Message from the Chair
Clyde Glazener,
TBC Chair

In my opinion, making separation of church and state a major emphasis of Texas Baptists Committed in 2003 is a timely and appropriate measure. Perhaps a more popular term than the phrase “separation of church and state” would be the words “religious liberty for everybody.”

Many religionists who want to use the state to further their vested interests (such as receiving funds to support their parochial schools) will speak of an imagined desire on the parts of folks like me to eliminate religious influence from the public square. That is a lot like the dentist jiggling and pinching your cheek while he gives you an injection in your gum. It’s a distraction while he punches a hole in your gum. Baseless charges distract attention from the fact that they expect the government to give favored position to their churches and causes.

We all should know the value of championing religious liberty for everybody. What we tend to forget is that without separation of church and state we cannot have religious liberty for all. Baptists have known that fact in the past, even in the relatively recent past.

When did we begin to forget? Wasn’t it about the same time that many Baptist churches in the South began to develop academies and schools to attract the folks who would pay money and join a church that would give them an alternative to racially integrated schools?

I’m certainly not saying that all Baptist churches that have developed private schools were motivated by desire to exploit the racial crisis. But the sudden remarkable proliferation of these is too great a phenomenon in history to be ignored. At any rate, it seems that about that time many of these churches began to push for government funds to subsidize their private schools. Once they moved that far, their passion for separation of church and state lost all substance.

When James Dunn (former head of the Baptist Joint Committee) did his job too well as a watchdog to guard against breeches in appropriate church and state issues, his agency came under attack from his own denomination. His “sin” was in holding our feet to the fire and pointing out our transgressions in blurring the lines between church and state separation.

Consequently, the Baptist Joint Committee was defunded and eventually supplanted by an agency that would espouse the views of the neo-Baptists. This new agency is so different that it supported a proposed bill that would have allowed tax-exempt churches to support and funnel money to political candidates. That’s our new agency (now about ten years old), which is supposed to ensure separation of church and state.

My point is that religious liberty for all is a cherished Baptist principle that is unattainable without separation of church and state, a principle that is under attack today from many so-called Baptists, and a principle that is worth defending.

Let’s do it together!

June 2003