By BJC Staff
Make your plans today to join students, community members, religious liberty supporters and the BJC staff at the 2012 Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State. The event is April 17-18 on the campus of Mercer University in Macon, Ga.
This year’s lecturer is Franklin T. Lambert, a professor of history at Purdue University. He will deliver three lectures.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Visit www.BJConline.org/lectures for more information.
Tuesday, April 17:
America Conceived as a Christian Nation?: The Separation of Good and Bad History
10:50 a.m. in Mercer Medical School Auditorium
This lecture begins with a critique of the radical right’s assertion that America was conceived of as a Christian state. It examines these revisionist “historians’” selection and use of evidence to support their presuppositions. It ends by examining within historical context the failed attempts to establish Christian states in colonial New England.
A Secular/Sacred Alliance in the Fight for Religious Liberty
5 p.m. in Mercer Medical School Auditorium
While some wish to create a gulf between all things sacred and all things secular, this lecture agrees with George Marsden’s notion that the U.S. was from its beginning profoundly sacred and profoundly secular. It explores the many points of intersection between Great Awakening and Enlightenment ideas and influences. It concludes with a close examination of the cooperation between the Baptist John Leland and the Deist Thomas Jefferson in the fight for religious liberty.
Wednesday, April 18:
Constituting the Separation of Church and State
10 a.m. in Newton Chapel
This lecture centers on the Federal Convention of 1787 and the state ratifying conventions that debated the draft Constitution. It explores the question of religion at those conventions within the context of trying to create a “more perfect Union.” It concludes that the delegates at the Philadelphia Convention separated matters of church and state both to solidify the union and to safeguard religion from government encroachment.
