If armed officers of the state didn’t come to your church gathering this past weekend, demanding that you break up your unofficial and unlicensed religious gathering, you can thank, in large part, America’s largest Protestant tradition: Baptists. It was Baptists in the colonial period who worked with the Founders, particularly Madison and Jefferson, to enshrine freedom of religion in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, religious liberty is at the heart of Baptist political theology. The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention reads: “A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal.”
For much of American history, this meant the rejection of an established church. But for the last several decades, religious liberty has been argued not against would-be theocrats but a distorted vision of church-state separation that sought to enshrine secularism as the guiding ethos, thus serving to push religious activity out of the public square altogether.
This is the thesis of Postliberal Protestants: Baptists Between Obergefell and Christian Nationalism by Hunter Baker, Baptist political scientist and provost at North Greenville University. Baker wrote this book “to encourage all of us to think again about why Baptists are Baptists in the third millennium after Christ.” It’s a necessary short volume that helps apply Baptist political theology to 21st-century challenges.
Baker begins Postliberal Protestants by walking the reader through a detailed history of the relationship between church and state in America. The original and relevant content in this section alone makes it a very helpful resource. Baker is right when he says:
In the first three-fourths of the nation’s existence, the concept of the separation of church and state took on a clear and simple meaning. It meant that churches would not be supported by tax money. Membership would not be required by law. The state would not exert any control over who could serve as a pastor or church official. Neither would it control the doctrine of churches.
But the late 1960s “introduced a new period for church and state in the US.” Baker then outlines the pivot both in jurisprudence and in the culture that expanded the Founders’ vision into a suffocating secularism. As Richard John Neuhaus eloquently argued in the 1980s, there can be no such thing as a naked public square. Some value system will fill the void.
Here Baker is especially helpful as he explains the difference between secularism and the original Baptist ideal. He defines secularism as the idea that “religion should not impede upon public life.” This distorted view of the Founders’ vision is what often drives the predictable left-wing freakout when a Christian (usually conservative) talks about his faith or takes a government position. Witness the overheated warnings about a theocracy when George W. Bush—someone who claimed Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher—became president. Or recently when Mike Johnson, a lifelong Baptist, compared his unlikely ascent to that of Moses. Common themes that would not have seemed unusual to most Americans and their leaders for much of our history is now warned against in dark and grave tones on the pages of America’s elite publications.
This misunderstanding is also why Christian service agencies, from adoption providers to homeless ministries and schools, were restricted from partnering with the state to alleviate social ills until recent Supreme Court rulings peeled back some of the secularist arguments. Today, when American Christians hear the term “separation of church and state,” they tend to recoil because, as Baker puts it, “They have seen the concept used aggressively to try to whittle down the presence of Christianity in American life.” The author is not shy about the negative impact of secularism on the church and the country.
Baptists, however, should still be concerned about religious liberty, Baker argues, even if “the nature of the religious liberty challenges have changed.” The rise of secularism, both in the culture and in the courts, made the author sympathetic to those Christians who surveyed the American landscape and concluded that the original arrangement between Baptists and the Founders was insufficient as a governing model for America in the 21st century. And yet Baker, while pushing back against left-wing secularism, also resists the pull of a Christian establishment, or “integralism,” that has become increasingly popular in both Catholic and Protestant academic (and ecclesiastical) circles.
While affirming the benefit of a culture thoroughly leavened with Christian influence, he urges the would-be nationalists to read their history properly and to see the peril of a theocratic state.
The Baptist sense is that the established church tends to have a weakening effect on church bodies, while the regenerate approach energizes with the power of a sincere and active faith. There is a reasonable body of evidence available to substantiate that point of view. European nations and the United Kingdom, which tended to embrace the comprehensive model, now represent some of the most secular places on Earth.
He’s right. As did Richard Land a generation ago, Baker argues for the accommodationist view, one that eschews both the establishment of an official state church and a secularism that drives Christianity from public life. Instead, he urges faithful Christians both to engage in politics and policy for the common good while also continuing in the spiritual practices that ultimately renew a nation: evangelism, discipleship, and strengthening the family.
“A coerced faith,” he notes, “is without value and promotes hypocrisy and violence to the conscience.” God has given the keys of the kingdom, not to the government, but to the church. It is the church that is the “pillar and ground of the faith (1 Tim. 3:15).” It is Christ, not government, who is tasked with “separating the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25).”
Baptists like Baker are not arguing for a quietism that allows malignant secularism to shape the common good. Rather, from the beginning, disestablishment has always included a robust engagement in the life of American democracy. Today Baptists are no less involved, serving in the highest positions of government, influencing the public debate, and remaining active in their communities.
It’s just that Baptists don’t invest more hope in politics than is proper. “For the most part,” Baker writes eloquently, “our politics should be the politics which proclaims the kingship of Christ. The end of that road is not a string of American Christian political victories, but the stunning moment when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
