What Does Baptist Dissent Look Like, and Why Does it Matter?

PART ONE: VOTING RIGHTS

During the 1950s and 1960s, African American Baptists, including Martin Luther King Jr., led the way in securing civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities. But in recent years their Civil Rights-era victories have come under attack from white Republican politicians dismissive of continued government efforts to ensure racial equality.

In June 2013 by a 5-4 margin the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In essence, the ruling invalidated the requirement that certain states with a long history of racial discrimination receive federal approval prior to changing voting laws, rules, requirements and procedures, including restrictive Voter ID laws, shuttering or moving polling places, and redrawing electoral districts. “Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in defense of the changes. Citing a desire to reduce “voter fraud,” many Republican-led states quickly set about enacting voter restrictions that disproportionately affected African Americans and other minority populations.

Civil Rights advocates cried foul, accurately noting that voter fraud is extremely rare and condemning Republican voting restrictions as blatant efforts to disenfranchise minorities.

Indeed, following the 2013 Supreme Court decision a number of Republican-led states soon passed laws making voting more difficult for certain citizens, particularly African Americans. The restrictive legislative acts included stringent Voter ID laws, systematic purging of black voters from voting rolls, the eradication of same-day voter registration, and the shortening of early voting opportunities.

Baptists have been, and remain, divided over voting restrictions. White evangelical Baptists have generally sided with state Republican parties in restricting minority voting access, or remained silent on the issue. Minority Baptists in general, especially African American Baptists, are opposed to the measures. Many have resorted to protests, legal efforts, or both methodologies in opposing voting restrictions and upholding voting rights previously obtained in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In North Carolina, Baptist dissenters have spoken loudly and acted decisively.

Led by a Republican governor, Pat McCrory, and legislature, North Carolina politicians in the weeks following the U.S. Supreme Court’s anti-minority decision signed into law numerous voter-suppression measures that included restrictive ID requirements, voter registration suppression, and the end of Sunday voting. The same day of North Carolina’s actions, both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, citing violation of the 14th and 15th amendments, filed suit against the state. Other lawsuits quickly followed.

Long accustomed to legislative racial discrimination, African American Baptists took up the fight to protect the voting rights of minorities. Many routinely protested, through the Moral Monday movement, the unjust actions of North Carolina’s General Assembly. In addition, four Baptist congregations and a number of individuals joined the plaintiffs in NAACP vs. McCrory, a lawsuit against the state’s discriminatory voting legislation.

The plaintiff congregations, like many other African American Baptist congregations, commonly coordinate efforts to facilitate voting by transporting members to polls during early voting Sundays prior to election days. Among other restrictive measures, the actions enacted by the North Carolina legislature curtailed this traditional African American practice known as “Souls to Polls.”

On the other side of the legal battle, several white Baptists, including U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, sided with McCrory, as did a number of other Republican-led states with high populations of white Baptists.

Three years of legal battles followed. Finally, in July 2016 a federal appeals court unanimously sided with the plaintiffs in NAACP vs. McCrory. Prior to the enactment of the voting laws in question, the appeals court noted that the North Carolina “legislature requested and received racial data as to usage of the practices changed by the proposed law,” including data pertaining to the patterns of black voting. Upon  obtaining the data, state Republicans enacted legislation that “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The following month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.

Minority, dissenting Baptists played a crucial role in defeating the discriminatory legislation. Their success, demonstrating that Baptist dissent yet matters, helps ensure the exercise of equal citizenship rights for all racial and ethnic minorities.

PART TWO: WASHINGTON, D.C.-BASED ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

On May 16, 1920 Southern Baptists arrived in force in Washington, D.C.

As many as 15,000 people assembled around the east steps of the nation’s Capitol that afternoon. Ordinary Baptists from around the nation mingled with Cabinet members, Senators, Congressmen, foreign ambassadors and other dignitaries of various religious persuasions to hear George W. Truett, the renowned pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas deliver an address entitled “Baptists and Religious Liberty.”

Truett’s speech included a reminder of the contemporary importance of early Baptists’ historical advocacy of equal religious liberty for all persons that helped birth the religion clauses of the First Amendment:

“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. Toleration 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.”

