When on the evening of Jan. 21, 1525, Conrad Grebel poured water drawn from the well outside Anna Manz’s house on George Blaurock, the simple act of baptism broke a thousand-year tradition of church-state fusion.

This new church would be without national boundaries, without political lords and without the sword’s protection. Nor would they use the sword in self-defense or to win “Christian” ­territories from “godless” Islamic Turks.

Two years later, the popular Michael Sattler was tried before a supportive crowd. It seems he was winning the case until he declared that if fighting were right, he’d rather fight with the Turks against the Christians because the Turks were Turks of the flesh, while Christians were Turks of the spirit.

He meant Christians knew better but didn’t do better. Sattler was quickly sentenced to a painful death by the judge, now supported by an enraged crowd. The Turks, at that moment, were at the gates of Vienna, threatening all of Europe.

Sattler and Anabaptists, or Swiss Brethren, as they called themselves, discovered Jesus as Lord, Savior and exemplar. And that made all the difference.

Their understanding of Jesus led them to critique the social order. The union of church and state, the fusion of cross and sword, created a coercive power that benefited the rich and powerful and dismissed the needs and rights of the poor.

The state protected the church, and the church blessed the state’s violence. Christians had been persecuted before the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in 313 and Emperor Theodosius declared it mandatory in 380.

In the blending of the cross and sword, Christians became persecutors.

Will Christians become persecutors again? 

The first Anabaptists pioneered church-state separation (their mentor, Ulrich Zwingli, taught it before abandoning it). About 250 years later, the U.S. founders believed it (see the Constitution’s First Amendment), but a growing number of Christians today don’t and want to restore a form of Christendom.

Anabaptists today need to resist the Christian nationalist movement, which fails to recognize that the first Anabaptists and the American founders were right: church-state separation is essential for religious liberty.

Why do so many of us want to recall the Theodosian mandate, forcing everyone into a Christian mold? Nationalism is our golden calf. When we worship it, we diminish the church and reframe the Constitution.

The attempt to make the country Christian isn’t good news to believers elsewhere. It certainly doesn’t look like Jesus. Will the United States forgive its enemies? Will it care for aliens and strangers? The U.S. acts like other ­nations, so let the nations be nations and the church be church.

In the U.S. history courses I taught, I asked my students to explain how the country is Christian given its genocide against Native Americans, enslavement of human beings, disenfranchisement of women and exclusion of so many from the American dream.

Packaging the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. flag with the Bible is outlandish, blasphemous and, yes, idolatrous.

Many immigrants to the American colonies fled the terror of state-sponsored religion. The founders were determined to avoid that deadly coupling. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison advocated a “wall of separation” and fought to disestablish Anglicanism as the state church in Virginia, a status it held until 1786.

Freedom from the state’s infringement on Amish education was settled in the U.S. Supreme Court case Yoder v. Wisconsin in 1972. Chief Justice Warren Burger made clear “that the First and Fourteenth Amendments prevent the State from compelling respondents to cause their children to attend formal high school to age 16.” The decision helped preserve religious freedom for everyone.

Would this not apply now to state-required posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms? Or to ordering that public schools teach the Bible, as Oklahoma’s state superintendent did in 2024? Or to calls by right-wing activists to end the separation of church and state? Are Christians claiming dominion over people of other faiths?

Might this be a good time to acknowledge the wisdom of the Anabaptists and the U.S. founders — and to recall Michael Sattler’s distinction between Turks of the flesh and Turks of the spirit? Because we should know better than to give up religious liberty.

John E. Sharp is a retired Hesston College history and Bible professor. He leads tours to Europe and Central Asia, writes, cares for grandchildren and is a househusband.