By Holly Hollman / Cooperative Baptist Fellowship channel on Patheos Evangelical
This is an abbreviated version of the story. For the full story, click here.
Recently, the term “religious liberty” has been used loosely by the media, presidential candidates and others, causing a great deal of confusion. There have been highly charged fights over laws purporting to protect religious liberty. There has been fear about how someone’s religious liberty could harm another person. News articles often put “scare quotes” around the term.
For more than four centuries, Baptists have been at the vanguard of the fight for religious liberty for all people, no matter their beliefs. In the midst of much confusion, it can be helpful to return to the foundational principles of religious liberty and the unique way it is protected in the United States. …
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When the United States began drafting its constitution, Baptists led by John Leland in Virginia pressed for explicit religious freedom protections. Baptists said the government was powerless to control conscience and incompetent to dictate spiritual matters. The ideas that the government will not do anything to establish religion or obstruct an individual’s religious practice were new and radical. In 1791, the ratification of the First Amendment embodied the Baptist vision of a nation founded on religious liberty for all and the institutional separation of church and state. …
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