Radical Religion and Laudian Rites: Baptists and the Imposition of Hands in Revolutionary England

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that the radical religious movements emerging during the English Revolution were indebted to a wider range of influences than is commonly assumed. This overarching argument is advanced through a close examination of a specific religious rite practiced by English General Baptists during the 1640s and 1650s: during this period, many General Baptists began to lay hands upon newly baptized converts as an initiatory liturgical rite. While this phenomenon has been widely noted, the full significance of the practice has not been fully appreciated due to both a failure of scholars to adequately locate the rite within a broader historical and theological context and a cluster of interpretive errors that have persisted throughout the literature. Though commonly interpreted as an example of radical puritanism, the Baptist imposition of hands is better understood as a radical reappropriation of confirmation as practiced in the Church of England, and more specifically, a reinterpretation of confirmation as it was pioneered by Laudian divines during the 1630s. By illuminating ways in which the General Baptist practice of laying on of hands echoed a High Church Laudian sacramentalism typically not associated with religious radicalism, this article broadens understanding of the provenance of radical religious ideology during the mid-seventeenth century and further evidences the dizzying theological eclecticism of the period.