Securely dominant in Southern culture, Truett and his fellow Southern Baptists nonetheless cast an anxious eye at a rapidly expanding Roman Catholic Church in America. Even as he assured his listeners of the superiority of the Baptist faith over against that of Catholicism, Truett promised the nation that “A Baptist would rise at midnight to plead for absolute religious liberty for his Catholic neighbor, and for his Jewish neighbor, and for everybody else.” From their advantaged perch, Southern Baptists at that time nonetheless remained committed to protecting the religious rights of minorities.

The most renowned address of Truett’s remarkable career, “Baptists and Religious Liberty” received national coverage, yet failed, at that time, to galvanize a Baptist advocacy presence in the nation’s capital.

Nonetheless, Baptist principles were on display in another important event of 1920. Few Baptists apparently took notice that year when a small group of dissenting activists founded an advocacy organization that shared Baptists’ freedom of conscience convictions. Formed during a post-World War I era of government censorship of labor groups, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) initially focused on defending the constitutionally-guaranteed free speech rights of all citizens. Later the organization added defense of religious liberty to its mission, which is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

During its nearly century of existence to date many Baptist churches have hosted ACLU meetings, while a number of Baptists have been leaders within the ACLU, including North Carolina Southern Baptist pastor William W. Finlator. Among other congregations, Finlator pastored the Pullen Memorial Baptist Church of Raleigh.

Of his work with the ACLU, Finlator spoke of his passion for righteous dissent: “As a member and vice president of the ACLU, I trace my civil libertarian convictions to my commitment to early Baptist principles, and I am confident that my involvement in the ACLU has made me desire to become an authentic Baptist.”

Brent Walker, recently retired executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), said of Finlator, “no one better exemplified the Baptist commitment to defending the rights of conscience in the second half of the 20^th Century than Bill Finlator.”

The BJC traces its roots to the 1936 establishment of the Southern Baptist Committee on Public Relations, an organizational extension, at that time, of three centuries of Baptist commitment to religious liberty and church state separation.

Thereafter the committee partnered with American and National Baptists, moved its headquarters to D.C., and in 1946 became the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. The name changed again in 2005 to Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a clear descriptor of the organization’s advocacy focus as “the only faith-based agency devoted solely to religious liberty and the institutional separation of church and state. Since 1936, the BJC has continuously provided reliable leadership on church-state issues as it leads coalitions of groups striving to protect both the free exercise of religion and to defend against its establishment by government.”

Today, led by Amanda Taylor, the BJC represents fifteen Baptist groups in its advocacy for equal religious liberty for all and church state separation as guaranteed to all Americans in the First Amendment.

The Southern Baptist Convention, however, is no longer a part of the organization it birthed, having withdrawn from the BJC in 1991 in order to increasingly pursue a decidedly anti-traditional Baptist vision of religious privilege for majoritarian Christians and (not infrequently) religious discrimination against minority groups. Accordingly, the BJC and SBC often find themselves on opposite sides of many religious liberty disputes.

A third Washington-based advocacy organization aligned with historic Baptist freedom principles is Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU). Established in 1947 as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the orgnization’s formation was “prompted by the Supreme Court’s Everson v. Board of Education decision, on February 10, 1947, which permitted public funds for the transportation of students to private and parochial schools.”

Three of the organization’s eleven founders were Baptists: Edwin McNeill Poteat, president of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School (who served as AU’s first president); Louie D. Newton, president of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Joseph M. Dawson, executive secretary of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

The organization’s 1947 Manifesto, echoing the fervency of early Baptists and imparting a timely warning for 2017, declared that “Congress and all State legislatures, and all executive and judiciary agencies of government must be warned that they are playing with fire when they play into the hands of any church which seeks, at any point, however marginal, to breach the wall that sharply separates church and state in this country. The principle of their separation is so firmly established in a long tradition as well as in the Constitution that any tampering with it will tend to light the fires of intolerance and fanaticism which our system of government is designed to prevent.”

The organizational name formally shortened in 1972 to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, AU maintains a firm commitment to legally combating any breach of church state separation. AU has counted many Baptists among its leadership, including Foy Valentine, Richard G. Puckett and Robert L. Maddox.

Amid today’s politicized onslaughts against the First Amendment, Americans United, often in alliance with either or both the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the American Civil Liberties Union, opposes governmental — national, state and local — favoritism of any given religious group, as well as discrimination in the guise of “religious liberty” favoritism for majority groups.

