Religious Liberty as a Baptist Distinctive
By James Dunn, Wake Forest Divinity School
Visiting Professor of Christianity and Public Policy
Past Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs
Editor`s Note: This address was delivered at the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission Annual Conference held on February 12, 2001, at Tarrytown Baptist Church in Austin, Texas.
- Soul Freedom
- Religious Liberty
- Separation of Church and State
There is an unbroken chain from the historical and theological starting point for Baptists: soul freedom, to religious liberty for all and its necessary corollary, separation of church and state.
See three concentric circles like the movement in water when a pebble hits a pond. The center circle is the point of impact, representing the experience of one person with the Divine, the central event of one`s life, an Act of God`s Grace, the immediate engagement of heaven with earth: soul freedom.
The inevitable ripple, the next circle out represents the certain consequences of a saving faith, the moral, ethical and social result of an individual encounter with God. Loving one`s neighbor as self, doing unto others as one would be done unto, people plural…we call it religious liberty.
The third ring is as logical and theological in sequence. Because human beings are frail and fallible, limited and sinners all, because God has ordained both church and state, because their purposes, constituencies, functions and fundings are different from each other, the separation of church and state follow as night follows day.
Baptists do not base our basic belief in church-state separation on some enlightenment theory or implied, social contract. We lean not merely on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or even on a biblical passage. We do not pretend to depend on some experiential pragmatism, claiming to have discovered that it works. (It does, but our foundation for freedom is firmer.)
We root our soul freedom in the very nature and person of God. We and all three religions of the book affirm the imago Dei, the radical idea that we are somehow "made in the image of God. We know that one major meaning of that belief is that we are able to respond to God-respons-able, responsible and free. We are wired up with a chooser and we live with the consequences of those choices.
F.J. Sheed said, "Being human is itself so vast a thing that the natural inequalities from one of us to the other are in themselves trivial." All made like God-persons and free, indeed.
There is in each of us a God-shaped empty place that can be filled only by the Divine. But it`s more than a piece of a puzzle, a pattern, a cut-and-dried Calvinistic plan. It`s the living energy, the dynamic dimension, the vital voluntary nature, the heart of our humanity that signals always beep-beep- made in God`s Image. That`s the living truth of soul freedom.
At least the idea is worth investigating that each individual has the ability to find answers in the Bible, exercise the centrality of religious liberty, hold to the sacredness of individual conscience in matters of religion and practice the separation of church and state.
Soul Freedom
God refuses to violate one`s moral nature even in order to save him. That base-line belief gets at the heart of soul freedom, it`s gospel-remember the rich young ruler.
Martin Marty in a well-known article. Baptistificate Takes Over (1983), points out that this emphasis is not new. St. Bernard in his Treatise Concerning Grace and Free Will about 128 wrote "Take away free will and there remaineth nothing to be saved….Salvation is given by God alone, and it is given only to the free-will…" As Marty puts it to "make Baptist" whether or not it meant joining a Baptist church "zeroed in on the key issue that modernity posed for religion: choice."
E.Y. Mullins set out (1908) the doctrine of [the] soul`s competency in religion under God as the distinctive historical significance of the Baptists. We call it soul freedom.
Hear the testimonies of the scholars:
Robert Bellah (1997): "What was so important about the Baptists was the absolute centrality of religious freedom of the sacredness of individual conscience in matters of religious beliefs."
H. Wheeler Robinson: "The Biblical significance of the Baptists in the right of private interpretation [of] and obedience to the Scriptures. The significance of the Baptists to the individual is soul freedom….The political significance of the Baptists is separation of church and state."
Fisher Humphreys sums up soul freedom as "the freedom, ability and responsibility of each person to respond to God for herself or himself."
Walter B. Shurden contends for the patent principle if one accepts biblical authority. The appeal of soul freedom to Baptists is anchored in "the nature of God, the nature of humanity and the nature of faith."
Bill J. Leonard echoes "Faith is the free response of persons to the gift of God`s love. Such faith cannot be compelled by church or state."
