Written by Don Byrd
The Baptist world lost a giant, and the Baptist Joint Committee lost a friend this weekend when Gardner Taylor passed away at age 96. Taylor was well-known as an iconic preacher and civil rights leader, but he was also a passionate champion of church-state separation and religious liberty for all.
In 2003, Taylor delivered a sermon for Religious Liberty Day, in which he warned that exercising our religious liberty should not become too prideful.
The great blessings of religious liberty, the freedom of every person to worship God “under his vine and under his fig tree” can become the overreaching that is license, lack of due restraint, the inability to make the distinction between being made a “little lower” than God and being God.
This is the peril America faces today. . . . We are in danger of seeing our blessings as license.
Sarah Pulliam Bailey has a nice writeup about Taylor in the Washington Post. Religion News Service offers this story about his life and legacy. In 2010, the Baptist Joint Committee awarded Taylor the J.M.Dawson Religious Liberty Award.
