Sam Houston – Advocate for Religious Liberty
By Bill Brian

I am enjoying James L. Haley’s Sam Houston, the very readable and fascinating account of the life of the Commander-in-Chief of the Texas Revolutionary Army and President of the Republic of Texas, friend of Baptist preachers George Washington Baines and Rufus Burleson. It was Burleson, then president of Baylor at Independence, who baptized Houston on a Sunday in November, 1854, in the “Baptizing Hole” in Rocky Creek. “Well, General,” a friend was later said to remark, “I hear your sins were washed away.” “I hope so,” replied Houston, “but if they were all washed away, the Lord help the fish down below.”

Burleson and Baines were not the only Baptist preachers who had influenced Houston. Judge Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor, lawyer and evangelist, administered the oath of office when Houston was sworn in for his second term as Texas President. Another Baptist, George W. Samson, pastor of E Street Church in Washington, D.C., earned Houston’s confidence to such an extent that Houston shared with him the circumstances of Houston’s separation from his first wife.

Houston’s regard for religious liberty bears the marks of the historic Baptist defense for freedom of conscience. Regarding the First Amendment mandate that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion Houston wrote, “That clause was placed there by wise men, by men who had been careful students of history … When tyrants ask you to yield one jot of your liberty, and you consent thereto, it is the first link forged in the chain that will eventually hold you in bondage.”

Of the laws of Mexico mandating the Roman Catholic religion as the only authorized religion of its citizens including Texans before independence, Houston said that such laws “intended to prescribe and regulate a person’s religious belief were the first moving cause that inspired the Texas patriots to draw their swords … History teaches us that men composing all denominations of religious faith, when clothed with ecclesiastical and temporal power combined, have been tyrants.”

Of the need to protect minorities in their beliefs, Houston said, “Let us suppose that the Quakers, the Jews, the Seventh Day Baptists, and others, that believe that Saturday … is the day God set apart, should get control of the legislative branch of the government… What do you suppose the religious people who believe that [Sunday] is … the day that Christ ordained, would say? Would they not all proclaim that such a law was a violation of the constitution?… We must remember that this is a land of equal rights to the Jews as well as to the Gentiles.”

Neither did Houston believe that high morals could be mandated by the laws of men. “…Nowhere in the New Testament can we learn that any agency save moral suasion was invoked to make people religious or moral.”

General Sam Houston, on the subject of religious freedom, would have been at home with Baptist religious liberty heroes Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, John Clarke, John Leland, and George Truett. This perspective on Houston gives further testimony to the breadth of his character and influence upon the earliest days of Texas.

Footnotes

1James L. Haley, Sam Houston, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University, 2002.

2Sam Houston, page 333.

3Sam Houston, page 316

4Sam Houston, page 316.

5Sam Houston, pages 316-317.

6Sam Houston, page 317.

October 2003