This doctrine of soul freedom has immediate, unfiltered application to Baptist battles. Harold Bloom, America`s best known literary critic sees "Mullins concept of `soul competence` destroying fundamentalism," because it "sanctions endless interpretive possibilities, the weird metaphor of a `literal` or `inerrant` reading totally vaporizes." Even Karl Barth told Louie Newton, "How I thank God for Mullins. [He] gave the world a mighty phrase-the competency of the soul. One cannot improve on Mullins` definitions of soul freedom: "The capacity to deal directly with God." and "The sinner`s response to the gospel message [as] an act of moral freedom."
Religious Liberty
Religious Liberty, the next circle out must follow soul freedom. It is based on the biblical view of persons. Created in the image of God, a human being is the crowning work of God`s creation (bio-centrists notwithstanding). To deny freedom of conscience to any person is to debase God`s creation. When anyone`s religious freedom is denied, everyone`s religious freedom is endangered.
George W. Truett put the concept in Victorian rhetoric that sounds strange to the ear but rings true to the soul. In his famous 1920 speech on the steps of the United States Capitol he said, "The right to private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity, and for any person or institution to dare to come between the soul and God is blasphemous impertinence and a defamation of the crown rights of the Son of God."
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 recognizes religious liberty as an entitlement of all human beings, a human right whatever their race or nation. We claim it as the basic human right, the primary human right, the ultimate human right. That is so because through the lenses of religious liberty we know ourselves, come to understand and value others and try to figure out the world. George Jellinek argued convincingly that "freedom of conscience may be the oldest Right of Man, at any rate it is the most basic Right of Man (pre-gender free language) because it comprises all ethically conditioned action and guarantees freedom from compulsion, especially from the power of the state." Religious liberty then as the basic human right is universal in its appeal and application.
The late James Ralph Scales of Wake Forest University stressed the universal and inviolable nature of religious liberty as the basis for church-state separation. He wrote in 1976 that religious liberty is "as nearly absolute as any safeguarded by the constitutions or practiced as a natural right."
For Bloom, consequences lie far beyond Baptists or religion or even "political, socioeconomic and anthropological implications" if religious liberty is neglected. That liberty "was also the stance of John Milton and Roger Williams…if that vision abandons the United States forever, then more than our spiritual democracy will yet be threatened."
Robert Torbet also linked religious liberty directly with church-state separation. He saw "an emphasis upon the accessibility of God to all men [and women] and the free responsibility of each individual before God, hence a free church in a free state."
Separation of Church and State
This last of our irreplaceable circles coming off a pebble in a pond or a shock-sending earthquake is in separation of church and state. It is an organic part of core Baptist belief, an appendage which if amputated would bleed dry the Baptist life blood.
Only last Friday the Executive of an American Baptist State Convention told me about a layman who lamented, "Why we did not just quit worrying about Baptist doctrines and be Christians?" She asked "like which doctrine?" and he replied, "like the doctrine of church-state separation."
There are many possible explanations to this sort of misunderstanding of church-state separation. The doctrine has been so distorted, diminished and deprecated that it`s easy to see how one could arrive at that point. Yet, it`s not just a Baptist doctrine, separation of church and state is an indissoluble aspect of our take on the essence of Christian faith.
True, separation of church and state does not define Baptist theology but it is a logical, inextricable inevitable corollary of religious liberty as we know it. It is the plug which if pulled out of our machine, the motor dies. We go no more.
So when anyone says, "Oh, I`m all for religious liberty but I really don`t know about separation of church and state," I`m ready to say "you really don`t know."
Baptist soul freedom allows you to take that view, you can be that way, you have every right to say that but it`s a sign you haven`t thought it out.
I must still offer you more than grudging respect and honor as a creature made in God`s image of inestimable worth. I still must extend to you real freedom, not mere toleration. Beyond that I may even embrace you as a fellow believer, a part of the family of faith, a joint heir with Jesus. This is rightly far more important than any doctrine and since ultimate judgment is God`s alone, we had all better consider and treat all professing others as if they too are Christians. But if you dismiss the separation of church and state as some irrelevant, optional teaching, I can say you are not a Baptist.
To use a T.B. Maston word play, I can say "to the degree that" you can not see the coercive state as separate from the church, "to that degree" you are not a Baptist.
