February 19, 2001
Dunn: 'True Baptists' defend liberty
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___AUSTIN--Commitment to separation of church and state is an identifying mark of true Baptists, a church-state scholar and activist told the annual conference of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission.
___"I personally and passionately believe that Baptist Christians are an identifiable breed. One of our marks is separation of church and state," said James Dunn, visiting professor of Christianity and public policy at Wake Forest Divinity School.
___"There is no doubt that there is an unbroken chain in our Baptist bona fides from soul freedom to religious liberty to the separation of church and state," said Dunn, former executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington.
___He spoke on "Religious Liberty as a Baptist Distinctive" at the annual statewide workshop, held Feb. 12-13 at Tarrytown Baptist Church in Austin.
___Using the metaphor of a pebble tossed in a pond, he said three principles--soul freedom, religious liberty and church-state separation--are like three concentric circles.
___"The center circle is the point of impact, representing the experience of one person with the Divine--the central act of one's life, an act of God's grace, the immediate engagement of heaven with earth, soul freedom," Dunn said.
___Religious liberty is the second circle, representing the moral, ethical and social result of a saving encounter with God, he explained. And the outer ring, church-state separation, is the "necessary corollary" to the two inner circles.
___The Baptist commitment to these principles is not based on Enlightenment thought, Constitutional guarantees, biblical proof-texts or experiential pragmatism, Dunn said.
___"We root our soul freedom in the very nature and person of God," he said. "We are wired up with a 'chooser,' and we live with the consequences of those choices. In a sense, we are genetically programmed for soul freedom."
___Because people are created in the image of God, he continued, "to deny freedom of conscience to any person is to debase God's creation."
___A commitment to separation of church and state flows naturally from that conviction, Dunn said.
___"True, separation of church and state does not define Baptist theology, but it is a logical, inextricable, inevitable corollary of religious liberty as we know it," he said. "It is the plug which, if pulled out of our machine, the motor dies. We go no more."
___Anyone who claims a devotion to religious liberty but questions the validity of church-state separation may be a devout Christian, but that person is not an authentic Baptist, Dunn said.
___"If you dismiss the separation of church and state as some irrelevant, optional teaching, I can say you are not a Baptist," he maintained.
___"I contend there is a Baptist identity. There are Baptist spots on our herd, and you can tell them apart from the others. ... Without these spots, you may be a wonderful person, maybe a devout and dedicated Christian, far closer to the Jesus model than I may ever be. But frankly, my dear, you are not a Baptist."
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