The Musings of a Small Town Mayor: My faith
By Bill Blackburn
The fact that I am a Christian and a Baptist minister has been reflected in my recent book, The Musings of a Small Town Mayor. My Christian faith is at the heart of who I am.
However, I also believe, given my Baptist heritage, in the separation of church and state. Not absolute separation, nevertheless separation. And a corollary of that is religious liberty which is at the heart of the Baptist faith and history.
The founders of this nation did not establish one church nor denomination. There was considerable diversity among the founding fathers in regard to faith, but they knew well the destructive religious wars of Europe and at times the undue interference of church hierarchies. They believed in the place of faith, but they wanted to construct a constitution that kept any religious group from controlling the affairs of the country.
So, though I assumed some were concerned about having a Kerrville minister who was a Baptist pastor as mayor, I would never have told citizens to vote for me because I thought I was God’s chosen for mayor, and I would never tell the city council to vote for something because I had prayed and God told me how to vote and therefore they should follow my lead.
I would never want to use my faith to gain advantage nor to intimidate others.
I have enjoyed thinking about Benjamin Disraeli, who was twice elected Prime Minister of Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century. Disraeli said that his very pious adversary, William Gladstone, another Prime Minister, always had an ace up his sleeve. And Disraeli said Gladstone would claim that the good Lord had put that ace in his sleeve! I did not have as mayor of Kerrville an ace up my sleeve, and if I had, I would not have claimed the Lord put it there.
My faith affected everything I did as mayor because that position is public service. I did believe that I was serving God and the citizens as mayor. On this I disagree with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan who said in a “The Future of Democracy” conference broadcast on C-Span 2 September 26, 2023: “Being Jewish is super important to my life, but I hope that being Jewish is of no importance to my judgment.”
To me that is sad. When you look at the ways the Jewish faith has shaped this nation and its laws including the legal texts and especially the influence of what Christians call “The Old Testament,” The Tanakh, I would hope Kagan’s faith would influence her judgment on the Supreme Court. Kagan also made a distinction between her personal morality due to her faith and the morality that influences her judgement as a Supreme Court judge. I can understand that, but as an observant Jew, I would expect her faith would be reflected in her judgments on the bench. I believe your decisions in public can be informed by your religious faith without being sectarian.
My ethical commitments are strong and obviously influenced my voting and leadership. I well might speak from my sense of right and wrong, but what I said was spoken in the court of public opinion and would be open to challenge.
As I have indicated earlier, I prayed for discernment, prayed for strength, prayed for patience and restraint, and most of all prayed for what was good for all the citizens of Kerrville.
My commitment to the biblical understanding that all persons are “created in God’s image” was reflected in respect for all those coming before us as the city council and for my fellow council members.
And, yes, I did regularly pray what is called The Lord’s Prayer which asks that the Lord’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” And, I was often reminded of the words of Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961) the second Secretary-General of the United Nations: “In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”
Here is a quote from Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), associate justice of the Supreme Court:
As stated earlier, very important to Baptists is religious liberty. People should be free to worship and practice their faith, but likewise they should have the freedom of unbelief. Coerced faith is not faith.
In my almost 40 years in Kerrville, I have spoken out and written letters to the editor in defense of groups of our citizens under attack usually by persons who professed to be Christians. I have stood up on behalf of the local Jewish community, Muslims, Mormons, and persons of no faith.
Karl Menninger, the noted psychiatrist, wrote a book entitled Whatever Became of Sin? He maintained that with all the maladies we face, sin, though it carries a lot of weight as a word, should be factored in plus the implied accountability.
How could sin be considered in governance?
From whatever faith stance of the founding fathers, I believe they were very conscious of sin as the Constitution was constructed. They had the history of power abused and distorted in Europe and elsewhere, the hazards of the concentration of authority, and mankind’s bent toward selfishness and gluttony, domination, power and control, arrogance, and favoritism. I believe the separation of powers in our constitution is clearly based on, yes, hard experience, but also a protection from the vagaries of sin.
Michael Novak, Catholic layman, author of many books, and U.S. Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, makes this point:
The founders ransacked dusty libraries to discover what went wrong in Constantinople, what went wrong in Venice, and what wrong in London in order to invent workable remedies. But this same insight may also be derived from a classical Judeo-Christian conviction, the doctrine of sin. (James Madison on Relilgious Liberty, Robert S. Alley, ed., p. 301.)
The three branches of government proposed by founder James Madison – executive, legislative, judicial – was in part out of the fear of all three branches over-reaching their power. (Federalist Number 47 and 48) As Madison stated,
The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. (Federalist 47)
While the text of the Constitution does not expressly refer to the doctrine of the separation of powers, the checks and balances were protection against the kind of abuse seen in the British monarchy. By the way, on this matter and others, Madison was influenced by the thought of the French theorist Montesquieu.
To my point, the separation of powers at the federal level or the city level is a guardrail against the sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.
So, as I pointed out earlier, the city council serves the legislative function, the city manager and staff the executive function, and appeals are dealt with in the courts.
Finally, this from what be an ancestor of mine, “Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.” (John Morley (1838-1923), First Viscount of Blackburn, a British statesman, writer, and newspaper editor)
— Bill Blackburn is a longtime friend of Christian Ethics Today. He is a graduate of Baylor University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was on the staff of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission. This essay is from his recent book, Musings of a Small Town Mayor, about his time in Kerrville, Texas as pastor, then two-term mayor of the town.
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