PM Ralph Gonsalves declares May 21 as National Spiritual Baptist Day, announces public holiday

In a historic move, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines has taken a bold step in solidarity with justice and religious freedom. He declared May 21st a new public holiday, known as National Spiritual Baptist Day.

Announced on the floor of parliament on August 27, 2024, this was a historic moment for the Spiritual Baptists community that has received intense persecution and marginalization over many decades.

Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, speaking at the ceremony, said recognition and restorative justice for Spiritual Baptists constitute meaningful and specific ways of making amends for this community regarding the sufferings following the prohibition in 1912 through the Shakerism Prohibition Ordinance.

Because of this prohibitionist law, countless numbers of Baptists had to undergo one form of criminal prosecution or another with attendant fines and imprisonment. This earned them much persecution, yet the Spiritual Baptists never lost their faith. To many, Gonsalves’s declaration of a national holiday seemed overdue recognition for this persecuted group of people and their right to worship.

“Being celebrated on the actual date rather than waiting for a Sunday is a wonderful and educational blessing for us,” Gonsalves said. “This is an extension of what we did in 2002 in establishing the National Day of Recognition for Spiritual Baptist freedom to worship,” he added.

The comments by the Prime Minister place this recognition into a wider perspective. He said that no other religious denomination in the Caribbean has been made to suffer as much as the Spiritual Baptists. “They were banned in St Vincent and the Grenadines, and there have been many leaders, both political and spiritual, who struggled for the freedom of the Spiritual Baptists to worship as their religion teaches.”

This belief of Gonsalves had been in line with his long-time belief in social justice and the rights of disadvantaged groups. The decision places St Vincent and the Grenadines alongside Trinidad and Tobago as only the second country in the world to have a public holiday in recognition of the Spiritual Baptist faith.

It was seen, thus, as a deep and meaningful gesture of healing and reconciliation, not only for the Spiritual Baptist community but also to the nation as a whole.

The Spiritual Baptist community received this with great enthusiasm and showed their gratefulness to the Prime Minister and his cabinet. This day to them is some sort of liberation and emancipation in honour of their ancestors and all the struggles they went through and their enduring faith.

Prime Minister Gonsalves called on all Christians in the country to support the acknowledgment, noting that even those churches that once opposed the Baptists had come to recognize the wrongs of the past.