by Dick Hall-Sizemore
This is one of the most attractive church buildings I have seen. It is Mathews Baptist Church, located on Rt. 198 in Mathews County at the intersection with the road leading to Gwynn’s Island.
The sign above the door says the church was organized in 1776.
In the years leading up to 1776, one had to have courage and dedication to be a Baptist in Virginia. The colony’s laws required ministers to be licensed and meetinghouses to be registered. The itinerant Baptist ministers refused to comply. In turn, they were fined and imprisoned. They would often preach to their followers through the bars of their cell windows. Laymen were also fined, and sometimes imprisoned, for attending “illegal” Baptist services. Whippings and beatings were common. Crowds disrupted Baptist worship services and harassed congregation members.
In 1776, however, the situation was looking better for the Baptists. Patrick Henry had been elected by the legislature to be the state’s first governor. Henry had been a strong supporter of the Baptists. He had defended them in court and had quietly paid their fines. He had introduced a resolution in the Third Virginia Convention to allow Baptist chaplains to minister to Virginia troops. There had been a petition drive that resulted in a document signed by approximately 10,000 persons presented to the House of Delegates in October 1776 calling for “Equal Liberty” and the ending of tax support for the established church.
A meeting between Henry and some prominent Baptist ministers seemed to result in a momentous bargain. As Jon Kukla, Henry’s biographer describes it:
“Faced with the formidable task of recruiting men and supplies for Washington’s army, Governor Henry and the commonwealth struck a deal with the Baptists. In exchange for religious toleration—including freedom of worship, exemption from parish duties supporting the Anglican Church, and permission for Baptist clergy to conduct marriages and serve as military chaplains—Virginia Baptists volunteered in great numbers to fight for the ‘common cause of Freedom.”
In December 1776, the Virginia legislature declared “all dissenters, of whatever denomination … totally free of all levies, taxes, and impositions” used to support the Anglican Church and its ministers.
A fascinating research project would be a study of the “organization” of the Mathews Baptist Church and its relationship to the political and social upheavals going on in the Commonwealth in 1776.