Real Baptists Respect Separation of Church and State

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Real Baptists Respect Separation of Church and State
By Randall Balmer

I never thought I would hear myself saying this, but America needs more Baptists. Real Baptists.

This point was brought resoundingly and hilariously to life for me when my mentor from college sent me a link to a recent meeting of the Okaloosa County School Board in Florida. As nearly as I can determine, some members of the community sought to open the board meetings with prayer. The school board attorney counseled against it, citing a small technicality called the First Amendment to the Constitution and its proscription against religious establishment. Undeterred, the pious Christians of Okaloosa County decided that public prayer could be offered before the school board meeting was gaveled to order.

The stage was set. One citizen opened this revival/board meeting by quoting verses of scripture: Matthew 6:24 (no one can serve two masters), Galatians 2:20 (crucified with Christ), Matthew 22:37 (love God with all your heart, soul and mind), Ephesians 4:27 (give no opportunity to the devil), Matthew 4:10 (worship the Lord your God). Had the reader quoted Matthew 6:6 – “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” — the ensuing donnybrook might have been averted.

After the scripture recitations, the man turned the meeting over to several pastors to lead the prayers (Apparently religion is a tag-team sport in Okaloosa County.), who were greeted with applause. As the first pastor started praying, “Father God, we just come before you. . . .” a middle-aged man began his prayer: “Mother, Father God of all peoples, we come today in our humble way to shape a small part of your creation.” He proceeded to invoke every deity imaginable, from Yahweh and Dionysus and Isis to Krishna, Ekankar and Buddha. “May we be imbued by the wisdom of all gods,” he continued.

The good Christian folks of Okaloosa County were not amused. If there was to be prayer in advance of the school board meeting, it would be Christian prayer, dammit.

After their initial shock at this interloper’s effrontery, the good citizens of Okaloosa County tried to shout him down, offering their prayers more loudly and insistently, arms raised. Some were speaking in tongues. Soon the school board meeting sounded like a cacophony, each voice seeking to drown out the others.

The lone dissenter persisted, at one point sitting in the lotus position in an apparent attempt to meditate. He invited someone nearby to join him, but the citizens of Okaloosa County by then had segued into congregational singing: Amazing Grace, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.

Mayhem! A video clip closes with one of the citizens shouting over and over, “In the name of Jesus! In the name of Jesus!” He tried to perform an exorcism on the poor, misguided soul who dared to offer prayers to a deity other than one approved by the majority. “We cast you out in Jesus’ name,” the exorcist shouted. It wasn’t clear if he was casting out the demon or the interloper.

What does all this have to do with Baptists? Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist tradition in America, was a Puritan minister in Salem, having arrived in Massachusetts in 1631. Very quickly, however, Williams ran afoul of the Puritan authorities because of his suspicions of too close an association between church and state, religion and politics. The Puritans convicted Williams of “diverse and dangerous new opinions” and expelled him from the colony. He left, and eventually founded Rhode Island.

In 1644, Williams wrote that the “garden of the church” should be separated from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Thomas Jefferson repeated those metaphors in his famous 1802 letter to a group of Baptists in Connecticut as a way of explaining the establishment clause of the First Amendment. “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people,” the president assured the Danbury Baptists, “which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Clearly, Jefferson wanted to protect the workings of the new nation from religious factionalism; but Williams’ original use of the metaphor had a different valence, one that generally goes unnoticed. Williams sought to protect the “garden” of the church from the “wilderness” of the world. And here it’s important to remember that Williams and his contemporaries were not members of the Sierra Club — that is, they didn’t share our post-Thoreauian romance with wilderness. For them, wilderness was darkness, a place of danger where evil lurked. So when Williams sought to protect the garden of the church from too close an association with the wilderness of the world, he was anxious about the integrity of the faith, lest it be compromised by cozying up to the state. Williams worried that the faith would be trivialized and fetishized when conflated with the state.

Williams acted on his principles when he left Massachusetts. The colony that became Rhode Island would be a place of religious toleration, where liberty of conscience and the rights of minorities would be respected. Because Baptists were once a minority themselves, they eschewed majoritarianism, the notion that whatever faith or ideology claims the allegiance of a majority should prevail.

All of these — liberty of conscience, separation of church and state, respect for the rights of minorities — were bedrock Baptist principles, jealously guarded by generations of Baptists — until 1979. With the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in June 1979, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States abandoned its historic role as watchman on the wall of separation between church and state. The denomination’s new leaders, adopting a majoritarian ethic, began to silence dissenting voices — on doctrinal matters, especially the ordination of women — but on political issues as well. Working hand-in-hand with the newly emergent Religious Right, these folks who called themselves Baptists began to level the wall of separation between church and state, calling for state support of religious schools, the enactment of legislation narrowly informed by religious interests and the display of religious symbols in public spaces.

In one of the more famous examples, Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and a putative Baptist, installed a 2.5-ton granite monument emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the judicial building in Montgomery. He steadfastly refused any other religious representations in that space; he wanted only the Ten Commandments.

I suspect that many of the citizens attending the school board melee in Okaloosa County would call themselves Baptists; they live in a region of the country where, as Bill Moyers once remarked, there are more Baptists than people. But they are not real Baptists. A real Baptist, true to her convictions, honors and defends the separation of church and state. A real Baptist abhors majoritarianism and upholds liberty of conscience. A real Baptist, following Roger Williams, recognizes that when faith and politics are conflated, it is the faith that suffers. It becomes trivialized and fetishized.

Let me provide an example. As it happens, I was one of the expert witnesses in the so-called Ten Commandments case. My testimony was that the First Amendment and the separation of church and state was the best thing that ever happened to religion in the U.S. The state has (for the most part, at least) stayed out of religious matters, thereby allowing religion to flourish. Any attempt to blur the line of separation diminishes the integrity of the faith.

Judge Myron Thompson ruled — correctly — that “Roy’s Rock” violated the First Amendment and must be removed. As the workers were preparing to relocate the monument, one of the protesters screamed, “Get your hands off my God!”

Unless I miss my guess, one of the Commandments etched into the side of that monument said something about graven images. And that was precisely Roger Williams’ point about protecting the faith from trivialization by too close an association with politics and the state. And I suspect Williams would also have something to say to those believers screeching their piety at a school board meeting in Florida.

America needs more Baptists.

Randall Balmer is chair of the Religion Department and director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. This essay first appeared in the Valley News newspaper on

Sunday, November 1, 2015 and is used with permission of the author.