BEING A BAPTIST MEANS FINDING ONE’S OWN ANSWERS
By Pamela Morsi

A new survey indicated that after 200 years of separation of church and state, more and more American’s want their religion involved in politics.

This seems pretty obvious when you compare the similarities between the meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Texas Republican Convention. Evangelicals are apparently in the forefront of this change and the largest Protestant denomination in the country, Baptists, make up most of the evangelicals.

I am a Baptist. I was taken to a Baptist church for the first time when I was three-weeks-old. I was “saved” at age five. Despite flirtations with other religions during college, I’ve always known that I was a Baptist.

What makes a Baptist a Baptist, and not anything else, is something called the “doctrine of the priesthood of the believer.” What that means is, if you want answers, you go straight to the top. There is no priest, no pope, no saint, no nobody.

You can’t turn to the guy in the next pew and say, “Hey, what do we think about welfare for unwed teenage mothers?” Taking his answer as your own is cheating. You have to figure it out for yourself.

The ramifications of this doctrine include the fact that the answers believers come up with may not be the same. That’s why Jerry Falwell, Buckner Fanning, Bill Clinton and myself can all be good Baptists and still not agree on very much, certainly not on politics.

This came home to me very clearly as a young girl in Oklahoma. A proposal was made in the state Legislature to collect property taxes from churches. The immediate screaming response had the representative who had authored the bill quickly reforming his idea into taxing only church property that was not used specifically for worship.

Still, Catholics, Protestants and Jews were united in their opposition. And in our little Baptist church, the pastor preached against it. My grandfather, thoughtfully, respectfully, but publicly disagreed with him.

Grandpa said that little churches, like ours, would find a way to pay the property taxes on buildings and grounds they owned. This was a fair obligation and God would provide for it.

Big, huge churches with wealthy congregations, which were spending too much money on land and buildings, would find an incentive to spend that money on helping people, which was more what God had intended anyway.

The folks who used the church as a front for profit-making would at least pay their fair share of what they made.

Property tax on church holdings did not become law, although I believe Grandpa was right about it.

Knowing him as I did, he came to his beliefs on the issue through prayer, communion with his creator and thoughtful consideration. Nobody told Grandpa what to think. In fact, he viewed his disagreement with the preacher as “typically Baptist.”

Which is why it is so alarming to see Baptists making group decisions; seeing “how to vote” cards handed out in church entry ways; hearing church pastors and denominational leaders handing down edicts about what we believe.

A Baptist church is not an oligarchy or a theocracy. It’s not even a democracy. It is a religious anarchy.

Unlike most other churches, no spokesman can come forward and say this is the church’s official position. The official position of the Baptist church is every believer, every conscience, every soul seeks truth for himself.

Of course that severely limits the political power of the largest protestant denomination in the United States. A church that cannot speak with one voice may well not be heard above the roar of the crowd. Nevertheless, that’s not our place to change.

God created Baptists, just as he did mosquitoes, for reasons of his own. The rest of creation may look on and say,” What was the purpose of that?”

But no genetic engineering should be utilized to turn the pesky mosquito into a busy bee. We have enough bees already.

Well-meaning Christians may think that a dose of religion might be good for politics. However, politics cannot be good for our churches.

Politicizing the communion between a believer and his God is simply the latest attempt to turn mosquitoes in to bees.

Dear Baptist, whenever someone tries to tell you what you should think and how you should vote, resist the temptation to go along with him, no matter who he says that he is. That’s copying from the guy in the other pew.

“Hey Brother Bud? What is it we think about capital punishment?”

The world needs Baptists. If only so that more organized religions can feel superior.

This article was previously published in the San Antonio Express-News. Pamela Morsi is an author of mass market fiction with thirteen novels, and a member of Trinity Baptist Church, San Antonio.

July 1999