Passing the Torch for Church-State Separation
by Bruce Prescott

Many historians believe that advocating the separation of church and state is the brightest light that Baptists have shed upon the advance of civilization. Baptists were certainly among the very first to carry the torch for religious liberty. Among them was Balthasar Hubmaier, a German Anabaptist. In 1525 he wrote one of the first pamphlets on religious liberty. He titled it, Concerning Heretics and Those who Burn Them. In it he argued that even atheists should be given religious liberty. Hubmaier wrote, “No one may injure the atheist who wishes nothing for himself other than to forsake the gospel.” That was a truly radical position to take nearly five hundred years ago. It was more than even John Locke thought permissible more than 160 years later. For good reason, the Baptist wing of the reformation was labeled the “radical” reformation. Unfortunately, radical reformers generally had short life spans. Hubmaier only survived for three more years before being burned at the stake. His dying words were, “Truth is immortal.”

From Hubmaier the torch of religious liberty passed to Thomas Helwys. Helwys founded the first Baptist church in England. Around 1610 he wrote a book called A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. He addressed his book to King James I — the one who gave us the KJV Bible. Helwys boldly told this king that he was a “mortal man and not God, therefore had no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” He argued for complete religious freedom saying, “Men’s religion to God is between God and themselves; the king shall not answer for it, neither may the king judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.” Helwys was also too radical for his age. King James had him arrested. He died in prison about five years later.

From Helwys the torch of religious liberty passed to Roger Williams. Roger Williams founded both the first Baptist church Passing the Torch for Church-State Separation by Bruce Prescott in America and the colony of Rhode Island. Rhode Island’s charter, granted in 1636, made it the first colony in the new world to guarantee religious liberty for every citizen. Williams founded the colony after he was banished — without provisions, in the dead of winter — from the Massachusetts Bay colony. He was banished for informing the magistrates that the government had no right to require uniformity of faith and worship. Fortunately, native American Indians showed more civility than the early Bostonians. They kept Williams from starving and freezing. If they hadn’t, the world would have been deprived of another classic writing on religious liberty, William’s Bloody Tenent of Persecution. In it he wrote, “True civility and Christianity may both flourish in a state or kingdom, notwithstanding the permission of diverse and contrary consciences, either Jew or Gentile.”

Williams was but the first Baptist to be persecuted for his faith in America. In 1651 John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes and John Crandall were arrested for conducting a worship service in a home on the outskirts of Boston. Clarke and Crandall were fined. Holmes was given thirty hard lashes with a three-pronged whip.

On the eve of the revolutionary war, several Baptist preachers were arrested in Virginia for “preaching the gospel contrary to law.” One of them, James Ireland, faced three attempts on his life while he was in jail. Attempts were made to kill him with explosives and to suffocate him with noxious fumes. When that didn’t work, a physician and his jailer collaborated to poison him. Not surprisingly, they destroyed Ireland’s health, but not his independent spirit.

With a history of open dissent like this, it should come as no surprise to find that Baptists eagerly enlisted in the war for independence and stood at the forefront of the subsequent struggle for civil liberties. For them, the battles were one and the same. That is why Baptists refused to ratify the Constitution until a Bill of Rights was added to guarantee that church and state would be separate. In fact, John Leland and Virginia toBaptists exerted considerable pressure on James Madison to assure that an amendment guaranteeing religious liberty for all Americans would be added to the Constitution. After the First Amendment was adopted, Leland rejoiced that the Constitution made it possible for “a Pagan, Turk, Jew or Christian” to be eligible to serve in any post of the government.

In 1802, when he wrote to Baptists in Danbury Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson knew well that he would have a sympathetic audience for his succinct summarization of the intention of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between church and state.” Whether Jefferson knew it or not, many Baptists knew Roger Williams had used the same metaphor to advocate for a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

The ongoing commitment to separation of church and state among Baptists was so strong and sustained that in May of 1920, when Dallas pastor George W. Truett spoke to 15,000 Baptists from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, he could truthfully say:

“Religious Liberty is the nursing mother of all liberty. Without it all other forms of liberty must soon wither and die. The Baptists grasped this conception of liberty in its full-orbed glory, from the very beginning. Their contention has been, is now, and must ever be, that it is the God-given and indefeasible right of every human being, to worship God or not, according to the dictates of his conscience; and, as long as he does not infringe on the rights of others, he is to be held accountable to God alone, for all his religious beliefs and practices.

Truett’s characterization of the Baptist commitment to religious liberty held true until thirty years ago when W.A. Criswell, the man who succeeded Truett in the pulpit at First Baptist Dallas, began to declare that separation of church and state was “a figment of some infidel’s imagination.” Since that time the nation’s largest Baptist organization, the Southern Baptist Convention, has been taken over by Fundamentalists who, along with others in the political and religious right, are determined to: 1) revoke the First Amendment by reinterpreting it, 2) utilize the Judeo-Christian religion to define and unify culture, and 3) establish the supremacy of biblical law within this nation.

The impulse and goals of the “New” SBC and of the “Religious Right” are diametrically opposed to the original impulse and goals of the historic Baptist faith and vision. That so many Baptists are caught up in the Religious Right, and leading it, is an indication that there is a crisis of faith within the Baptist community — and within the broader evangelical community that lays claim to being “born again” Christians. The crisis of faith is rooted in a loss of faith. The faith that has been lost is faith that the gospel has sufficient power to effect meaningful transformations.

Baptists claim to be “born again” Christians. No one is born a Baptist. We are the ones who believe that each person must come to faith personally by individual conviction and commitment. Baptists used to believe that the gospel had power to win hearts and change lives. We used to believe that a free and open hearing for the gospel was all that was needed to effect lasting personal and social transformation. That is why religious liberty was so important to Baptists. For historic Baptists, real faith could never be produced by compulsion or coercion. For traditional Baptists, real faith could never be passed down like an heirloom from one generation to the next. For us, real faith must be accepted freely by individual commitment and conviction.

The “New” Southern Baptists and the “Religious Right” are giving up on what the apostle Paul called, “the foolishness of preaching” that would transform society by changing individual lives. Jerry Falwell once critiqued this historic Baptist understanding of social and spiritual transformation saying, “That’s a correct premise. In reality, it doesn’t work out that way.” In his eyes and in the eyes of the leaders of the “New” SBC and of many in the “Religious Right,” the way social transformations really “work out” is by elections, legislation, adjudication, and by a very doctrinaire “home school” education. They intend to make the United States a Christian nation by political action and legislation. Politics is their main mission field. Getting “values voters” to the polls has become the modern equivalent of fielding armies for crusades to reclaim the holy land. Only now the land being claimed is American.

Should the “New” SBC and the “Re-ligious Right” achieve their goals there will not be a happy ending for either the church, the state, or the American people. Already, the U.S. government is privileging a majoritarian faith and subsidizing it with tax dollars for faith-based initiatives. The integrity of some churches is clearly being compromised. Americans of minority faith increasingly perceive that their own government is treating them as second class citizens. Americans across the religious and political spectrums are complaining about the erosion of even the most basic of human rights.

I hope that this information does more than alarm you. I hope it motivates you to do something. Now, more than any time since the founding of our country, it is imperative for men and women of genuine Baptist conviction to renew their commitment to the full and equal right to religious liberty for all Americans. A new generation needs to take up the torch of religious liberty for all. The best place for Baptists to get started is with the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty. Support their work. Sign up for their newsletter. Get involved in their activist network. Take up the torch for religious liberty and pass it on to another generation.

February 2007