Freedom Fighters?
Christianity Today bills itself as a magazine of "evangelical conviction." As could be expected, in their eyes, the "Freedom Fighters" are the Southern Baptists and other Right-wing evangelicals who are being deputized by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Department of Justice's First Freedom Project. There was a day when Southern Baptists would have been strong allies in the struggle to preserve liberty of conscience for all persons. Those days are over. Be suspicious when Christian Nationalists and Dominionists tell you that America is "a nation of tolerance." There was a time when Baptists objected to mere tolerance for the faiths of others. On May 16, 1920 George W. Truett, then pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX, stood on the East steps to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. and spoke these words to 15,000 Baptists:
Baptists have one consistent record concerning liberty throughout all their long and eventful history. They have never been a party to oppression of conscience. They have forever been the unwavering champions of liberty, both religious and civil. Their contention now, is, and has been, and, please God, must ever be, that it is the natural and fundamental and indefeasible right of every human being to worship God or not, according to the dictates of his conscience, and, as long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others, he is to be held accountable alone to God for all religious beliefs and practices. Our contention is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty. There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle. Liberty is a gift from God. It is the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the perogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship, or to pay taxes for the support of a religious organization to which they do not believe. God wants free worshipers and no other kind. In 1920, all Baptists agreed with Truett. Today's Southern Baptists are the heirs of Truett's successor at First Baptist Dallas. In the 1980's, W.A. Criswell informed a CBS News crew that, "Separation of church and state is the figment of some infidel's imagination." The Southern Baptists who continue to honor the Baptist legacy of church-state separation left the SBC in the early 1990's when Southern Baptists defunded the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
Representatives of all the Baptist Conventions in North America who genuinely honor the Baptist legacy in regard to religious liberty will be converging at a meeting called by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to form a New Baptist Covenant. That meeting will be in Atlanta, GA from January 30 to Feb. 1, 2008. Encourage all your Baptist friends to go to that meeting.
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