Rogers operates on thin ridge of faith and politics

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (ABP) — A career invested in helping Baptists and others navigate the narrow edge where government and religion press against each other with mutual respect and reciprocal wariness has garnered Melissa Rogers the Religious Freedom Award from Associated Baptist Press.

Receiving the ABP award is “a great honor, one that is tremendously humbling,” Rogers said. “I say many times that some people in their lifetimes can claim to be the originators of terrific ideas. Others get the opportunity to be introduced to great ideas and to live with them, study them and lift them up.”

Associated Baptist Press will present Rogers with the award at a recognition banquet May 1 at Ardmore Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C. Tickets are available online . R.G. Puckett, editor emeritus of the North Carolina Baptist Biblical Recorder will receive the Greg Warner Lifetime Achievement Award in Religious Journalism at the same event.

Melissa Rogers

Rogers directs the Wake Forest University School of Divinity Center for Religion and Public Affairs and is a nonresident senior fellow within the Governance Program of The Brookings Institution. She also teaches courses on church-state relations and Christianity and public policy within the divinity school.
 
Rogers previously served as executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in Washington, D.C., and was general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, where she was instrumental in helping to enact the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Rogers has co-authored a case book on religion and law for Baylor University Press, Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her chair of the first Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. 

ABP’s board established the Religious Freedom Award in 1994 to honor individuals who advance the principles and practice of religious freedom, particularly in the field of journalism. Rogers is the 13th recipient.

She is a “go to” resource for journalists and politicians dealing with public policy issues that involve religion, or vice versa. Current “front burner” issues involve government partnerships with non-profit agencies, including religious non-profits, to provide services.

She also is studying issues around the rights of health care professionals to decline to provide certain services to which they have a religious or moral objection.

“Melissa Rogers is an amazing resource person for religious groups across the nation with her particular expertise in religious freedom and church/state relationships,” said Bill Leonard, a noted Baptist historian who teaches with her at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

“Her work on the monumental study Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court is an illustration of her solid academic contribution; her work on President Obama’s church/state advisory committee gives evidence of her skills as a bridge builder to various political and religious coalitions; and her teaching opportunities at Wake Forest University have enhanced graduate education for divinity school students significantly.”

Last year Rogers’ Wake Forest Center for Religion and Public Affairs released a publication entitled, Religious Expression in American Public Life: A Joint Statement of Current Law at The Brookings Institution. The statement summarizes the law on various points of religious expression in American public life. Does the law allow, for instance, prayers before sporting events or public meetings? Does it allow churches to meet on public property or schools to conduct religion education classes or religious symbols to be displayed in government buildings?

There is so much misinformation about the law in these areas and about what does and does not constitute conflicts of interest between religion and public affairs that Rogers led production of this document that details, “what the law actually says, not what people say it says,” she said.

A changing Supreme Court and “a steady relaxation of the rules that apply to religious institutions and activities” receiving government funding is also an issue Rogers is watching “to see where the court moves in the future and see if the rules continued to be softened.”

“Religious issues” do not begin and end with those involving Christian churches. Many Americans struggle with the presence and place of Islam in America and the debate over construction of a mosque near the site in New York City where Muslim extremists brought down the towers “brought that to the fore,” Rogers said.

People in other parts of the country debate the place or prohibition of sharia law in local jurisdictions. “We want to have one standard for the free exercise of all faiths,” Rogers said. “One of the concerns is that we see in some instances people calling for a singling out of Islam for different treatment and sometimes the government even acquiescing in that.”

Rogers asks as she works in the context of faith, religion, government and public policy, “How do we maintain that seamless system for all people of all faiths in religion?

“I think we have to renew our dedication to these issues with each generation,” she said. “Time will tell whether we did a good job with this or not. “

In the ongoing discussion of religion in public life, Rogers confesses discouragement when some claim “that to defend the freedom of others to practice their religion is defending the truth claims of the other faiths.”

“That’s not so,” she said. “Rather it is defending their liberty to practice their faith, which is basic in American history and constitutional law.”

Early Baptists, she said, like Roger Williams and John Leland, defended the faiths of people that were quite different from their own.

Rogers relishes living with the great ideas of religious freedom and holding up the ideal of church and state separation, ideals voiced and validated by early Baptists.

 “I view any chance that any award someone might give me is not affirmation of me personally, so much as affirmation of the continued power of the Baptist ideal of church state separation and religious liberty,” she said. 

Rogers is married to Stan Fendley and they have two sons, Adam and Carter. She is a graduate of Baylor University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.