2018 BJC Fellows

Bound by my Catholic faith to recognize and to honor the dignity every person with a particular interest in interfaith collaboration and meeting the needs of those on the margins, I was drawn the work of the Baptist Joint Committee and the effort they pour into protecting religious liberty for all.  I work on a college campus where, recent survey results have shown us, students state that they think more favorably of people from different religious traditions if they know someone from that tradition.  My role as a chaplain on a college campus allows me to create spaces for interreligious dialogue and advocacy, but I have been itching for ways to take this advocacy to the next level.

The first day of our training, Charles Watson pleaded with us not to be combative with the Thomas Jefferson impersonator.  Throughout the course of the seminar, I kept wondering, “What happened last year?”  And despite not having the answer, I know this plea is reflective of the enormous amount of intelligence and activism in the room.  BJC Fellows are curious.  We ask questions, we crave facts, and we advocate for all.  It is a privilege for me to be counted in the Baptist Joint Committee family.

Unfamiliar with the tenets of Baptist theology and the core values of Baptist communities before the seminar, I am grateful for the opportunity to learn about my Christian brothers and sisters.  I had some baseline assumptions of what Baptists were like based on my limited interactions at home, but the people I met blew my assumptions away.  Just as within the Catholic Church, Baptists are diverse and complicated.  Like me, Baptists navigate a church that is both beautiful and broken.  We share a commitment to the dignity of each person, and having that foundation makes collaboration natural and easy.  In addition, the voices of other non-Baptists at the seminar made our conversations richer.  Each participant brought their full, authentic (and quirky!) self to the table, and we listened to each other with genuine curiosity and respect.  I do not know if I have ever learned more from a relatively small group of people.

Using what I learned at the BJC Fellows Seminar, I will be reframing the why of interfaith work on the Texas Christian University campus.  I serve as a staff advisor for TCU Better Together, our campus interfaith club that works closely with Interfaith Youth Core.  This diverse club meets weekly to engage in activities like interfaith dialogue, community service, and visits to local areas of worship.  While facilitating a student club that centers on free food and conversation is both fun and meaningful, I now have the knowledge I need to inject a more intentional why into the organization.  Our student organization matters because we are learning about our neighbors.  Learning about our neighbors matters because we are called, as people of faith, to love our neighbors. And loving our neighbors requires us to advocate for our neighbors.  In continued collaboration with the BJC, I know I can empower these students to be advocates for all.

Britt Luby is the Associate Chaplain at Texas Christian University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, in Fort Worth, Texas.

Growing up with privilege in America, I took religious liberty for granted. In fact, I only viewed religious liberty from the perspective of someone from above, or as someone from the inside. My time in Williamsburg further opened my eyes to the vantage points of people from the bottom, and the outside.

Baptists were those people at one time. Maybe not in the South when I was a kid, but two hundred plus years ago, they were the ones who were imprisoned; they were the ones they tried to silence. The irony is that you can’t really shut Baptists up. If there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s making a raucous. Even in prison, they found ways to preach the Good News.

Of course, even my knowledge of Baptists is skewed toward my privilege. I knew of Roger Williams, of the Massachusetts Baptists who were exiled to Rhode Island, of John Leland and the role Baptists played in the Bill of Rights. I wasn’t aware of the Black Baptists’ role in the early days of our history.

I was moved nearly to tears as we sat together and learned about the Black Baptist Meetinghouse in Williamsburg. As we read about the courage of these enslaved persons, I couldn’t help thinking how we give so much attention to the ministers—most often white—not just when they’re famous or charismatic, but even when they’re persecuted. Yet here an entire congregation was enslaved, in a lifelong prison, and we don’t celebrate them like we do the white Baptist preachers who were locked up. If the Baptist tradition was borne of dissent and courage, then black Baptists embodied it better than most.

At the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, I was invited into the pride and celebration of this historic church. Begun in 1776, this black Baptist congregation first met in a bog or a forest, with their first black pastor, and here we were nearly 250 years later ringing a bell in a historic sanctuary that had been rung by the first black President. As a Baptist pastor, I’m a descendent of this history, whether I’d ever been taught so or not.

I’m still processing why the racial oppression of slavery weighed so heavily on my heart and mind during a seminar on religious liberty. Except I can’t escape the juxtaposition of the notion of religious liberty against the backdrop of enslaved persons’ churches. One historical marker noted that the enslaved persons turned to the Baptist and other Christian congregational traditions because “everyone was equal in the eyes of God.”

Because liberty is essential to human dignity. They’re inextricably linked. We cannot fully recognize someone’s dignity if we don’t ensure their liberty. Freedom of conscience, to worship how or who or what one chooses, is what it means to be human. If that is kept from someone, then dehumanization has already begun, and slavery, whether in makeshift cages at a border or internment camps in WWII or chains during the Civil War, is only a step or two further.

So, religious liberty is about so much more than simply allowing people to worship. It’s about their fundamental right to exist—to be human. When we begin to allow our governments to diminish or denigrate or discriminate against people because of their religion, when entire religions are misunderstood or misrepresented or mischaracterized by our governments, we aren’t protecting anyone—we’re harming everyone.

The challenge of a nation that has ensured religious liberty for two centuries is that charitably, it can create complacency for the religious majority, or more critically, it induces a kind of hypocrisy that forgets that they were once the minority, too, and inevitably will be again.

And that’s the irony of my perspective growing up. A Baptist kid with the privilege of being in the religious majority in the South, taking for granted the very liberty that made it possible.

Never again.

Brent Newberry is the Pastor at the The First Baptist Church of Worcester in Worcester, Massachusetts.