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FORT WORTH?The historic Baptist idea of religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment is under attack from the American judiciary, Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Sept. 9.
Land was the keynote speaker at the seminary’s first annual Baptist Distinctives Conference, a two-day event that this year examined “The First Freedom” of religious liberty.
“The greatest threat to religious freedom in America are secular fundamentalists who want to ghetto-ize religious faith and make the wall of separation between church and state a prison wall keeping religious voices out of political discourse,” Land said.
More than 300 people, including registered conference participants, seminary students, faculty and staff were in attendance as Land presented his paper titled, “The Role of Religious Liberty in the Founding and Development of America.” Land told the conferees that America has been, is and always will be a “very religious” country.
“This drives post-modernists crazy because they think that as a country evolves, religious dedication should fade,” Land said. “Religious liberty is the unique Baptist contribution to the Reformation.”
Land traced the history of Anabaptists and Baptists to explain how they came to cherish?and even die for?the idea that government should not interfere with the people’s right to believe, or not believe, and practice, or not practice, whatever faith they chose.
He explained that as successful as the Protestant Reformation was in taking “church” back to the “primitive” New Testament model, magisterial reformers such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin were never “quite able to separate church from state.”
On the other hand, “Baptists understood that the ‘parish church’ concept was not biblical,” Land said. “This became the cause of Baptists.”
From Oliver Cromwell and the English Interregnum, to Baptists in the 1660s fleeing to Colonial America to escape religious persecution, to the stand Baptist pastors took to make sure the First Amendment was incorporated into the new U.S. Constitution in 1791, Land demonstrated that “current controversies” in America about the separation of church and state are nothing new.
“We have never separated religion from politics in America,” Land said. “In 1854, 3,000 New England clergymen signed a petition to the United States Senate demanding an immediate end to the practice of chattel slavery and denouncing the Missouri Compromise. ? Pro-slavery senators urged the Senate to ignore the petition on the grounds of separation of church and state. But the preachers refused to shut up. They understood ? that most Americans want to talk about God (in political discourse).”
Land said that Baptists have always believed that the state must be separated from the church largely because the state always “pollutes and corrupts the church.” Thomas Jefferson affirmed that idea in 1802 when he wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association saying 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.”
But Land said that the Supreme Court’s modern application of that doctrine “is twisted” because Jefferson meant for the First Amendment to protect the church from the state, but not vice versa. “The restrictions of the First Amendment are on the government,” Land said. “They are not on people of faith.”
Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson addressed the question of whether the concept of religious liberty is compatible with the doctrine of the exclusivity of salvation in Jesus Christ. Patterson drew on personal experiences to explain that this question often arises from people of faith who are not believers in Jesus Christ. They often think that Christians want to restrict freedom of religion simply because Christians understand unbelievers are “going to hell” unless they believe in Jesus Christ.
Patterson turned to “the biblical witness” and “the historical witness” to refute that misunderstanding. He explained that belief in the exclusivity of Jesus Christ for salvation and a vigorous defense of religious freedom are not mutually exclusive.
“Jesus Christ does not favor coercion,” Patterson concluded as he reviewed passages on the life and teachings of Jesus from the Gospels of Matthew and John.
Patterson acknowledged that an objection to that conclusion might arise based on the account of the Jesus driving out the money-changers from the Temple in Matt
