J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, was the keynote speaker at the Nov. 10 dedication of a collection of materials on the separation of church and state donated by and named for long-time BJC supporter Flynn T. Harrell at the University of South Carolina.
The Harrell collection, housed in the University Libraries’ South Carolina Political Collections, consists of journals, correspondence, audio-visual files and more than 100 books documenting the history and debate of church/state issues. The collection was gathered from a variety of sources and organizations over the past 45 years, and it reflects Harrell’s extensive involvement with the Baptist Joint Committee and the Religious Liberty Council.
Click here to visit the BJC’s Flickr page and see photos from the dedication ceremony. Walker commended Harrell for his service as a lifelong advocate for religious freedom, and for helping to dispel misconceptions about the First Amendment.
“Indeed, this generous library gift memorializes [Harrell’s] energy and dedication and will serve to debunk these myths for generations to come,” Walker said. Walker’s speech focused on five common myths concerning the separation of church and state in the United States, including the idea that the separation of church and state does not exist because those words are not in the U.S. Constitution. “True, the words aren’t there,” Walker said, “but the principle surely is.” Walker also addressed misconceptions that the United Sates is a Christian nation, that citizens have freedom of religion but not freedom from religion, that church-state separation only keeps government from setting up a single national church and that God has been kicked out of the public square.
Harrell served as an executive assistant to Attorney General Travis Medlock for 11 years and for 21 years as the first business/financial officer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. He was elected president of the convention for 1987. Harrell is a former member of the Board of Visitors of the Wake Forest University Divinity School and the advisory council of the Center on Religion in the South at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. He has authored several church/state articles and delivered speeches on the subject on more than one hundred occasions to churches, schools, civic clubs and other groups.
Raised as a Baptist in Colombia, SC, Harrell learned about religious liberty at an early age. He has been collecting newspaper clippings, books, and resources relating to the constitutional guarantee for most of his adult life, and he has spoken to more than one hundred different groups and authored numerous articles on the subject.
