Brent Walker Speaks about Religious Liberty

Article by Marv Knox

Baptists must hold in tension three sets of paradoxical ideas if they are to remain faithful to their heritage and champion freedom, Brent Walker told participants at the T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Award Dinner Oct. 30 in Dallas.

The awards dinner is sponsored every-other year by the T.B. Maston Foundation, named for a pioneering Baptist ethicist who taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth much of the 20th century. Maston shaped the ethical thinking of generations of ministers and gained a reputation for leading Baptists to support civil rights and racial reconciliation.

The foundation presented its 2009 Maston Award to Leon McBeth, a leading historian of the Baptist movement who taught at Southwestern Seminary for 43 years.

The history McBeth chronicled showed Baptists to be people who “fought for religious liberty -- for others as much as for ourselves,” stressed Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington.

If Baptists intend to preserve religious liberty, they must maintain balance within three sets of ideas, he added. They are:

• The two religion clauses in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The nation’s founders gave religious liberty “double protection” by including two religion clauses -- No Establishment and Free Exercise, he noted.

“Both ensure religious liberty; both require an institutional separation of church and state as a means to that end,” he said. “As soon as government starts to meddle in religion or takes sides in religious disputes, someone’s religious liberty is denied and everyone’s is threatened.”

Walker proposed a common-sense exercise for maintaining the tension between the religion clauses: “Every time we say ‘no’ to government’s attempt to promote religion to uphold the Establishment Clause, we should find a way to say ‘yes’ to its Free Exercise counterpart. This allows us always to seek to find a ‘win-win’ solution and keep these two clauses in proper balance.”

• Religious freedom and responsibility.

“Our freedom in Christ can never be separated from -- and must always be limited by -- the responsibility that we have to one another,” Walker stressed. “Freedom and responsibility, liberty and accountability -- these dyads must always be held in tension.”

Freedom and religious liberty are not ends in themselves, he added.

“We are free, in the words of the Great Commandment, to love God and love one another,” he said. “… And our freedom in Christ must always be exercised in the context of the responsibility we have to one another. This also involves the ethical imperative of ensuring everyone’s religious liberty. An attitude of ‘religious liberty for me but not for thee’ is self-centered, irresponsible and sinful.”

• Civic withdrawal and engagement.

“Historically, for most Baptists, the separation of church and state has never meant a segregation of religion from politics or to strip religious talk from the public square. It does not relieve Baptists of their duties of citizenship,” Walker insisted.

Citing examples of Baptists who engaged government across the past four centuries, Walker observed, “We have always been committed to doing -- rolling up our sleeves, going to work and speaking out in the public square.”

Tensions are part of life -- including public life, he concluded. “It is my prayer, in our so-called post-modern, post-denominational time and throughout the next 400 years, we Baptists carry forward a proper understanding of these three issues and deal with them responsibly and constructively.”