NEWS FEATURE: Baptists’ Evolving Views on Church-State Issues

c. 2003 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In the beginning, Baptists preached, promoted and, yes, probably prayed for separation of church and state. Indeed, Roger Williams, co-founder of the first Baptist church in the United States, wrote in the 1640s: “An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state confounds the civil and religious, […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In the beginning, Baptists preached, promoted and, yes, probably prayed for separation of church and state.

Indeed, Roger Williams, co-founder of the first Baptist church in the United States, wrote in the 1640s: “An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”


So the ways in which many Southern Baptists _ the nation’s largest Protestant denomination _ have shifted their views regarding separation of church and state in recent years have been surprising to Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va.

“Baptists were the great separationists in our early history, and were the army that supported, really, the voting army that supported disestablishment in Virginia,” Haynes said. “Theologically, going back to Williams and others, Baptists always believed that authentic religion was corrupted when the state got involved in it.

“It’s a long history of theological and political opposition to church and state entanglement that has been reversed, by at least the Southern Baptist Convention,” Haynes said.

But Cecil R. Taylor, dean of the School of Religion at the Southern Baptist-affiliated University of Mobile in Alabama, contends that it’s the current crop of separationists who have changed their views, not Southern Baptists.

“The Baptists that I know favored separation of church and state so long as it meant the state could not interfere in church matters,” Taylor said. “Separation of church and state has come to mean the excision of God from government as we perceive it.”

Today, Taylor said, the United States is engaged in a “dangerous experiment. … We are trying to build a stable, workable society without reference to God. That appears to be the objective of the courts and the people who are filing the suits. They want no recognition of God by the state.

“That is an experiment that has never been attempted before in the history of man. … I’m not sure the experiment’s working out very well.”


Sentiments like Taylor’s may evolve from a belief that Supreme Court decisions and secular culture have destroyed morality, Haynes indicated. “So the response to that is, `We need to return the nation to God.”’

Those who believe such views mark a change in Southern Baptists’ ideology said the group’s thinking changed as the Southern Baptist Convention grew more theologically and socially conservative. During that transformation, which started more than 20 years ago, the nation’s largest Protestant group also gained political clout.

“When the group becomes the majority in some parts of the country and a powerful force politically and religiously, there does seem to be a tendency to forget what it was like to be the beleaguered minority,” Haynes said.

“The Baptists in Utah, they understand why it’s so important for the state not to promote religion, particularly in a public school. They feel the impact of it,” Haynes said. “They understand the importance of the First Amendment because they need it. … They’re aware of what it means to be persecuted.

“That’s why, of course, under the First Amendment, it’s important for citizens to take responsibility to guard the rights of other people,” he said. “We’re all a religious minority somewhere in the country. The only way for that to work without violence, without oppression, is for the state to be neutral.”

DEA END CAMPBELL

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