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TBC Newsletter | |
| March 2006 |
LOOKING FOR SOME BAPTISTS |
I met Doops Momber several years ago. Doops is a fictional character in Will Campbell’s book The Glad River. The object of much family and community scorn, Doops had refused to be baptized because he would only consent to be baptized by a real Baptist. The truth was that Doops feared there was not a real Baptist left in the world, though he was willing to wander the globe looking for one. There are worse pursuits, you know.
I am fortunate to have a job that repeatedly takes me to nearly every part of this great country and to sites of dialogue and public interaction throughout the international community. Since The Interfaith Alliance focuses most intently on what is happening to religion at the intersection of religion, politics, and government, on a daily basis, I see up close what is happening to faith and freedom in our nation and beyond.
To be perfectly honest with you, in recent years, the joy I find in the work that I do has been tempered significantly by a growing sense that something is wrong—something is—bad wrong in this nation. Something in the relationship between religion, politics, and government is out of kilter and all three of these important entities in our society are being hurt by what is wrong. Politicians have latched on to religion as a key ingredient in their strategies to win elections, to pass controversial pieces of legislation, and to garner support for questionable policies. Reciprocally, religious leaders have formed alliances with more-than-willing politicians in an effort to use the government— its agencies, laws, policies, and money—to seek preferential treatment for, if not an actual establishment of, their particular religious institutions and the advancement of narrow sectarian agendas.
The meaning of religion in our day is being decided by voices speaking from the periphery of religion—voices defining the authenticity of religion not by traditional standards of belief and behavior but by compliance with a narrow partisan agenda and personal positions on four or five social-political issues that have been made litmus tests by which to measure not political identity but religious integrity.
Politicos preoccupied with power are willing to use even what is sacred to advance their self-aggrandizing causes just as religious leaders are obsessed with using the methods of politics and the machinery of government to establish their particular religion as the religion of the land. In both pursuits, the big losers are religious freedom and the American people.
Religious liberty is in serious trouble in this land. The movement known as the Religious Right advances like a juggernaut against the religious liberty clauses in the Constitution. Be careful in your estimates of this group. Speaking of Pat Robertson as a laughing stock can be a dangerous diversion of attention from the more reasoned rhetoric, carefully-honed strategy, broad-based coalition building, and political as well as religious finesse of this movement. The influence of this movement on our government is frightening. Key Religious Right leaders—such as Tony Perkins, Richard Land, Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Jay Sekulo, Al Mohler, and James Dobson—have an amazing amount of access to the political leaders of the nation as they work cooperatively to establish the primacy of religion over non-religion and their particular interpretation of Christianity over all other religions in the nation.
I found Joe Lewis’ instructions to me regarding my presentation this evening chilling. Joe said that I was being asked to speak about the rising threat of a theocracy from the Religious Right and how that danger affects religious liberty for all Americans. Think about those instructions. Honestly, can you believe we are talking like that? Can you wrap your mind and emotions around the fact that in the United States, the most religiously pluralistic nation in the world with a government founded on a Constitution that guarantees religious freedom and promises liberty and justice for all its citizens—in this nation— we are worried about a religious— take-over of our government?
To be sure, some call us “paranoid.” Others make fun of our strict separationist views regarding the proper relationship between the institutions of government and the institutions of religion. A whole host of critics label us as radicals merely opposed to religion.
So, I must ask, “Are we over-reacting to what we are seeing? Are we making too much of this matter of the dissolution of religious liberty amid the poison of a passion for a theocracy, modified or full blown?” The questions are worth asking and answering correctly.
Allow me to speak personally. I think the situation is even more serious than most people like us realize and the challenges that we face are even greater than we imagine. But I want to be accountable for that conclusion which, no doubt, some will consider outrageous. Thus, here are some of the reasons for my comment.
• Public tax dollars are now flowing directly into the budgets of houses of worship and other religious organizations in a manner that turns houses of worship into contract employees of the federal government that can spend the government’s money without any worries regarding accountability.
• For the first time since the passage of civil rights legislation, religion is being used as a justification for discrimination in employment practices.