Walter Glick, my major professor at Texas Wesleyan College, a great Methodist layman loved to tell of Farmer Brown`s cow Maggie and how she symbolized claims of Reformers and Baptists to be the true New Testament church.
As the Reformation unfolded after a thousand years of captive Christianity there were those who wanted to see in their credentials a historical, documented chain that linked their beliefs, their spiritual pedigree, even their ordination, link by link, all the way back to Jesus, nay, even John the Baptist. (J. M. Carroll tried that in his Trail of Blood). John the Baptist baptized Jesus and also "so and so," who baptized "so and so jr.," who in turn dunked "so and so II," who then baptized the great grandchild of "so and so," and so on down the line to "so and so the 73rd," who baptized me. The same with ordination!
Farmer Brown lost his cow and found it down the road apiece on Dollar Bill`s place. Dollar Bill said, "Okay we will follow her tracks back to your cow lot . . . just like some theologians looking for tracks all the way back to the River Jordan.
Sure enough the tracks went right down to the creek and disappeared. She had come down the creek. But Brown insisted, that she had all the markings of his Maggie the miracle milkmaker who had misplaced herself. Witnesses prevailed and Brown took Maggie home.
I contend that there is a Baptist identity. There are Baptist spots on our herd and you can tell them from the others.
There`s a Thomas Helwys spot: "I`ll serve the King, I`ll fight for the King. I`m willing to die for the king, but the King is not Lord of the conscience. And so, that very King whose name is in the front of the favorite Baptist Bible, King James, put him to death.
There`s a Roger Williams spot: "To call a nation a `Christian Nation` may make a nation of hypocrites; but it will not make one single true believer."
There`s a John Leland spot: "The fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity has done it more harm than all the persecutions ever did."
There`s a Gardner Taylor spot: "We need church-state separation so that neither will ever hold the other in a bear hug."
And there`s a Truett spot, and a J.M. Dawson spot, and one shaped like Maston and Estep and, yes, Newport.
So, without those spots you may be a wonderful person, maybe a devout and dedicated Christian, far closer to the Jesus model than I may ever be, but frankly, my dear, you are not a Baptist. I personally and passionately believe that Baptist Christians are an identifiable breed. One of our marks is separation of church and state. There is no doubt that there is an unbroken chain in our "baptist bonafides" from soul freedom to religious liberty to the separation of church and state, all part of the package.
Thank God Texas Baptists are not among those so-called, semi, pseudo anti-Baptists who have turned away from our blood-bought heritage.
The proposed White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives would be a turning away from the American way in church-state relations. We have never in our nation`s history had a federal office for funding religious groups. The relatively low-level people in the White House who were charged with making connections for faith groups had no "initiatives" and more important no budget.
This proposal by President Bush would have Madison and Jefferson spinning in their graves: Five billion dollars to be funneled through churches. Mr. Bush insists that it would be done "without changing the nature of those groups." How many organizations in this real world do you know that are not shaped to some degree by their funding? And all this activism is itself set in motion by an idea.
"Charitable-choice" is a whole set of tinkerings with established law that allows government money to flow into "pervasively sectarian" organizations, mostly churches and church agencies. For years tax monies were taken and used for a range of social causes by "religiously affiliated" institutions. Since the first so-called "charitable-choice" amendment was tacked on the Welfare-to-Work laws in 1996 by Senator John Ashcroft, it has been "Katie bar the door." Our tax dollars have been flowing freely into profoundly proselytizing programs.
This scheme is bad for the citizen. We do not know what our tax dollar is buying, there is little, in some cases no accountability on the part of the receiving spender.
It`s bad for the church. He who pays the fiddler calls the tune. Ultimately there will be regulations and guidelines, must be, ought to be. And there will be reporting (pages of questions to answer) and monitoring. How`s that for religious freedom?
So folks all across the political spectrum are beginning to get a little nervous about "charitable-choice." Is it really so loving after all? How long will there be a choice?
At the very least Baptist Christians should lead all concerned citizens in calling for extensive Congressional hearing on "charitable choice." Surely, the Congress can do that. But then, maybe they`d rather be investigating something.
