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.
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