Groton, American Baptist officials worried the anti-slavery document had been lost forever after fruitless searches at Harvard and Brown universities and other locations. A copy was last seen in a 1902 history book.

“I was just amazed and excited,” Cromack, a retired teacher who volunteers at the archive, said. “We made a find that really says something to the people of the state and the people in the country. ... It speaks of their commitment to keeping people safe and out of situations that they should not be in."

The document offers a glimpse into an emerging debate over slavery in the 18th century in the Northeast. The document was signed 14 years before the start of the Civil War as a growing number of religious leaders were starting to speak out against slavery.

It is only fitting and proper that such a document remain in a local church office rather than an Ivy League university.  Boston's First Baptist  affiliate with the American Baptist Churches maintaining an office in Valley Forge.  I wonder if there's a copy of that scroll in the archives there.

The resolution, which followed the schism, has echoes in contemporary life.

The document also shines a spotlight on a critical moment in the history of the Baptist church.

It was signed two years after the issue of slavery prompted southern Baptists to split from northern Baptists and form the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. The split in 1845 followed a ruling by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society prohibiting slave owners from becoming missionaries. The northern Baptists eventually became American Baptist Churches USA.

As far as I know, no practicing Baptists (recall, dear reader, that affiliating with a national organization is optional), Southern, American, Baptist General Convention, endorse slavery or segregation.  Ordination of ministers living alternative lifestyles, receptivity to abortion, Culture Wars matters more generally are another matter.

“It comes from such a critical era in American history, you know, right prior to the Civil War,” said the Rev. Mary Day Hamel, the executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts.

“It was a unique moment in history when Baptists in Massachusetts stepped up and took a strong position and stood for justice in the shaping of this country,” she said. “That’s become part of our heritage to this day, to be people who stand for justice, for American Baptists to embrace diversity.”

There's something contemporary about the language of the declaration.

The document shows ministers had hoped “some reformatory movement” led by those involved in slavery would make their action “unnecessary,” but that they felt compelled to act after they “witnessed with painful surprise, a growing disposition to justify, extend and perpetuate their iniquitous system.”

“Under these circumstances we can no longer be silent,” the document states. “We owe something to the oppressed as well as to the oppressor, and justice demands the fulfillment of that obligation. Truth and Humanity and Public Virtue, have claims upon us which we cannot dishonor.”

The document explains why the ministers “disapprove and abhor the system of American slavery.”

“With such a system we can have no sympathy,” the document states. “After a careful observation of its character and effects and making every deduction with the largest charity can require, we are constrained to regard it as an outrage upon the rights and happiness of our fellow men, for which there is no valid justification or apology.”

It is not too far a leap of logic from "regard it as an outrage" to "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."  "Righteous symbols," though, might not always be as easy to see as coerced labor.