A rabbi among Baptists

By Rabbi David Segal, BJC Policy Counsel

“Why is a rabbi working for a Baptist organization?” 

What struck me most about this congressional staffer’s question is that I heard it only once during a day of a half-dozen meetings on Capitol Hill. I understand why it may be surprising to some that a Jewish attorney and advocate would fit in at a Christian advocacy organization, but this rabbi has found a home at BJC.

Growing up as part of a religious minority in America, I was raised on stories of this country’s embrace of religious diversity. My father introduced me to George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. The synagogue had written to the new president with well-earned skepticism about whether America’s promise of full and equal citizenship regardless of religion included Jews — since no country had offered that before. 

President Washington responded that all “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” not out of mere “toleration … by the indulgence of one class of people,” but because those rights are inherent in humanity. The president assured the Rhode Island Jewish community that the government gives “to persecution no assistance” and prayed that everyone “shall sit under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” In other words, this would be a country that separates citizenship from religious identity. More than a century later, my grandparents benefited from this promise, leaving their less-than-hospitable Eastern European birthplaces to create a new life here, as Jews and equally as Americans. 

Baptists have been at the forefront of defending America’s promise of religious freedom since colonial times. More than a century before President Washington reassured Rhode Island’s Jews of their American welcome, Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts for agitating against religious coercion. He founded Rhode Island as a haven for Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and other religious minorities and established the first Baptist church in this country.

Inspired by Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13, Williams (a Baptist only briefly — but more Baptist than I!) taught that the power to distinguish between truth and error —wheat and weeds — would belong to God alone at the harvest. This faith manifests as patience and pluralism, trusting in God to sort it out at the end of time while we figure out how to live together peaceably in the meantime.

This teaching resonates with pluralistic threads in Jewish tradition. The Torah speaks commandingly to Jews in the context of our divine covenant, but we don’t expect others to live by our rules — aside from the basic moral laws given to Noah in Genesis 9. Rabbinic sages across the centuries taught that the righteous of all nations, not only among the Jewish people, have a share in the world to come.

It’s no wonder that Jews have embraced and defended religious pluralism in America: it resonates with our theology and it has allowed us to thrive. For me, working with Baptists to cultivate and expand religious liberty fulfills my deepest commitments as a Jewish American. 

Why then is a rabbi engaged in legislative advocacy and litigation strategy at BJC? Because I feel called to do this work, and I’m blessed to do it within an organization with the vision and legacy of BJC.

David Segal is BJC’s policy counsel.

This column originally appeared in the winter 2025 edition of Report from the Capital. You can view it as a PDF or read a digital flip-through edition.