A church that was born in defiance of government oppression just turned 250, and the same liberty its founders risked their lives for is squarely in Washington's crosshairs today.
Historic First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, commemorated its 250th anniversary this weekend — a congregation that began when enslaved worshippers gathered secretly under a brush arbor at Green Spring Plantation in 1776. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 prohibited enslaved people from gathering in groups or worshipping without an enslaver's permission. These believers met anyway. They understood what the founders drafting declarations nearby were only beginning to grapple with: that religious freedom comes from God, not government permission.
The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot covered the four-day celebration extensively, including Friday's dedication of the re-created African Baptist Meeting House, originally built around 1818. Virginia Sen. Mamie E. Locke told the crowd: "A 250th anniversary is rare. It reminds us that endurance is itself a testimony. It tells us that when a community is rooted in faith and anchored in purpose, it can outlast oppression, outlive hardship and rise to meet every new challenge."
She's right. The question is whether she and her colleagues remember that principle when the oppression comes from their own bureaucracy.
The church was organized by African Americans, for African Americans, led by the Rev. Gowan Pamphlet — an enslaved man who preached despite threats of persecution. That is the real American story: ordinary people exercising their God-given rights against a state that told them they had none. The Virginian-Pilot noted that while America's Founding Fathers debated concepts of liberty, this congregation was living it out.
Carly Fiorina, now CEO of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, acknowledged the importance of truth-telling to heal racial wounds: "There have been times when we have chosen to ignore, to eradicate, to cover up, perhaps to pave over, to refuse to see. The result we know — that choice creates a wound that cannot heal."
Fair enough. But the paving-over doesn't just happen to history. It happens in real time, when federal agencies treat churches as hazard zones, when bureaucrats decide which congregations are essential and which aren't, when the IRS audits pastors who preach the wrong politics from the pulpit.
WTOP's coverage focused on photo documentation of the rededication but offered little of the historical context that makes this story matter — the raw fact that government once made it illegal for these Americans to worship, and they did it anyway.
That's the tension the founders understood in those taverns under British rule. The right to assemble, to worship, to speak — these aren't privileges granted by legislatures. They are pre-existing conditions of free people. First Baptist Church proved that for 250 years. The question now is whether the republic those founders built will honor that truth — or repeat the old pattern of a state that thinks it grants liberty rather than recognizes it.
