Still Fed Up with Fundamentalism's View of Religious Freedom

This article is based on the sixth chapter of my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007), which I am currently updating (and slightly revising) for re-publication by the end of the year. Matters related to religious freedom were not prominent during the first decades of fundamentalist Christianity, but such matters became a major concern in the 1980s and the following decades.  

Current Emphases

From the first years of the resurgence of fundamentalism, conservative evangelical Christians have made ongoing efforts to get prayer back into public schools, to procure sanctions for public displays of the Ten Commandments, and to protect the use of “one nation under God” in the pledge of allegiance and “in God we trust” on USAmerican currency.

Those emphases were accompanied by strong condemnation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which conservative evangelicals saw/see mainly as an anti-Christian organization. To combat the activities of the ACLU, in 1990 Pat Robertson founded a new legal action organization, naming it the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).

The headquarters of ACLJ is, as they proudly state, “just steps away from the Supreme Court and Congress.” Since 1992, Jay Sekulow has been the chief counsel of ACLJ. Many of you, though, know his name in another context: in 2017 Sekulow (b. 1956) also became one of DJT’s lawyers.

The ACLJ has been a major force of the Religious Right seeking religious freedom as they understand it. But the freedom they seek is mainly the freedom for Judeo-Christian religion to have predominance in the public square.

Current Ties to the Republican Party

It is evident that the ACLJ and most other Religious Right organizations are closely aligned with the Republican Party. That link is clearly seen with Sekulow being both the chief counsel of the ACLJ and a prominent member of the President’s legal team.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition is another prominent organization of the Christian Right. Incorporated in 2009, founder Ralph Reed (b. 1961) has described it as “a 21st century version of the Christian Coalition.”

Even though it is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization, there is no question of it working
“hand in glove” with the Republican Party.

Since 2010, they have held conferences in Washington, D.C. My 6/5/11 blog article was about the 2011 conference, which I attended as a researcher. Nearly all the Republican 2012 presidential hopefuls spoke, as did DJT, who decided not to run for President that year.

The ties of the Faith and Freedom Coalition as a conservative evangelical Christian organization and the Republican Party could not have been more evident. This link as well as much that was said about the emphases mentioned above, also made evident a very questionable understanding of the principle of the separation of church and state.

Current Rejection of the Separation of Church and State

Although I am still very much a baptist (with a small “b”), Fed Up with Fundamentalism was written when I was still a Baptist, and the sixth chapter is clearly the most Baptistic chapter of the book.

Earlier and more consistently than any other Christian denomination, beginning with Roger Williams, who in 1638 started the first Baptist church in what is now the United States, up until about forty years ago Baptists have been outspoken proponents of the principle of the separation of church and state.

(Click here to read my 2/5/11 article titled “In Praise of Roger Williams.”)

But with the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, that historic position has been largely lost. Consequently, I am fed up with fundamentalism’s view of religious freedom, for it does not endorse that precious freedom for all people equally.

Remembering Isaac Backus

The New England Puritan Isaac Backus was born in 1724 and died 208 years ago today, on November 20, 1806. As an outstanding advocate of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, he is well worth remembering, and honoring, on this anniversary of his death.

Backus was the most influential Baptist in British North America after Roger Williams (1603-83), founder of the first Baptist church in the “new world” in 1638.

He became a Christian as a teenager in 1741. Five years later he became a preacher and at the age of 24 was ordained as a Congregationalist minister. In 1748, however, he was baptized by immersion and became a Baptist.

In 1756, Backus started a Baptist church in Middleborough, Mass., where he served as pastor until his death fifty years later.

Backus joined with others in 1764 to found the first Baptist institution of higher learning in the Colonies, the school now known as Brown University. It was the third college in New England and the first Ivy League school to accept students from all religious affiliations.

As a Baptist pastor, Backus became involved in the lengthy battle for separation of church and state in Massachusetts, opposing the “ecclesiastical tax” that had been imposed upon all citizens of that state to support the Congregational churches.

Even those who opposed the beliefs of those churches were required to pay the tax, and those who refused to do so had their personal property seized. Many people were even imprisoned because of failure to pay the tax, including several members of Backus’s own family.

Backus’s strong advocacy for the freedom of religion is best articulated in his published sermon of 1773, “An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the Oppressions of the Present Day.”

Religious liberty is always a problem for minority groups—such as the Baptists in New England during Backus’s lifetime and religious groups in the U.S. now, such as American Muslims.

Thus, being an advocate of religious liberty today means supporting the freedom of Muslims and all other minority groups. That liberty includes freedom from the heavy-handedness of the religious majority.

Those in the majority usually don’t easily give up their position of privilege. Massachusetts didn’t amend the state constitution to give religious freedom to all people until 1833, some 27 years after Backus’s death.

