Religious freedom is either a principle or a convenient fiction. I once taught American church history at Samford University, and I at least know something about religion and American history. And on the matter of religious liberty, I am a fiery Baptist. It is a principle, not a convenience. If you are a real Baptist, you fight for EVERYBODY’S freedom.  My friend Glenn Hinson once wrote, “For faith to be genuine, it must be free.” That means unsupported by government, and free from government power over our conscience and the practice of faith as long as we do not interfere with others’ same freedom.

I find it somewhere between ironic and appalling that so many fellow Christians fail to even understand this in the most basic way. They seem to be saying, “We need Christian faith to have dominance through the law. We want to use the levers of government power to restrict all religions but our own. And those with no faith have no say.”

This is the weak theology that underlies Christian Nationalism. A secular state is a threat to the Kingdom of God, therefore we must “take it back” in some sense, and therefore the entire Seven Mountains idea emerged that underlies many of those pushing project 2025 and other attempts to create cultural Christian control.

Christian Nationalism, the anxiety driven flavor of the month in some conservative quarters, isn’t the only Christian position, and in American history not even the most persistent historic American position. Separation of church and state was birthed in the founding of the nation in a principled way. A principle is worthless if it has conditions. Either you believe it or not.

Baptists were persecuted not only in England (by other Christians! Consider that!) and in the Colonies by the Puritans who drove them out of Massachussetts Bay Colony, but also in Virginia, where they were regulated and registered by the state to “keep tabs” and so they were the most passionate voices of the Constitution for the First Amendment.  They wanted government out of the regulation of the human conscience, and that included religion. The Puritans, on the other hand, wanted a Puritan nation, Anglicans in Virginia wanted the Church of England to be favored, Catholics in Maryland, Quakers in Pennsylvania, all wanted freedom, but there was always that insecurity that permitting the deviations to exist, well, better to license them, or in the case of the Puritans, beat the daylights out of them and put them in the stocks and worse.

When Roger Williams finally helped carve out radical religious liberty in Rhodesia Island, according to the late eminent historian Sydney Ahlstrom of Yale, Cotton Mather called it “the sewer of New England.” Williams, a Baptist, committed the unpardonable sin of leaving people alone to follow their consciences, be they Anglican, Puritans, Muslim, or no religion.

So no, the wall of separation was not a misunderstanding by Jefferson and Madison and John Leland. The disingenuous revisionism of right wing Christian nationalist has a theology, but it is very much a backstory created to rewrite actual history. Jefferson wrote an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association on his view

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and 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 and State.^[45]

So perhaps you’ll understand that I am adamant on this point, that the imposition and coercion of Christian faith or its spread through any means but persuasion and voluntary commitment is no Christianity at all. Giving religious preferences to Christianity in schools, public spaces, curricula and laws are the subtle and blunt ways the wall erodes. They are based on many forces–cultural anxiety, fear, a legitimate worry of moral uncertainty, concern for the welfare of our families and children, and a desire for political dominance in running the world for its own good, as we think in our worst moments. But it is not the American heritage or its founding impetus.

I would think that so obviously a violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment wouldn’t need mentioning. . But I have watched a steady erosion of confidence that Christian faith can survive in the marketplace of ideas. This lack of confidence intensifies in times of great stress. Does it surprise you that in times of social unrest and conflict–think Civil Rights movement, the 9/11 attacks and conflicts over immigration and the growing diversity of the American population that the confidence in principles of authentic liberty has all but disappeared?

The Europeans who came to the so-called New World (certainly news for those already here) often did come for Christian freedom to practice their faith without hindrance. The freedom they sought was largely against other Christian communions in established “Christian” states, not from atheism or even other religions. The founders worried as much about Christian’s repeating the disastrous bloodshed of Europe in the fledgling American experiment, and the tests of that came again and again with the growth of the country. That principle was only dimly worked out but then deepened both out of necessity and the growing conviction that the European state churches had produced wars, persecutions and intolerance, but not Christian unity.

To avoid that in the infant experiment required something new, different, unique in history. Those now calling for the sacrifice of principle and truth for the small-mindedness and unprincipled return to everything the forefathers rejected for our own benefit are simply wrong. The founders guaranteed , however imperfectly worked out at the time, that we could be free from persecutions and oppression because of faith in the great experiment of America as place where beliefs and ideas stood on their own, without being propped up by the favor of the state.

The separation of church and state is a principled and working way to live together. Whatever is done in immigration, education, civic life and local leadership must be based on a just principle, not fear and prejudice.  There is no religious test in our founding documents.  The principle works. Stick with it. If it hadn’t, we would all be Puritans or Anglicans by law. 

I’ll take religious liberty and freedom. Leave us alone, federal government. ALL of us. If my neighbor loses his liberty, mine is next. If you defend the Second Amendment (and I do), then you ought to defend the First. But that means you trust it both ways. Freedom of church from coercion by the state. Freedom of all citizens to believe as conscience dictates without punishment or harassment. But the reverse is true. Your faith must operate in the public sphere without the preferential treatment of the state. It cannot have the best seats at the house of justice and fairness.

Principles are frustrating limits we place upon ourselves. They inconvenience us, cause us to stop at red lights and accept difficulties as a willing restraint on our endless infantile desire to have our own way. Religious Liberty has been a sometimes rocky and inconsistent path in practice. But looking across history and the world, it has been well worth it. I would wish that Christians themselves would renounce the lust for cultural domination and lead the way back to our truest instincts–that religion freely affirmed is the only lasting faith at all. Violence, oppression, and coercion only deepen the desire to be left alone. It’s messy, this way we have charted, but the alternative has been well illustrated in human history. Why would we lose confidence in freedom now?