Some Reflections on Separation of Church and State, Southern Baptists, and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism

Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of The Interfaith Alliance

Last night, my husband, our college-aged daughter, and I attended a meeting at a local town hall where Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of The Interfaith Alliance, gave a well-received speech on the separation of church and state. Of course, he was preaching to the choir. Most of us, if not all of us, tend to vote the Democratic ticket, and the majority of us were over the age of fifty. Our daughter and a couple of other kids accompanying their parents were the only ones under the age of twenty-five.

Many of us were probably at one time or another allied with a church that had scrupulously practiced separation of church and state back in the day when people knew what that meant. Some of those religious organizations have since abandoned that traditional/Constitutional view of separation of church and state, causing an exodus of members who refuse to bow to a politically-minded religious fundamentalism. I speak here most specifically of myself and my husband. I was reared in the Southern Baptist Church, but I left the organization after years of questioning its increasing fundamentalism. (I've written about some of that experience here). Reverend Gaddy is one of those folks, too, only he had a place quite a bit more elevated on the Southern Baptist organizational ladder than the likes of me. Before the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Gaddy served on many leadership committees, including the Executive Committee (1980-1984) and Director of Christian Citizenship Development of the Christian Life Commission (1973-1977). (see bio from which I found this information here).

In the 1970s, there was a concerted effort, led by Paige Patterson and Texas judge Paul Pressler, to transform the Southern Baptist Convention, to get the convention to abandon its traditional stand on "priesthood of the believer" (members were free to interpret the Bible as they felt God leading them, so there was a diversity of belief, and local churches had some freedom in their expression of those beliefs) and to promote a fundamentalist view on inerrancy of the scripture and an uncompromising creed.  My husband knew Paul Pressler in the early 1970s when he was a teenager and was living in Houston with his parents.  He and his family attended Bethel Independent Presbyterian Church, where Judge Pressler and his wife, Nancy, were leaders of the youth group that Tom attended.  (Tom remembers some particularly "interesting" advice this couple gave the group about dating.)

As with many such wranglings over national church leadership, Paul Pressler's struggle for power seems to have begun locally, in the Second Baptist Church of Houston, where he and his wife had been members and Sunday School teachers. Pressler and another member of that church, John Baugh, have differering views of that time, but evidently the Presslers were removed as Sunday School teachers. According to John Baugh, one of the reasons for that removal was that "the Presslers were working with a small Presbyterian church and taking students from Second Baptist." That would have been the years the Presslers were leading that youth group at Bethel Independent Presbyterian Church which Tom attended.

Anyway, John Baugh became associated with moderate Baptists and Paul Pressler with fundamentalist Baptists. Eventually, moderate Baptists were forced out of leadership positions in the Southern Baptist Convention, and pastors such as Dr. Gaddy united to form the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

The climax of the struggle between moderate and fundamentalist Baptists was happening during the years when Tom and I lived in College Station, Texas, where we attended Texas A&M University and were members of a Baptist church that was moderate and that accepted members with a diversity of views. So, as we listened to Dr. Gaddy last night, we had all this background history which gave us, perhaps, a different view of the presentation than some of the folks in the audience. (As Tom said later, we'd heard all the preacher jokes before.)

Dr. Gaddy is an interesting and thoughtful speaker; he has a sense of humor and a smile that just makes you want to trust him, good pastoral characteristics. He began with references to some of the mean-spirited things being advocated from pulpits today, noting two particularly hateful speeches, though he didn't name the men responsible. However, I had heard excerpts from these particular sermons, so I knew he was referring to Louisiana pastor Dennis Terry, of Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, and to either Charles Worley, of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina or Sean Harris, senior pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

But the focus of Gaddy's speech, titled "But God Told Me I could be President--Religion and the 2012 Election," was about the separation of church and state and how that separation is being undermined by political and religious leaders. Political leaders are using religion cynically to garner votes, and religious leaders are using religion to gain political power, that is, power to change legislation that will impact all Americans. He referred specifically to the Affordable Health Care Act and how its attempts to cover all Americans is being unhelpfully and uncompassionately undermined by religious groups that erroneously claim the act tramples on their religious freedom. Gaddy reminds us that your religious freedom stops where the other person's religious freedom begins, that a secular government has the responsibility to respond to the needs of ALL its citizens and that a woman's right to make choices about her own body should not be determined by one religious group. Of course, he believes strongly that individuals have the right to act on their own religious faith, just not that they should expect others to defer to that faith in the arena of governmental legislation.

Compassion and humility seem to be two important words to Dr. Gaddy, compassion for others different from us and humility about our own self-importance and self-righteousness. I like how he concluded his speech with a reminder that we all need humility, the willingness to accept that we might be wrong. He administered some stern injunctions with that very kind smile of his, sweetening the sting of some of his words, for he had some criticisms of the Obama administration as well.


other links:
Editorial by Todd Dorman, "Entangling Religion and Politics Diminishes Both," in The Cedar Rapids Gazette, 1 December 2011.

State of Belief with Rev. Welton Gaddy--radio show production of The Interfaith Alliance Foundation