At present, some religious conservatives, or traditionalists like those in 18^th century Massachusetts, generally don’t like social change when that means giving up their privileged position. Thus, we hear clamor for upholding the religious convictions of the nation’s founders.

Without question, the Massachusetts Bay Colony formed in 1630 was based on Puritan religious convictions. In a sermon even before landing, John Winthrop, the colonists’ spiritual leader, proclaimed a vision of a Christian society that was to be an exceptional “city on the hill.”

Such a society, however, could not tolerate even the dissident Puritan minister Roger Williams, who was banished in 1636. Nor could it tolerate the outstanding, but unusual, Puritan religious leader Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from Boston in 1638.

But it was the freedom of religion and separation of church and state established in Rhode Island by Williams and then bravely backed by Backus over 135 years later that became a part of the U.S. Bill of Rights ratified in 1791.

I am grateful for Baptists like Backus and their emphasis on religious liberty for all.

Let freedom ring for all religious groups in the U.S. today!

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Some of the material in the above article is similar to that found on pp. 167-8 of my book “Fed Up with Fundamentalism” (2007).

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Remembering Stanley Grenz

In doing research for the above article I used Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz’s “Isaac Backus—Puritan and Baptist: His Place in History, His Thought, and Their Implications for Modern Baptist Theology” (1983). This work was originally Grenz’s doctoral dissertation that was written under the supervision of Wolfhart Pannenberg and submitted in 1978 to the University of Munich.

So this article was also written in memory of Grenz (b. 1950) as well as Backus.

In April 2004, mostly through my efforts, the Department of Theology of Seinan Gakuin University hosted Dr. Grenz for special lectures. I found him to be “a prince of a fellow,” and I told him that in a year or two I would like to visit him in Vancouver, Canada, where he lived and taught at Regent College.

It was a shock and a great grief when I learned that Grenz had suddenly passed away in March 2005. He was a fine man and a good scholar; his passing was a great loss to Baptists and the theological world.

Infringement on Religious Freedom: Then and Now

A year ago, my blog posting was about Roger Williams, who arrived in Boston Harbor on Feb. 5, 1631. As you know, Williams became the great champion of religious liberty in the Colonies and influential in freedom of religion eventually being included in the U.S. Constitution.

But 113 years after Williams’s arrival in the “new world,” there still wasn’t religious freedom in the Colonies, at least not in Virginia. On Feb. 4, 1774, 240 years ago today, David Tinsley was arrested and charged with “having assembled and preached to the people at sundry times and places” as a Baptist preacher.

Tinsley ended up serving four and a half months in the Chesterfield County jail. During that time, though, he “preached to the assembled crowds through the grates of the prison” (This Day in Baptist History).

Just last year I learned the particulars about the preachers jailed in the 1770s because they were publicly preaching as Baptists. And I was especially interested in Tinsley, who was one of several so jailed.

My wife, June, was a Tinsley. So we began to do some research and found that David’s grandfather was Thomas S. Tinsley, the first Tinsley to be born in the U.S. (He was born in 1640, two years after his parents had come to Virginia from England.)

And Thomas S. Tinsley is June’s 7^th great grandfather, so David was her first cousin, seven times removed.

Not being able to assemble a crowd and preach to them seems, certainly, to be an infringement on religious liberty. Accordingly, some of the most outspoken advocates of guaranteeing religious liberty were Baptists in Virginia, such as John Leland, a Baptist preacher who worked with (or worked on) James Madison in getting the Bill of Rights added to the U.S. Constitution.

But now, in 2013-14, there are Baptists claiming that they, and other Christians, are suffering from an infringement of their “freedom of religion.”

Just last week the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) told the U.S. Supreme Court, as part of a friend-of-the-court brief, that the Obama administration’s abortion/contraception mandate (their words) violates a federal law protecting the religious freedom of for-profit corporations and their owners.

Russell Moore, president of the ERLC, in a Jan. 28 podcast said, “Our Baptist forefather John Leland wasn’t content to trust politicians with tyranny over the conscience. We are his sons and daughters, and we will carry the banner of soul freedom to the Supreme Court and beyond.”

What a difference! Leland was struggling for the freedom of Baptists in Virginia to preach without being arrested and jailed. But now Baptists like Moore are struggling for the right of employers not to provide insurance to their employees who might use that insurance in ways that they (the employers) do not approve for religious reasons.

Rather than religious freedom for all, it sounds as if these employers (such as Hobby Lobby’s CEO, who is an evangelical Christian but seems not to be a Baptist) are seeking to have tyranny over the conscience of other people. Since they do not believe in the morning after pill, they do not want to provide insurance that will allow their employees to use such measures, even if they can do so in good conscience.

David Tinsley suffered in jail because of preaching the Gospel openly. Hobby Lobby’s CEO and other conservative Christians are now “suffering” because of being required to provide insurance for their employees.

