Written by Don Byrd
Here’s a good way to start the week: read Sunday’s op-ed from Rev. Robert Randolph, a retired Baptist minister in North Carolina, writing in Asheville’s Citizen-Times. Responding to the idea that the Bible is the “foundation” of America, Randolph countered with a primer on a Baptist trio of religious freedom champions: Roger Williams, John Leland, and George Truett. Through their example, he argues that instead of the Bible, “our country’s foundation is for each citizen to decide his/her own faith, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, any other faith, or no faith.”
Here’s a snippet:
Rev. John Leland, Baptist minister of Virginia and friend of James Madison, had a critical role in ensuring that our Constitution provided total separation of church and state, as Virginia Baptists had insisted. … The Baptists of Virginia were determined to have no established religion of any kind because they had personally felt the sting so deeply of enforced religious practice.
Read the whole thing.
