Isaac Backus

Overview

Isaac Backus (1724-1806) was a Separate Baptist pastor, historian, and advocate for religious liberty in colonial and early national New England.¹ Converted during the Great Awakening and ordained into the Separate Congregationalist movement it produced, he came to reject infant baptism, spent five decades pastoring a Baptist congregation in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and wrote the first sustained history of the American Baptist movement, all while campaigning against Massachusetts’s tax-supported religious establishment.¹²

Life and Ministry

Born January 9, 1724, in Norwich, Connecticut, Backus was converted during the Great Awakening, the revival that, according to Baptist historian Daniel Scheiderer, brought “many” New Englanders “to faith” and, in Backus’s case, eventually into Baptist convictions.² He began preaching in 1746 as an itinerant New Light exhorter and was ordained in 1748 over a Separate Congregationalist church in the Titicut precinct of Massachusetts.¹ Controversy over his growing opposition to infant baptism forced him from that pulpit in 1756; later that year he organized a Baptist congregation in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and served as its pastor until his death on November 20, 1806.¹

From 1761 until John Gill’s death in 1771, Backus corresponded with the English Particular Baptist theologian.³ In 1765 he wrote to Gill to introduce James Manning, the first president of the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University), and to request books on the young college’s behalf, since it had few.⁴ After Gill’s death, his executors donated his entire set of published works and fifty-two folio volumes of the church fathers to the college’s library, a gift Manning called “by far the greatest donation our little library has yet had.”⁵ Though he never attended a college or seminary himself, Backus received an honorary degree from the same institution in 1797.¹

Theological Contribution

Backus’s chief theological legacy lies less in original system-building than in transmitting, within American Separate Baptist life, doctrines he held in common with the wider Calvinistic Baptist tradition. His earliest published sermon, on Galatians 4:31 (1756), assumes rather than argues for the doctrine of the eternal covenant of grace between the Father and the Son as the ground of the church’s salvation: “the glorious covenant of grace, made between the Father, and the Son, before the world began… That the Son of God should assume our nature, and in that nature perfectly obey the law which we have broken, and bear the punishment due unto us for sin.”⁶ Scheiderer places Backus among a line of Baptists running from John Gill onward who “assumed” this covenant as settled theological background to their gospel preaching rather than “articulating” and defending it at length in its own right.⁷

His most substantial work, A History of New England, with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians Called Baptists (1777-96), was the first sustained history of the American Baptist movement, combining advocacy for his own denomination with documentation of its persecution under New England’s tax-supported religious establishments.²

Historical Significance

Backus is remembered chiefly as a leading eighteenth-century American advocate for religious liberty and the separation of church and state. He fought against Massachusetts laws taxing religious dissenters to support the Congregationalist establishment and served on committees that documented discrimination against Baptists.¹ He supported ratification of the United States Constitution at the Massachusetts ratifying convention of 1788, seeing in it a safeguard for the liberty of conscience he had spent his ministry defending.¹

Backus’s political theology, like that of many Baptist and evangelical contemporaries, judged the American Revolution itself in moral rather than purely patriotic terms. Historian Obbie Tyler Todd quotes his verdict that the war was driven by “self-love” on both sides: “Self-love, under the specious name of government and a concern for the public good, has moved and now moves the Britons to act towards us like incarnate devils. And self-love in this country, by sinking our public credit, has exposed us to greater danger than all their fleets and armies could do.”⁸ Todd places this alongside similar warnings from contemporaries such as Richard Furman, part of a broader evangelical suspicion of self-interest in the founding era.⁸

Related Doctrines

References

“Isaac Backus,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed September 8, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Backus. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Daniel David Scheiderer, “John Gill: Continuing Baptist Affirmation of the Eternal Covenant,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 75. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 77, citing Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, vol. 1, 1741-1764, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Providence: Brown University Press, 1979), 522, and Alvah Hovey, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, A.M. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), 152. ↩
Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 77-78. ↩
Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 78, quoting a letter from James Manning to John Ryland, November 12, 1772. ↩
Isaac Backus, A Short Description Of the difference between the Bond-woman and the Free; As they are the two Covenants (Boston: Green & Russell, 1756), 7-8, quoted in Scheiderer, “John Gill,” 76. ↩
Scheiderer, “John Gill,” 77. ↩
Obbie Tyler Todd, “What Republicanism Is This? An Introduction to Christian Republicanism (1776-1865),” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 118. ↩ ↩²