Thomas Jefferson

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Baptist thinking on anti-Catholicism: Scribes covering SCOTUS war need to know some history

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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.


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Getting ready for July 4th: What enduring values unite Americans of all religious outlooks?

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Getting ready for July 4th: What enduring values unite Americans of all religious outlooks?

THE QUESTION:

What enduring values unite Americans of all religious outlooks?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The Fourth of July 2020 will be a sober, as well as socially-distanced, observance amid the COVID-19 scourge, resulting economic devastation and racial unrest in cities nationwide.

Nonetheless, it provides an opportunity to reflect not only on the nation’s sins and sufferings but permanent values these United States have upheld through it all.

The American Revolution was first and foremost about ending dictatorial rule so that government is based upon “the consent of the governed.” Freedom of religion and conscience over against government compulsion reinforced this principle and was an equally extraordinary innovation in the 18th Century. Admittedly, courts and politicians continually joust over what this means in particular cases.

Today’s Americans should consider how many regimes have not caught up with either of these concepts 244 years later.

Those principles have united the citizenry across old religious lines. Religious liberty – including freedom to doubt — could only have arisen with broad support from conventional Christian believers in the colonial population and among the Founders. (A “Loyalist” faction among Anglicans still obeyed king and crown, and Quakers desired independence but opposed taking up arms to achieve it.)

Why did orthodox Christians unite on freedom of conscience with, for instance, the three skeptical Founders who are especially interesting figures: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine? Many Christians embraced this freedom in principle, while others saw that government control over religion was essential to the monarchy they spurned.


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What did America’s three founding presidents believe about religion?

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What did America’s three founding presidents believe about religion?

THE QUESTION:

Here’s one for July 4th:  What were the religious beliefs of the three founding presidents of the United States, George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The Fourth of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence, was the date when both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died.

What were the odds?! The two served on the five-man Continental Congress committee responsible for the Declaration of Independence, and Adams, who recognized Jefferson’s golden pen, ensured that his younger colleague would be the author.

The immortal prose had a distinctively religious flavor, with non-sectarian affirmation of peoples’ unalienable human rights that were “endowed by their Creator,” citation of the laws bestowed by “nature’s God,” appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the world,” and with “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” during the improbable and risky rebellion against mighty Britain.

These two Founders coincided otherwise in life, as in death. Adams was the nation’s first vice president and Jefferson its first secretary of state in the administration of the first president, George Washington. Adams was then elected president in 1796 with runner-up Jefferson as his vice president. After the nasty 1800 campaign, during which Jefferson was assailed as a religious infidel, he turned the tables and defeated the incumbent Adams.

Adams was so furious he even boycotted Jefferson’s inauguration. Though these allies of independence had become fierce rivals, they reconciled later in life and exchanged fascinating letters that enrich the recent book “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” (Penguin) by prize-winning Brown University historian Gordon S. Wood.


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