Baptists and Liberalism, Blessing or Curse?

Is the Baptist dedication to freedom going too far?

American Reformer has asked an important and incisive question with regard to the relationship of Baptists to liberalism and post-liberalism.  Certainly, it has been the case that I and several other Southern Baptists (including a group who appeared at a small conference at the denomination’s flagship seminary) have tended to issue warnings about post-liberal alternatives while emphasizing the Baptist distinctives of church-state separation and religious liberty.  There is a sense in which this rejection is almost reflexive for Baptists who are steeped in their denominational history and theology.  But is this instinct to reject post-liberalism correct?  And has the Baptist relationship to liberalism (meaning political liberalism as a philosophy and not as left-wing politics) been too readily assumed to be compatible?

I think it is important to acknowledge that Baptists have a special relationship to the United States.  Famously, the Baptist John Leland delivered a “mammoth cheese” to Thomas Jefferson in honor of the president’s support of republicanism and religious liberty.  Less famously, but more important, is the way Baptist churches flourished in the United States in the 19^th and 20^th centuries after earlier times of persecution and oppression.  Rodney Stark and Roger Finke presented a picture of the powerful, rapid growth of Baptists in the young republic.  There is a real sense in which Baptists and the United States coincided and rose together.  American Baptists have seen themselves as believers in freedom and democracy as much as they have seen themselves as people of the book who emphasize the primacy of scripture over centralized authorities or interpreters of theology.  Baptists, then, have generally been good Americans.  Let it be acknowledged, of course, that many of them also failed in the way their country sometimes did when it came to extending the benefit of their beliefs more fully to everyone regardless of race.  Americans have not always followed the true paths of their self-proclaimed philosophy, as Baptists have not always followed out the broader implications of their dedication to the Gospel.  

Let us take it, then, that while many Americans doubted the compatibility of Roman Catholicism with the United States and its democracy and separation of church and state, Baptists themselves fit rather smoothly with the politico-philosophical mores of the young nation as it moved away from establishments of religion and toward the modern settlement of the thing.  Indeed, even Catholics would have their champion for church-state separation in the person of John Courtney Murray, who was initially a lonely voice but came to be representative of the more modern American Catholic view.  Like the Baptists, he argued for a position that came to be very comfortable for American Christians in the mid to late 20^th century.  One might argue that the Baptist approach became the American approach and eventually persuaded almost everyone.  

Of course, the agreement sometimes was only the appearance of the thing.  There was a time when Baptists emphasized the separation of church and state much more than they do today.  The reason was simple.  They had championed separation as a way to protect the freedom of the church and the believer against the meddlesome and even oppressive action of the state.  Baptists had actually suffered some persecution at the hands of those who operated church establishments.  If the state interfered with faith, then the door would be open to outright coercion at the worst or a thumb on the scale at least.  Baptists, however, wanted everyone in the church to be there out of sincere faith and real conviction.  Their model of the church, then, was a regenerate one rather than a comprehensive model.  The comprehensive church features a tight nexus between church and state in which birth and baptism go together.  One’s citizenship and one’s church membership flow as necessary complements.  The regenerate church focuses on evangelism and then baptism upon confession after reaching a suitable age of decision.  Proponents of the regenerate church tend not to be impressed with cultural Christianity much (and may even see it as a negative).  However, they may not be appreciative enough for the protective space cultural Christianity can afford and for the degree to which it underwrites the moral order.   

While Baptists championed the regenerate church and the removal of ecclesiastical powers and authority from the state, they were joined by more secular-minded Americans.  This essay began with a discussion of John Leland and Thomas Jefferson.  Those two demonstrate the situation nicely.  Leland (and other Baptists) sought separation out of Christian belief.  Jefferson was motivated more by political philosophy and probably his own sense that Christianity was not really true.  After all, it was Jefferson who cut the miracles out of his New Testament and expressed his belief that all young men in the U.S. would soon be Unitarians.  Although Baptists and figures such as Jefferson fought similar battles for religious liberty and against church establishment, they were merely fellow travelers, perhaps destined to travel together only part of the way.  Jefferson’s intellectual kin today are probably more likely to embrace something like secularism rather than the classic institutional separation of church and state.  Devout Baptists of today, now alienated by what they are likely to view as excessive policing of the public square by secularists, don’t traffic much in the language of church-state separation.  Instead, they tend to uphold religious liberty over against aggressive secular progressivism.

