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The metaphor of the wall of separation: Baptists and the First Amendment.

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In the heat of the 1960 presidential campaign, W. A. Criswell, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, declared that our founding fathers wrote "into our Constitution that church and state must be, in this nation, forever separate and free." (1)

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This declaration mirrored the comments of his predecessor, George W. Truett, who in delivering his famous sermon on religious liberty from he steps of the United States Capitol in 1920, proclaimed: (1)

On and on was the struggle waged by our Baptist forebears ... until at last it was written into our country's Constitution that church and state must in this land be forever separate and free, that neither must ever trespass upon the distinctive functions of the other. It was preeminently a Baptist achievement. (2)

Within a generation of Criswell's 1960 remarks, many Baptists were singing a different song. The same Criswell, speaking during the Republican National Convention in 1984, declared: "I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel's imagination." (3) The guilty "infidel" was, of course, Roger Williams, the father of the Baptist tradition in America. Before exploring what has brought about this sea change in attitude and whether the change is a positive one, the story of the metaphor of the "wall of separation" between church and state should be told, with the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the starting point. (4)

Baptists and Church-State Separation in Colonial America

The Puritans left England for the New World to obtain religious liberty. When they arrived, they promptly established a society that was every bit as oppressive as the one in England that they had left behind. The founding of Plymouth Colony in 1620 marked the beginning of an early New England tradition of religious intolerance. (5) The Massachusetts Bay Colony taxed its citizens to provide financial support for ministers of the established church, limited the suffrage and the right to hold office to members of the established church, and eventually required non-members to attend church services. (6) Puritan authorities had a Baptist, Obadiah Holmes, publicly flogged on the streets for conducting a Baptist worship service in a private home. (7) Anne Hutchinson was tried and convicted of heresy for challenging the power of religious authorities, who then exiled her from the colony, (8) and Roger Williams was also exiled from the colony as a result of his perspective on the proper relationship between the church and governing civil authorities.

Brent Walker has dubbed Williams "our all-time all-star." (9) Williams believed that civil magistrates had no authority in religious matters-"that they could not even require people to keep the Sabbath." (10) He was opposed to the design of English flag, which at that time had a bright red cross on it. Williams asserted that including the Christian icon in the national emblem constituted a clear mixing of nationalism and faith. He also opposed the requirement that every oath of office conclude with the words "so help me God," because those words would be applied to unbelievers as well as to believers and thus would reduce invoking God's name to empty form and ritual. (11)

Calling for a "hedge or wall of separation between the Garden of the church and the wilderness of the world," Williams believed that such a hedge would protect the garden of the church from the wilderness of the state. (12) He asserted that the church could do little damage to the state, which he believed was necessarily corrupt, but instead was concerned with protecting the church from the corrupting influences of government, "believing that the ambition and vices of men could pervert the church, turning faith into simply a mechanism for achieving temporal power." (13) According to Williams:

The unknowing zeal of Constantine and other emperors did more hurt to Christ Jesus' crown and kingdom than the raging fury of the most bloody Neros. In the persecutions of the latter, Christians were sweet and fragrant, like spice pounded and beaten in mortars. But these good emperors, persecuting some erroneous persons, Arius, etc., and advancing the professors of some truths of Christ--for there was no small number of truths lost in those times-and maintaining their religion by the material sword--I say, by this means Christianity was eclipsed, and the professors of it fell asleep. Babel or confusion were ushered in, and by degrees the gardens of the churches of saints were turned into the wilderness of whole nations, until the whole world became Christian, or Christendom. (14)

When his friend, Governor John Winthrop, had Williams expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Williams fled to Rhode Island and three years later, in 1639, he founded the first Baptist church in North America. (15) There in Rhode Island, Williams established a religiously free society, at least by the standards of his day.

The commitment to religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment is often thought of as an idea that was revolutionary in its day. But more than 125 years before the First Amendment was ratified, Williams and John Clarke successfully petitioned the King of England to approve the Rhode Island Charter of 1663. That charter expressed the aspirations of the people of Rhode Island "to hold forth a lively experiment that a flourishing civil state may be maintained among his Majesty's subjects with full religious liberty." The charter added that "no person within the said colony shall hereafter be in any wise molested or called in question for any difference in matters of religion." (16)

The commitment to religious liberty and separation of church and state was later amplified by early Baptist leaders, including Isaac Backus, who protested a Massachusetts law that required all citizens to pay an "ecclesiastical tax" to support the Congregational Church. (17) Backus denounced the requirement that Baptists and other non-Congregationalists be forced to support a brand of Christianity that they opposed. (18) Writing in 1781, Backus expressed his view that since "religion must always be a matter between God and...

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