Leithart, Children, and Baptists

Peter Leithart has a thoughtful post on the theology of the child.

Though his post is thoughtful, he makes a comment about Baptists that is on the troubling side:

Baptizing infants poses a deep challenge to liberal order: It rejects the notion that the individual child is a self-standing individual, and by placing the child within the church, a public institution with a political history, it disrupts easy public/private divide.  By contrast, believer’s baptism looks to be an accommodation to liberal order (though, more precisely, it may be at the roots of liberal order).

He rightly notes (though he does so parenthetically) that the Baptists are not conceding to the liberal order...there wasn't one when they came around.  The early Baptists saw themselves as conceding to Christ's right to be king and his demand of fealty over against a baptism that had long been co-opted by the state as a (the) mode of determining citizenship in the city of man. Baptism, according to Jesus, was always a sign of citizenship in God's kingdom. When it is used by the rulers of the present age, particularly when it is used by them as an authorization to disobey Christ by killing other Christians, it becomes a concession of the power of the gospel to the power of the sword. The early Baptists and Anabaptists knew about that too. The violent version of the Anabaptists did the same thing when they used baptism as an excuse to rebel violently. They denied the presence of the kingdom, they failed to love their enemies, and Jesus was right about them, they died by the sword.
The Baptists had no sense of defending pure human autonomy until much later (see Mullins), even then their case must be argued against. The point the early Baptists wanted to make was that the state was not autonomous and neither was the church autonomously able to merge with kingdoms that were fundamentally at odds with Jesus Christ. If anything, they defended God's sovereignty rather than anything approaching classical liberalism. To be baptized as a convert is to admit of an alien grace, to submit to a crucified king, to worship a resurrected Lord, and to receive an act from other citizens of the new kingdom. Nothing about that sounds like rugged individualism.