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. 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-contro