Collectively, all three Washington-based organizational advocates of equal religious liberty for all and church state separation — ACLU (1920), BJC (1936), and AU (1947) — reflect, whether directly or inherently, the historic dissenting Baptist tradition.

Human rights, equality and democracy are made stronger by the tireless, hard work of all three organizations. Their collective successes past and present demonstrate that Baptist dissent yet matters and helps ensure the continued freedoms of all Americans, Christian or otherwise.

PART THREE: RESPONDING TO EMPIRE

Seventeenth and eighteenth century Baptists faced an existential challenge: surviving in the face of a Christian-enabled hostile empire.

During the crucial years of America’s colonial era, Baptists chose a stance of resistance. Yet in the ensuing centuries some succumbed to the siren song of power and embraced empire, launching Baptists upon an ongoing but contorted relationship between faith and empire that yet ranges from resistance to embrace and points in between.

This year the relationship between evangelical Christianity, a category that includes millions of Baptists, and empire in America is acute. More than 80% of white, evangelical Christian voters in November 2016 voted for a proudly evil man — one whom many had earlier decried as an antichrist — for president of the United States.

Why? Because the stern father figure, a man who declared he had never had a need to ask God for forgiveness, promised to restore conservative Christianity to colonial-era-like dominance in government, culture and society.

Many Christians, fundamentalist to liberal, warned their fellow believers not to put faith in a blatantly evil, racist man. The warnings unheeded, and with Donald Trump now in the White House, many progressive and liberal Christians are dissenting wholesale, often loudly. Conservatives, meanwhile, are divided.

Southern Baptist’s Russell Moore, executive director of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and with impeccable conservative credentials, is one among many conservatives who denounced Trump during the election season. Now, some 100 Southern Baptist churches — representative of perhaps tens of thousands of Baptist congregations suddenly and happily allied with empire — are threatening to defund the SBC if Moore is not fired.

Not lost is the irony of many Southern Baptists threatening to punish their man charged with providing ethical guidance because he opposed an obviously unethical presidential candidate.

Many observers warn that evangelicals’ fervent embrace of evil has destroyed the evangelical witness. Some progressive evangelicals have recently renounced evangelical terminology. On the other end of the spectrum, some conservative to fundamentalist Baptists among the “never Trump” Republican contingent have become enamored with the Benedict Option, a concept put forth by Eastern Orthodox political writer Rod Dreher. Like St. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, Dreher advocates walking away from hostile politics and culture in order to form and nurture inward-focused communities of faith that serve as bastions of orthodox Christianity.

On the other hand, from slavery and Jim Crow to the present, choosing evil has long been a problem for white American Christianity. Trump is merely the latest episode in an oft-repeated pattern of a white supremacist Christianity allied with white supremacist empire. Thus it comes as no surprise that Black Southern Baptists are warning their white brethren to turn away from their racist impulses.

Fifty years ago and one year to the day before his assassination, Baptist minister and Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in an address at Riverside Church in New York City and with the Vietnam War mind, spoke against an American empire defined by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

Today all three legs of an oft-oppressive American empire are embodied vividly in Donald Trump: long-time racist, unethical billionaire businessman, and militaristic strongman.

The late historian Vincent Harding wrote King’s Riverside speech, of which King made only minor changes. On the 40th anniversary of the speech, Harding, who often attended King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, noted that King opposed empire “from a deeply Christian perspective.”

Harding posed questions which America’s Baptists, and other Christians, yet face today.

“We have to ask, what is patriotism? What is nationalism? What does it mean to follow the national leaders into the destruction of others of God’s children?

“What does it do to the Christian faith when we recognize that our community began in a setting where most [early believers] were outcasts from the empire’s power? What does it mean when the Christian community now identifies itself with the empire, apologizes for the empire, and goes to war along with the empire?”

Historically, Baptist dissent has not been directed against secular, inclusive governments, but rather in opposition to Christian-enabled, exclusive empires.

Today in church buildings and in public rallies, in print publications and in digital media, ordinary Baptists reflecting the best of their faith heritage of human rights and church state separation are speaking against white supremacy and racism, opposing government policies that enrich the wealthy by taking from the poor and middle class, and rejecting militancy destructive of basic humanity. Traditional Baptists, in short, are responding to a Christian-enabled evil empire by remaining faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For the sake of the future of America, of Christianity, and of the world, Baptist dissent matters.