Anyone who knows their church-state history is aware that Baptists played a key role in the creation of America’s tolerant marketplace of ideas and “free exercise” on matters of faith.

Ask Thomas Jefferson. Here is a much-quoted, with good cause, passage from his pen, taken from the famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared 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 & State.

At various times in history, activists on the left and the right have found that letter disturbing.

So, as journalists prepare for whatever awaits Judge Amy Coney Barrett and her family (click here for this week’s podcast post on the “handmaid” wars), journalists may want to take a look at this short article from Baptist historian Thomas Kidd, published at The Gospel Coalition website. The headline: “Amy Coney Barrett and Anti-Catholicism in America.”

It’s sad to have to say this, but it helps to know that Kidd has taken his fair share of shots from social-media warriors on both sides during the Donald Trump era. Through it all, he has consistently defended — as a Baptist’s Baptist — an old-school liberal approach to the First Amendment and religious liberty (without “scare” quotes).

Here is Kidd’s overture:

The looming nomination of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice has renewed an ugly but persistent tradition in American politics: anti-Catholicism. Since 1517 there have been enduring and fundamental theological divides between Protestants and Catholics about tradition and Scripture, grace and works, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and more. Disagreement over theology certainly is not the same thing as outright anti-Catholicism, though theological differences are often components of anti-Catholicism.