America's freedom of religion did not come from James Madison or Thomas Jefferson. It wasn't a product of the Enlightenment, and it doesn't prove that America was founded as a purely secular nation. The religious freedom that we so often take for granted today was brought to our nation by Baptists who not only preached about religious freedom in their pulpits but publicly advocated for it in the political realm, even to the point of being tortured and killed for their views.

This debt to the Baptists was recognized by historians of previous centuries who generally acknowledged that "the Baptist became the first and only propounders of absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty." And George Bancroft, America's most prominent nineteenth-century historian, concluded that "freedom of conscience, unlimited freedom of mind, was from the first the trophy of the Baptists."

The Trophy of the Baptists presents the Baptist heritage of religious freedom in the words of the men who suffered and died to bring it to our shores. From John Murton who died in an English prison because of his Baptist faith to Obadiah Holmes who was publicly whipped for holding a Baptist service in Massachusetts to the eventual triumph of the Baptist cause through John Leland's influence on James Madison, this book traces the historical record of our religious freedom to its real source in the doctrines and beliefs of the Baptists.