Somehow the “infringement” of the latter’s religious freedom just doesn’t seem quite as great a problem to me.

In Praise of Roger Williams

February 5, 1631. That is the date on which the Lyon, a British ship, “anchored safe amid great and dangerous ice floes in Boston harbor.” On board that ship (which had set sail from Bristol, England, on December 1) were Roger Williams and his wife Mary.

The words quoted in the above paragraph are from the new book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012). In it the author, noted historian John M. Barry, tells the story of one of the most important people in American history.

Roger Williams was probably born in 1603, the year Queen Elizabeth died and James I was crowned King of England. Roger became a well-educated English clergyman, graduating from Cambridge University in 1627. (As a longtime admirer of Williams, when I visited Cambridge for the first time in 2004 I thought, “Wow! This is where Roger Williams walked 375 years ago.”)

Although ordained by the Church of England, Williams became a Puritan and decided to sail with other Puritans to the “new world.” The massive movement of Puritans to New England had begun the year before. In 1630 John Winthrop (c.1587-1649) led a group of colonists to the New World and later that year became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a post he held at four different times for a total of around 13 years.

It was Winthrop who first spoke of the new colony being “a city on a hill” that would shine for all the world to see. He and those Puritans who arrived with him believed that they were chosen and blessed by God, and they sought to build a Christian country.

In his first years in New England, Williams served as a minister in Salem and Plymouth, but his disapproval of the Puritan church in Massachusetts led to his banishment from the colony. Williams’s criticism was twofold: he did not think that the civil government had the right to force people to hold prescribed religious beliefs. Further, he thought it was not right for the Englishmen to take lands from the Native Americans without compensating them.

Consequently, in order to escape deportation Williams fled into the wilderness in January 1636, and later that year he (and others who had come to join him) established the settlement that he named Providence, which is now the capital of Rhode Island. (Interestingly, Barry, the author of the book mentioned above, was born in Providence in 1947.) Two years later Williams founded the first Baptist church in the New World.

Several years later, in 1644 Williams wrote his most important book. It was published under the less than inspiring title The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, For Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace. Basically, this treatise calls for true freedom of religion and absolute separation of church and state.

In his new book A Thicker Jesus (2012), the noted Baptist ethicist Glen Stassen points out that in The Bloudy Tenent, Williams contends that the bloodshed of war “is largely caused by religious persecution. Relief from this bloodshed and from the hypocrisy of people who merely pretend to embrace a faith because they fear persecution, will result from establishing religious liberty” (p. 199). That may have been more nearly true in the 17^th century than now, but it is still a point worth considering. 

All of us who believe in, and appreciate having, religious freedom (or freedom from religion) should be continually grateful to Roger Williams (d. 1683) and his significant positive impact upon “the American soul.” 

Wide Open Spaces?

Keith's question (see the end of the previous posting) is worth considering: "is it imaginable that North America should have remained lightly populated by native Americans while much of the rest of the world was overwhelmed?" What about the wide open spaces of this country in 1500?

My friend and fellow church member Chris Thompson, an ardent advocate of Native American rights and founder of Project Warm Embrace, posted passionate comments in response to what I wrote and Keith's comments. He questioned the accuracy of "lightly populated." According to the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians, though, the population in 1500 of what became North America was under two million. Some think it was probably much larger; one Native American advocate estimates it around six million.

Even with the larger number, that was still a very small population for an area that now supports more than three hundred million people. But how many people could be supported if everyone still lived according to the lifestyle of the Native Americans? (I am indebted to Keith for causing me to think about this several years ago.)

Perhaps it was legitimate for Europeans to come to the wide open spaces of the New World. (Do some people have the "ownership" of land in perpetuity just because of where they were born?) Perhaps it was necessary for the survival of the human race (and I don't mean just Europeans) for new lands to be found and developed for swelling populations. (Most migrations, as well as perhaps most wars, have been due primarily to population pressures.)

So while I cannot completely censure the migration of Europeans to what became North America, I do deplore the villainous treatment of the native people here. The Europeans may have had the right to come and even to settle in these wide open spaces, but they did not have the right to steal the land from the people living on it. And certainly they did not have the right to kill at will the people who lived here.

There were some, thankfully, who did seek to deal fairly and kindly with the Native Americas. One such person is Roger Williams (1603-83), one of my heroes. Although a pastor, he was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, partly because of his insistence that the "Indians" should be compensated for their land. English colonization, Williams argued, was "a sin of unjust usurpation upon others' possessions." Christian kings somehow believed that they were invested with the right, by virtue of their Christianity, "to take and give away the Lands and Countries of other men." Williams thought that was nonsense, absurdity! (See Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty [2001], p. 17.)

Treatment of the Native Americans in the manner of Roger Williams is the way things might have played out in a more nearly perfect world.