Study Guide Island Christianity
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Antipedobaptist Heresy
One of the early threats to the Puritan hegemony on the island of Martha's Vineyard was the rise of what would become the Gay Head Community Baptist Church in Aquinnah. While Vineyard Wampanoags had flirted with Baptism ever since the teachings of renegade schoolmaster Peter Folger (1617-1690), it wasn't until 1693 that they established a congregation on the island dedicated to the Baptist creed. This congregation was led by the Wampanoags themselves. Being self-led was a crucial selling point for the Native population in the area: they had repeatedly emphasized their preference for Native preachers. The first leader of the Gay Head congregation was Stephen Tackamasun, the former preacher of Christiantown, and the second was Jonah Hossueit. In spite of his defection, Tackamasun (?-1708) is described by Experience Mayhew as having “lived the Life of a righteous Man,” and was esteemed enough to merit a two-page biography in the “Godly Ministers” section of Indian Converts (Example XVI, 42-44).(1) Hossueit was also esteemed, and he carried on the island tradition of clergymen who were connected to traditional Wampanoag hierarchies. His kinsman was sachem John Philip of Squibnocket and Noman's Land. (Silverman 283-85). By 1739, the Algonquians of Chappaquidick and Nantucket had followed suit and formed Baptist churches of their own (Silverman 187).
Puritans were not known for their love of dissent, and the Baptists and their followers rankled the Puritan Congregationalists, including Experience Mayhew. Mayhew defended his mission by arguing islanders had left his congregation only after they were “brought under Church dealing for their vile Immoralities” (Indian Converts 42-43; cited in Silverman 284). It is possible that some of these “vile Immoralities” may have included proto-Baptists beliefs. Although New England Baptists had began as a splinter group off of the Congregational church led Roger Williams, their theology and practice differed from Puritanism in several important ways. First, unlike Puritans, they believed in infant baptism. In addition Anabaptists(2), like those on the Vineyard, believed that “there should be a separation between the State and the Church; that no Christian should bear arms, take an oath, or hold public office; and that there should be complete religious liberty,” convictions that can be traced to the teachings of heretic Roger Williams, who was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 (Schaff 161-162). To the Puritan these were literally “damnable errors,”(3) that is, mistakes that jeopardized the authority and holiness of the community. With this is mind, it becomes clearer why when schoolmaster Peter Folger began to preach these Anabaptists heresies, he was run off the island in 1662 (Silverman 119). Folger was not the only victim of the Puritan distrust of the Baptists: Puritans throughout New England persecuted Baptists at least until the U.S. Constitution made such practice illegal (1787). Given that Baptists in other parts of Massachusetts publicly beaten, fined, and imprisoned, early relations between Baptists and Puritans on the Vineyard seem almost mild in comparison.
Although the Baptists on the island remained a minority during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (roughly 20% of worshippers), they included some important members of the Wampanoag community. Even more troubling, the church's influence seemed to grow, not dwindle. Hence it must have been a great relief to Mayhew and others when Zachariah Hossueit defected from his position as assistant in the Baptist church to become minister of the Congregational church in the town in 1740. The records from the Gay Head Baptist Church help give a sense of the growth and experiences of this sect. Today the Baptists remain a strong force in Vineyard Christianity, and the Gay Head Community Baptist Church remains the oldest native Protestant church in continuous existence in the country (Silverman 283, 287).
Notes
(1) Tackamasun was a prominent enough figure on the island that he served as a witness along with other island leaders in records involving land transfers. Two of these survive: one from September 1675 (Goddard and Bragdon #17: I.82-85) and from May 1704 (Goddard and Bragdon #38: I.136-39).
(2) Later called Antipedobaptists (Mayhew 42), meaning literally “against-infant-Baptism.” Samuel Sewall reports that the congregation was largely what we would call Seventh-Day Baptists, in other words those Baptists who opposed both infant baptism and Sunday worship (Silverman 283).
(3) One example of the use of the rhetoric “damnable” errors is in the abjuration made by the Walloon Baptists taken before minister Dr. De Laune, in 1575, in London. It begins, "Whereas we being seduced by the devil, the spirit of error, and by false teachers, have fallen into the most damnable errors; that Christ took not flesh of the substance of the virgin Mary, that the infants of the faithful ought not to be baptized, that a christian may not be a magistrate, or bear the sword and office of authority, and that it is not lawful for a christian man to take an oath. Now by the grace of God, and the assistance of good and learned ministers of Christ's church, we understand the same to be most damnable and detestable heresies; and … henceforth utterly abandoning and forsaking all and every Anabaptistical error." (Crosby, vol. i. p. 69; cited in Ivimey Chapter 3)
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