• Congress refuses to defeat once and for all a pernicious piece of legislation that will allow houses of worship to endorse candidates for public office and support their partisan campaigns without losing their tax-exempt status.
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• Historic peace churches, like the Quakers, moderate Muslims concerned about security, and faith-based, anti-war activists are victims of privacy-compromising surveillance spawned by an attitude that government policies carry a moral authority that makes their opponents unpatriotic and dangerous.
• Congressional leaders are playing politics with the constitution through votes on constitutional amendments to define marriage and legislative attempts to control people’s behavior in their bedrooms and hospital rooms and in their children’s school rooms.
• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argues that states have a right to establish a state religion.
• Environmental policies are advanced or opposed as science is challenged or discredited using a particular religion’s beliefs-based arguments.
• Members of the United States have not even challenged recent nominees to the Supreme Court on their affirmation of the appropriateness of religious displays on public land and in civic institutions.
• Policy strategists shut down the lifeblood of democracy—that is civil debate, the art of government, a free exchange of ideas—by polarizing positions and characterizing one moral and the other evil.
• Millions of dollars are being allocated for government agencies to counsel men and women about healthy marriages (using, of course, the standards and hierarchical views of experts like James Dobson).
• The guidelines adopted to correct the abuse of religious liberty and the imposition of religious faith on cadets at the Air Force Academy have now been revised because of pressure from Focus on the Family and other evangelical groups to allow officers and instructors to share their personal faith with cadets even in uniform.
• A major political party has funded revisionist historian David Barton to travel the country calling on people to tear down the wall that was never supposed to have been erected between church and state and to advance the idea of a Christian nation so prominent among framers of the Constitution (his opinion).
Look, I don’t mean to cause you problems in digesting your dinner, but these are some of the real threats to religious liberty that are alive and sick in our nation. Frankly, I do not see an overt attempt to establish a theocracy, yet. The Religious Right is now too savvy in marketing and politically sophisticated to use theocratic language. The National Association of Religious Broadcasters did not want Pat Robertson speaking at their recent convention. Remember, these are the “stealth” people.
Indications of a threat of a theocracy can be found, however, in the use of executive orders and “signing statements” that do not have to receive congressional approval and in rhetoric regularly delivered from the bully pulpits of the White House, the lecterns of the leadership of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the venues of Supreme Court Justices. Again here are some examples.
• On a recent Jefferson Day—how ironic as well as sad—Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that local community conflicts centered around religious issues should be resolved by paying more attention to the majority religious presence in those respective communities—a suggestion offensive to the very substance and spirit of democracy as well as a welcome sign to all who argue for establishment of the religion of the majority.
• Just prior to the last presidential election, during a debate with Jerry Falwell on CNBC Television, Falwell suggested a divine endorsement of the presidency when he told me that [every] Bible-believing Christian must vote for one particular candidate.
• Voices from inside the government speak of foreign policy initiatives shaped by a literalistic reading of Christian apocalyptic literature.
• On this week’s edition of our radio show State of Belief, the fine Muslim scholar Reza Aslan, author of No god but God, describes an international Muslim community that views the war in Iraq as a conflict between Christianity and Islam, and notes how little is being done to prove that view wrong.
• Poll after poll shows that a majority of the people in the nation have no understanding of the meaning of religious freedom much less appreciation for it. Witness the onslaught of the Hang Ten Campaign with its efforts to turn Sacred Scriptures into civil documents or the public outrage over a challenge to the inclusion of the name of God in the pledge of allegiance to the American flag or the complete absence of public outcries challenging the suggestion that the name of God is just a patriotic word and not a matter of religious conviction.
• One a possible candidate for the presidency in 2008, writes that the Constitution never guaranteed freedom from religion only freedom for religion.
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Dear friends, you must form your own conclusions about the power of the Religious Right and the push toward, if not a theocracy, a nation immersed in the theology and world view of one particular religious tradition.