The kinds of Baptists who lost the battle over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s and 90s were more likely to end up identifying with secularists than with their co-religionists.  Part of the reason for the existence of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is because of disappointment with the increasingly leftward identification of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.  For the left-of-center Baptists, the defense of the separation of church and state seemed to become, at best, something considered a good in and of itself and at worst, an important way to prevent the church from imposing its morality on the nation.  One of the classic arguments when it comes to church-state separation and religious liberty is whether the emphasis is on protecting the church against state power or protecting the state against church interference.  The reality is that both ideas are operative, but for the fellow travelers, the discovery of the disagreement is a bit like the founding of Springfield in The Simpsons when it turns out some of the settlers came on the journey for the right to marry their sisters.  

I won’t identify any camp of Baptists as the group that wanted to marry their sisters, but the point is that fundamental disagreements revealed themselves as the unofficial establishment of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. waned.  With its recession, we discovered different reactions.  Conservative Baptists generally wanted to fight what they saw as a cleansing of the public square of Christian morality (and sometimes symbols), while more liberal Baptists seemed to cheer the development.  One might imagine these more liberal Baptists simply wanted to do away with the detritus of cultural Christianity in the way Russell Moore sometimes talks about today, but that may be too generous a view of the thing.  One of the more well-known and well-established professors at Baylor University in the late 20^th century offered arguments to the effect that separation of church and state and religious liberty protected abortion rights.  When Robert Sloan (named president in 1995) tried to draw Baylor back more strongly to its Christian roots, he found stout resistance from within.  One board member claimed Sloan was trying to establish a theocratic institution.  The claim revealed much about how influential Baylor Baptists thought.  Somehow, Sloan’s desire to re-Christianize a Christian university augured theocracy rather than being an example of free people using their freedom to pursue a spiritual mission at a place no student was required to attend and for whom no faculty member had to work.  

One of the things that became clear in the midst of the Baylor controversy was that some Baptists had learned the wrong lessons from their tradition.  Sloan’s predecessor, Herbert Reynolds, was a devout Baptist who drank so deeply of the “soul competency” or “soul liberty” emphasis that he was highly reluctant to inquire much about a job candidate’s spiritual life.  Likewise, when Sloan pressed to make Baylor more faithful, there was resistance from many in the faculty based on the idea that his attempt to hire and promote serious Christians represented a violation of these same Baptist distinctives.  Somehow, freedom had become more important than actually accomplishing goals of evangelism and discipleship at a Christian university.

There is no question that freedom is a major part of the Baptist cultural and theological legacy, but to emphasize freedom over the authority of scripture is to disconnect Baptists from their source in favor of autonomy.  To the extent that Baptists, whether conservative or liberal, ever exalt the norms of liberalism over against Christian orthodoxy, then that will be the failure.  If, on the other hand, Baptists are able to value freedom and to remain rooted to scripture while doing so (careful to keep the Gospel in a place of primacy), then the successful connection between Baptists and liberalism may endure.  Of course, even that assessment may be too easy as we are still unsure what form of liberalism will emerge as the dominant one.  Baptists may feel more pressed as the liberalism we face turns in a more and more progressive direction and is perhaps emboldened to mark more space off-limits to orthodox faith.  My instinct, and the instinct of many other Baptists, has been to continue to press the case for a liberalism that continues to be open to the influence of Christianity and, hopefully, even recognizes how much it owes to the organic Christian tradition in the West.  

But to return to the question with which we began, which is whether Baptists have a critique to offer of late 20th-century liberalism, I would say there is one.  The critique is that a significant number of Baptists transmuted the Baptist freedom emphasis into independence from the Bible and even Christian supernaturalism.  And that happened because they were sometimes more formed by liberalism than by Christianity.  I hasten to add that similar threats abound in different directions.  Liberalism has its virtues and dangers.  So, too, do the developing post-liberal alternatives.  The key is to heed David Koyzis’ excellent advice which is to resist the temptation politics constantly provides toward idolatry.

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