Why I am a Baptist

To be perfectly honest, I was born a Baptist and not just a Baptist but the son of a Baptist missionary and the grandson of a Baptist preacher. My father's brother was a Baptist pastor and his sister married a Baptist pastor. It's in my blood--and I must confess that I've had a love-hate relationship with being Baptist for much of my life. I'm convinced that we Baptists are just about the most misunderstood religious group out there--and that we've brought this misunderstanding and misconception upon ourselves.

I once attended a conference on religious diversity at the Carter Center in Atlanta where I discovered that more people had prejudice against Baptists than against any of the twenty other religious groups in the room. It was an eye-opener! And can you imagine how many Baptists attend religious diversity conferences? There were two of us--a reality which caused the other 400 folks in the room to collapse in laughter. At one point, I had to stand and defend my tradition against the various words that the other attendees used to describe Baptists--bigots, rednecks, misogynists and racists were among the kinder descriptions. The Hare Krishna folks in their saffron robes got much more gentle treatment! And I had trouble coming up with a credible defense.

And yet I am still Baptist. Here's why:

1. Baptists may disagree with you when it comes to God, but we'll also fight to the death for your right to believe whatever you wish to believe about the divine. It's in our genetic code. Roger Williams of Rhode Island (pictured above) was a Baptist and he had this notion that no human being ought to have the power to control the individual conscience. In his estimation, all human beings were fallible, sinful creatures whose perspectives were warped by original sin. And God was much too powerful and omniscient to ever be trapped in the tiny space of a single human mind or even collective human minds. For this reason, every perspective on God ought to be heard--and Williams was pretty confident that, in the end, the truth would win out. God was perfectly capable of accomplishing that without much help from the hoi polloi!

2. Baptists root religious experience in the heart of the individual and in the connection of that individual to a community of faith or congregation. It's not a flawless process-but it certainly is a powerful and meaningful way to experience God. We baptize folks who are capable of knowing right from wrong and of making a conscious decision to follow in the way of Jesus. We baptize them into a church that can nurture them along that way until such time as the individual and church come to a parting of the ways (either geographically or theologically). At such time, the individual is free to move to another church, start a new one, or quit church altogether. In this sense, Baptists are like germs--you never know where we might pop up next!

3. We Baptists insist upon the separation of church and state--mainly because we got burned badly by the marriage of the two institutions. At the heart of this conviction is the Actonian notion that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When church and state get together, the church and the individual always lose. As that great Baptist prophet, James Dunn, says (pardon this very poor restatement, James), "It's not theocracy I fear; it's the person who thinks he's speaking for Theo that frightens me!" When it comes to religion and the state, every faith at the table ought to be treated as equals--nobody gets to sit at the head of the table and nobody has to stand outside the door.

I once heard Dr. Ed Gaustad, a good Baptist and dean among American religious historians, adddress a gathering of religion professors in San Francisco (again, my apologies for the rough quote). "If you pass the First Church of Satan as you are strolling the streets of this city," he said, "then be sure to thank a Baptist. Their fight for religious liberty ensured that such a church could be here."

I wish I'd thought to quote him at that conference on religious diversity at the Carter Center. It certainly would have given them a different perspective on Baptists and, perhaps, taken their minds off the fact that there were only two of us in the room.