There are a pair of remarkable op-ed columns in today’s Charlotte Observer about Baptists, presumably in reference to the N.C. pastor who put up the sign saying the Koran should be flushed (follow-up story).
The first, Baptists, remember who you are, by Paul Harral for Knight Ridder, urges American Baptists to remember “that they were pioneers — champions of not only religious freedom but a separation between church and state,” “the goal of a new effort involving two Baptist-based media organizations — Associated Baptist Press and the journal Baptists Today — and the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty.”
Greg Warner, the executive editor of Associated Baptist Press, agrees, saying that “many congregations have failed to teach a healthy understanding of human freedom, which was such an integral part of our heritage as Christians in America.” Bitter divisions over what he called “no-win social issues” stymie substantive conversation among Baptists, “even on the issue of our constitutional freedoms.”
“We want to help churches rediscover a healthy understanding of American freedom — particularly religious freedom and freedom of the press — that doesn’t force our churches into false choices between uncritical patriotism and hypercritical cynicism” …
More below:
Harral continues:
Not only is dissent discouraged in Southern Baptist Convention publications, but the “historic Baptist passion for religious liberty for all persons is not being heard from SBC leadership,” Pierce says.
(Disclosure: My wife, Harriet Harral, is on the board of ABP and the coordinating council of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I attended a Washington conference on the First Freedoms Project with her.)
Part of the project’s thrust is to remind Baptists of who they are — and who they were, and why.
Advocates for freedom
Early Baptists in the United States were key players in the effort to include freedom of religion in the Constitution, culminating in what became the First Amendment.As a Baptist myself, I’ve always been proud of that heritage. But I fear that many of my brothers and sisters neither know about nor respect it.
“Many Baptists have lost touch because, as I think someone said at the conference, we are now `powerful’ and no longer `persecuted’ — at least in this country,” Walker said. “Many think we can run the show through the political process and no longer need the `counter-majoritarian’ protections afforded in the First Amendment.” …
The companion piece, Baptist Pioneers in America, is a marvelous list of the sacrifices by early members of the Baptist church. Here’s a sampling:
JOHN CLARKE (1609-1676) — Clarke started a town at Newport, R.I., and by 1644 had founded a Baptist church there. In the summer of 1651, Clarke, John Crandall and Obadiah Holmes — all members of the Baptist church at Newport — were arrested and imprisoned for holding an unauthorized worship service in the home of a blind Baptist named William Witter, who lived at Lynn, Mass., near Boston. They were sentenced to be fined or whipped. Fines for Clarke and Crandall were paid by friends. Holmes refused to let friends pay his fine and was publicly whipped on the streets of Boston on Sept. 6, 1651.
HENRY DUNSTER (1612-1659) — In 1653, Dunster, the first president of Harvard University, refused to have his fourth child baptized as an infant and proclaimed that only believers should be baptized. He was forced to resign from his position and was banished from Cambridge, Mass.
[……………………]
ESTHER WHITE — An elderly widow who lived in Raynham and belonged to the Baptist church in Middleborough, Mass., White refused to pay a tax to support the minister of the established Congregational church in Raynham on the grounds that she was a dissenter from that church and had become a Baptist. The town of Raynham put her in jail. She remained there for 13 months.
SOURCE: Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists
