New book contextualises Spiritual Baptist struggle

On December 16, 1917, a month after the Shouters’ Prohibition Ordinance was enacted, a 27-year-old teacher, Joseph Bailey, and members of his Spiritual Baptist congregation were arrested while worshipping at a home in Cunupia.

The following night, they were arrested in Couva. Ten days later they appeared in court with their headscarves, bell and Bible. Bailey stood resolute in his beliefs.

“I am prepared to go to jail every time, and to carry on these meetings. I will always do so. Christ was persecuted for religion, and if I go to jail for religion, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Two hundred supporters stood outside the courtroom. Inside, supporters shouted, “Alleluia, praise the Lord!”

Bailey’s testimony appears on page 197 of a new book about the Spiritual Baptists, Against Toleration: Britain’s Persecution of the Spiritual/Shouter Baptists written by former UWI history lecturer Claudius K Fergus.

Joseph’s trial was a defining moment in decades of religious persecution that wouldn’t end until the repeal of the Shouters’ Prohibition Ordinance on March 30, 1951.

Ian Randle Publishers (Jamaica) says Fergus’s book is “the first, in-depth comparative study of the Baptist struggle in the region. Using a wide selection of articles, books and dissertations, Fergus synthesises and analyses an enormous amount of information stretching back to British laws enacted in the 17th century guaranteeing freedom of religion and culminating in the devious means enacted to circumvent those laws in the West Indies."

“Freedom of conscience was an alien concept for the English when they became overseas colonisers,” says Fergus.

The author provides a clear, comprehensive and exciting history that puts the Shaker and Spiritual/Shouter Baptist struggle into a regional and international context. Against Toleration shows just how colonialism wielded its political power to keep political control over them.

In 1912, the Shakers were outlawed in St Vincent, and the Spiritual Baptists followed in 1917. Once those laws were enacted, they faced harassment, beatings and imprisonment. Preachers couldn’t perform marriages or baptise people in the sea or rivers.

But the Baptists were not powerless.

“Spiritual Baptists were both respected and feared as spiritual warriors,” writes Fergus.

It is no exaggeration. The outlawed religions refused to conform. Their creolised religion, which mixed African and Christian rituals, threatened colonial power while instilling pride and courage in those who defied the authorities.

“Several colonial governments adopted prohibition to compensate for the failure of formal education and imperial evangelism to diminish the attraction of Africanised Christianity,” says Fergus.

The prejudice and persecution was unimaginable.

Fergus writes, “Britain’s ascent to ordinances to proscribe the Spiritual Baptists was one of the most extreme violations of human rights in the Caribbean since the abolition of chattel slavery.”

The Spiritual Baptists’ ordeal and culture is well documented outside colonial-controlled courts and upper-class-controlled newspapers. Anthropologists’ interest in the Spiritual Baptists, dating back to field studies by US anthropologist Melville J Herskovits and his wife Frances in Toco in 1939, presented a non-biased view of the Spiritual Baptists’ culture and struggle.

That anecdote of teacher Joseph in court reveals just how much this fight against the Spiritual Baptists and Shakers depended on language. Fergus tells us Joseph’s moving court testimony was not captured in the newspaper report.

He writes, “The Guardian’s report of the climax of Bailey’s address shows the power of the vernacular that the Port of Spain Gazette’s report lost in transcribing to standard English.”

Authorities manipulated language to achieve nefarious political goals. They used the terms “Shaker” in St Vincent and “Shouter” in Trinidad to describe the Baptists in a derogatory manner. The Baptists countered the authorities by referring to themselves as Spiritual Baptists.

The belief that the colonisers 'version of religion “would prevent marronage and insurrection led to the development of The Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro slaves in the British West Indies,” says Fergus.

“Slaves had their own censored version of the Bible with anything taken out that could give ideas of liberation theology. It began with Genesis and skipped to chapter 19 of Exodus so slaves would not get any ideas of rising up.”

Fergus says religious intolerance was not so much about the right of conscience but more about protecting the political and cultural dominance of European and European-descendent elites. It was about control, which couldn’t be guaranteed with a free-thinking, educated black population.

The author systematically outlines the process of outlawing the Shakers and Spiritual Baptist. The governors had to be careful not to attack religion. They built their cases on the Shakers and Spiritual Baptists being a public nuisance. For this, they relied on the Summary Offences Act of 1854, which forbade public or subscription dances.

The Chief Justice of the Windward Islands, Charles James Tarring, advised the governor of St Vincent to “carefully avoid the words religion, religious services, denomination, representative, authorised person and other such expressions.”

The authorities weaponised language. The Shouter Baptists’ liturgy became a “nuisance”; their culture “a relic of barbarism," and “paganism.” Meetings were “indecent.”

Carefully manipulated language got the legislative council to vote unanimously in support of a bill banning the Shakers on its third and final reading.

“The Shakers Ordinance was not a public-order act. It was full-scale religious persecution with economic implications,” says Fergus.

There was no definition of Shakerism in the ordinance that banned the religion. Once in place, the law was used against the Spiritual Baptists in Trinidad, where colonial powers claimed (falsely) that many of the Spiritual Baptists in Belmont were Shakers from St Vincent who had fled that country.

The Port of Spain Gazette published an article with the headline "'Shakers’ in Town.”

It called the Spiritual Baptists “an abominable nuisance,” described them as “a band of lunatics,” accused them of “performing hideous incantantations" and said they abducted teenage girls for “immoral purposes.”

The facts were distorted with language and lies, and this Fergus exposes in fascinating detail. The Spiritual/Shouter Baptists have a complex history, which Fergus outlines while reminding readers of the difficulty of pinpointing the exact beginning of the religion.

The strength of this book lies in his comparisons of the Shaker and Spiritual Baptist plight to the colonial treatment of religions in India, the US and the UK. That comparison adds immeasurably to the understanding of the colonisers’ mindset.

The author takes the reader through the entire process of the developing religion, its ban and triumph over colonialism – even documenting when calypsonians changed their tune and began to sing favourably about the Baptists. Raymond “Atilla” Quevedo even admitted in song he had attended ceremonies “to bask in the glory of their spiritual enlightenment.”

Covering that transition from ostracised and outlawed to accepted and legal is most interesting for what it shows about the collision of colonial and local culture and politics.

Against Toleration is an important academic work that crosses over into general readership. I would have liked to see more anecdotes and newspaper reports to create more indelible images to support the interesting details and compelling history that Fergus presents.

There is much to discover about prejudice, religious persecution, colonisation, resistance and rebellion. That thread on how language was used to both manipulate laws and fight injustice weaves its way through this important history.

The launch of Against Toleration: Britain’s Persecution of the Spiritual Baptists takes place at 5 pm on March 27 at the Central Bank Auditorium in Port of Spain.