KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent – Parliament on Tuesday unanimously approved legislation declaring May 21 a public holiday in honour of the Spiritual Baptist faith.
Members of the Shouter Baptiste faith (File Photo)Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, in piloting the Public Holiday (Amendment) Bill, 2024 (National Spiritual Baptist Day) bill, said that St. Vincent and Grenadines is the second country in the world to have such a holiday.
He noted that Trinidad and Tobago has a similar holiday that is observed on a different date.
“This bill is very brief but stuffed with significance,” Gonsalves said, with Opposition Senator Israel Bruce, a Spiritual Baptist, said the law was the “most significant” he had debated since becoming a lawmaker in 2019.
“I have participated in the debates on a number of bills that came before this noble house. I have participated in a number of debates on budgets for St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Today I’m about to enter, embark, to participate in the most significant bill that I will debate in this Honourable House,” Bruce said.
Gonsalves said that on March 28, 2002, Parliament had enacted a two-clause law that came into effect on April 16 that year, declaring May 21 the Spiritual Baptist Official Recognition of Freedom to Worship Day.
“Today, as a consequence of the request, indeed, the urgings sometimes go beyond request to a demand by the Spiritual Baptist community to have a national Spiritual Baptist day as a public holiday, 21st of May,” Gonsalves told legislators.
He said the debate of March 28, 2002, clearly outlined the position of the government.
The prime minister traced the history of official persecution of Spiritual Baptists here beginning with a 1912 ordinance passed by the colonial legislature.
The Shakerism Prohibition Ordinance outlawed the expression of freedom of religion by the faith now known as the Spiritual Baptist, but which was called the Shakers or Shouters.
“Of course, the colonial authorities didn’t conceive of the worship being done by the spiritual Baptist that it was a religion. They saw it as something else,” Gonsalves said, noting that a second important milestone in the legislative journey was that on March 22, 1965 when then Chief Minister Ebenezer Theodore Joshua led his government to repeal the 1912 ordinance.
“The bill which he brought was called the Shakerism Prohibition Repeal Ordinance 1965 and that was debated on the 22nd of March, 1965,” Gonsalves said, adding that said some people would then ask why not use March 22 as a public holiday.
“The Spiritual Baptist community has long held that May 21 is the day they recognise as their day of liberation. And what they have indicated is that on that particular day, that was the last day, effectively, in the law courts that there were any prosecutions under the 1912 law and importantly, on the 22nd of May, the records show that The Blessed McDonald Williams established a formal national organisation of spiritual Baptist, but under the rubric of the Christian pilgrims,” Gonsalves said.
Prime Minister Gonsalves, a Roman Catholic, said he has been associated with the Spiritual Baptist for a very long time and “can speak the testimony that they regard May 21 as the day of their freedom of religion, liberation.
“And once they so recognise that, it is our business in the circumstances to acknowledge that,” he said, noting the research into the history of the Spiritual Baptist faith and the contributions of various people to their freedom to practice their religion.
He old legislators that the 2012 census found that nine per cent of the population self-identified as Spiritual Baptists.
“There is a view that the number is larger than that. But some persons refer not to themselves as practising Spiritual Baptist, even though they are, but the religion in which they were, we will say baptized (christened).”
Gonsalves said that former attorney general, the late PR Campbell perhaps did more politically on behalf of the spiritual Baptist and assisted it with great official recognition, even though nothing was done formally in the parliament.
The prime minister noted that Campbell was the Chancellor of the faith led by the blessed Cosmore Pompey.
“We can speak legions about this, but I am duty bound to put on record his immense contribution and to thank him as I’ve thanked him when he was alive for his tremendous contribution to the enlargement of the recognition and the organization and the structure of the spiritual Baptist faith in St. Vincent and the Grenadines,” Gonsalves said.
He said that listeners would urge him not to be ultra-modest but put on record that between 1981 to 2001 he was the warden of the spiritual Baptist Friendly Society.
“[This] caused me to go to churches all over the country on the matter of the friendly society,” Gonsalves said, adding that as a result, he met “several titans in the faith and they taught me a great deal.
“And I pay tribute to them and for their own influences on me in very important ways. And of course, I was the lawyer for the organisation, which I gave freely, both positions,” he said.
Meanwhile, in his contribution to the debate, Bruce said that his grandfather, the late Kayla Bruce, a Spiritual Baptist leader, would “have his wooden rod in his hand.
“And in his limping moves, as he swirls across the floor just before the altar, he echoes the song, ‘Look how the work lay down in the field. Show me the children work.’
“You don’t appreciate it by simply hearing the echoing of the words, but is to hear the sankie been bellowed in the halls of the church,” Bruce said and sang the words rhythmically in the National Assembly.
“So that there is absolutely no doubts at all in this country, I want to take the privilege afforded me by the Honourable Leader of the Opposition to lead off in this debate, to say to all of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines that all of us on this side of the Honourable House lend 100 per cent support to this particular bill.
Bruce recounted how, as a 12-year-old, he had gone to church and responded to the altar call after hearing the sermon and the famous hymn “Just As I Am”.
“On that day, I felt all of it, and I left my seat, I walked to the altar with other youngsters, and at age 12, in the Spiritual Baptist faith, I gave my life to Christ.”
He said that in much the same way that in academics one would move through the various degrees from undergraduate to doctoral, “I felt that I wanted to have a deeper take of this.
“I went and at age 13, virgin, 14 years old, I went and I took a journey that the spiritual Baptist we call mourning. I went to mourn,” he said.
Mourning is a voluntary rite in the Spiritual Baptist church where the mourner lies blindfolded in a room for days without food or water to escape their “carnal” body and commune with the inhabitants of another world.
It is one of the ritual voyages that believers undertake with the church.
“So, when I speak today, I speak with sufficient authority that I am grounded firmly in the spiritual Baptist movement,” Bruce said.
He noted that the Spiritual Baptist movement of SVG “didn’t have the most pleasant journey.
“… But it is clear that this religion came from the belly of Africa. It is an Afrocentric religion, the practices, a lot of which continue today, bear a number of the things we see as are still practised in the motherland.”
He said that the people who started the Spiritual Baptist movement in SVG were brought to the country as slaves from Africa.
“… the colonial masters were able to lift them out of Africa, but what they were unsuccessful in doing is stripping the people, the African descendants, of that hardcore spiritual connection between their existence and the existence of Africa,” the Opposition Senator said.