Whatever your conclusion, maybe you are beginning to see why I feel kinship with Doops Momber and share his passion for finding some real Baptists. Every day I work with people who come from over 80 different religious traditions. With respect for all of them and intending no diminution in the importance of any of them, I sincerely believe that real Baptists can make a major contribution for good in the midst of a bad situation. Religious freedom is our tradition and religious freedom should be our vision and passion.
God forgive us for the shortness of our memories! Likely the United States Constitution would contain no prohibition against an establishment of religion had it not been for the hard work of Baptists and other Christian evangelicals finding common ground with Unitarians, secularists and Deists in believing that an establishment of religion would be bad for religion and bad for the nation. Those in the Christian tradition argued for the no-establishment clause, on the basis of, not in spite of, their Christian beliefs. Remember that because of their support for religious freedom, our predecessors in the Baptist family were labeled traitors by people of other faiths in the early days of the colonies and likely would be labeled traitors and heretics by many today who claim the Baptist name. Isaac Backus confessed that he envisioned a Christian nation, but adamantly insisted that such a development could not and should not take place apart from churchstate separation.
Friends, we have hard work to do on this matter and it will be fraught with misunderstanding, false charges and controversy. Both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims must realize that free religion in a free state is an absolute necessity for the maintenance of a freedom that makes room for both as well as for other religions and people with no religion. Let’s be dead honest here. The challenge is to move from inspired Christian scriptures that read to some like the documents of a theocratic movement to an enlightened perspective on how, on the basis of those scriptures, to best be Christian in this nation. We will be misunderstood as we praise the notion of a secular government. But let us be clear, our government was not established to do the work of God, but to do the work of government. It is religious to do the work of politics and government well without ever voicing a religious phrase, more religious, in fact, than constantly using religious language without ever doing the challenging work of guaranteeing liberty and justice for all people in a diverse and pluralistic society. Our great Baptist predecessor, John Leland stated the matter beautifully, “The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever. . . . Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another.”
We need some Baptists—real Baptists for whom freedom is a good word not a bad word, Baptists that recognize freedom not as a threat but as a source of promise, a provision without which there is little authenticity anywhere but especially in the realm of religion!
I am looking for some Baptists who, true to our historic tradition, will not waver in their advocacy for a strict separation between the institutions of religion and government. Baptists well could lead but certainly must participate in, a new broad-based ecumenical and inter-religious coalition to preserve religious liberty. Frankly, the manner in which the Baptist Joint Committee and The Interfaith Alliance work together is a good model for the cooperation that is a necessity. We can do that, and we should do that!
I realize full well that I asking you to do work that is difficult and not without controversy. You will get called names that sting the spirit and numb the will. Though doing the work of religion at its best, maintaining vigilance in defense of freedom and remaining faithful in an earnest pursuit of truth, you will get charged with being antireligious, dangerously liberal, and reckless with truth. So be it!
Please do not allow the critics to weaken your voice, blur your vision, or stifle your activities. Thinking is not a sin. Study is an act of faith. Working toward consensus can be a moral enterprise. Freedom is the state to which God called us. Nothing is inconsequential here.
Near the conclusion of Will Campbell’s book The Glad River, Doops Momber gets baptized. He finally found a real Baptist—not a perfect Baptist but a real Baptist—and he got soaking wet with excitement and joy, obedience and promise. Will Campbell’s novel concludes with Doops letting loose a ferocious shout of joy that went resounding through a forest—the kind of shout that comes from the joy of being blessed for who you are, knowing your identity and staying true to it, sensing your calling and keeping at it until somewhere, sometime, some one along the way blesses you with water, with a hug, or with words.
Over the past few weeks, we have lost some real Baptists—dear friends Foy Valentine and Phil Strickland. As a part of my grieving the loss of these long-time friends who were colleagues in the cause of supporting and defending religious liberty, I have found myself asking, “Who will take their places? Who will pick up this cause with the vision and vigilance that these two leaders brought to it?” Please hear me. I do not say perfunctorily, lightly, or thoughtlessly, friends, I think you are it; you are the people. The issue is ours. The time is now. As someone else has said, we are the leaders for whom we have been waiting. Pray tell, if we do not do this work on religious liberty, who will do it? If not us, who? And, if not now, when?
