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At the center of the maelstrom is the question of the Senate filibuster, and whether Republicans can alter Senate rules to prevent Democrats from using unlimited debate to block seven Bush judicial nominees.
In an April 18 e-mail by the fundamentalist-leaning Focus on the Family, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, called the anti-filibuster crusade a battle against "black-robed tyranny." And Senate majority leader Bill Frist recently used his bully pulpit to fuel the erroneous suggestion by the religious right that the dispute is between the faithful and the faithless.
Amidst all this grandstanding, moderate voices - particularly moderate religious voices - have become more and more crucial. For Southern Baptists, factionalized since a massive split 14 years ago, it's a Tampa-trained lawyer-turned-minister named Brent Walker who's leading the effort to remind church leaders and others of the significance of the First Amendment.
"The goal is religious liberty for everyone by means of separation of church and state," says Walker, who heads a diverse non-profit coalition of Baptists across the U.S. "If you don't have separation between church and state, you don't have full religious freedom for everyone. As soon as government takes sides in matters of religion, someone's religious liberty gets denied."
It's an argument with particular relevance at the moment. And for moderates from a Southern Baptist background, the separation of church and state seems a vital part of their tradition. They have watched as fundamentalist forces within their denomination worked to erode that separation - and now they're speaking out as they see real signs of the same erosion happening in the country as a whole.
It's doubtful that many Floridians have heard of Brent Walker. A former attorney at Tampa law firm Carlton, Fields, he was raised in Tampa's Bayshore Baptist Church and played first base at Robinson High School. As executive director of the 69-year-old Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, Walker is at the forefront of an effort to protect religious liberties in the U.S.On April 24, he helped organize a protest in Louisville, Ky., during the airing of "Justice Sunday" from the 2,000-person Highview Baptist Church. During that broadcast, Sen. Frist championed his plan to overhaul the 200-year-old Senate filibuster system.
The telecast, which was sponsored by the right-wing Family Research Council, made ominous references to "the filibuster against people of faith" and suggested that all religiously minded voters were of uniform opinion, locked in step with Frist and the FRC. Walker begs to differ: "People can speak out, and God can motivate people, but it's presumptuous to say 'God is on my side.'"
In a recent sermon, Walker talked about the issue this way:
"We need to stop trying to convince each other we've got God in our hip pockets. God is not a Republican or a Democrat, nor even an American for that matter. God's precinct is the universe. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's famous pronouncement about the Civil War, the question is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side. God is not aligned with any political party, but is able to work within and though all political movements and nations to accomplish his purposes."
A promising attorney slated for partnership when he decided to leave Carlton, Fields to study for the ministry, Walker entered the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville in 1986. His longtime friend, Tampa insurance agent Richard Heider, remembers the morning, during a breakfast at the Village Inn on Dale Mabry, when Walker explained his life-changing plans.
"He just felt called," says Heider, who had grown close to Walker at Bayshore Baptist, and remembers being devastated by the news. Walker's wife and their two children had become so intertwined with Heider's family that their absence seemed unimaginable. "You don't have that many close friends in your life," says Heider.
Since that time, the families have stayed close and visit regularly, Heider says. But Walker's life has changed. After graduating from seminary, he worked for a short time as a minister. But in 1989, he decided to juggle both faith and law and take a job as associate general counsel with the Baptist Joint Committee.
Now, as executive director, Walker spends most of his time filing amicus briefs, or friend of the court papers, for upcoming cases at the U.S. Supreme Court that deal with the First Amendment. He also lectures at churches, colleges and conventions and issues weekly news releases on BJC's website (www.bjcpa.org).
As the head of the BJC, Walker and his group take no position on the proposed filibuster changes or the judicial nominees. The organization becomes concerned with those issues only when there's a perceived violation of church-state separation.
Walker says there's a constant tension that exists in the First Amendment between two clauses: the establishment clause, which forbids the government from underwriting religion; and the free exercise clause, which insures citizens' rights to practice religion as they wish. "You have to uphold both," he says. "Sometimes they tend to tug against one another, but that's OK. That's what they are supposed to do."
For instance, this year he has written in support of expanding prisoner rights to prayer (free exercise) and, yet, has opposed the placement of the Ten Commandments on government property in Texas and Kentucky (establishment clause). In his role at the BJC, Walker has fought President Bush's efforts to give money to religious-based programs, but has supported the state funding of groups like Catholic Charities, which operate on a secular models.
Walker's BJC office is on Maryland Avenue in Washington, some 200 yards from the U.S. Supreme Court. He's surrounded by family photos of his wife and two children, and by photos of himself with politicians, including presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. However, no pictures exist of him and George W. Bush, something Walker attributes to the current president's unwillingness to listen to those who disagree with him and who don't espouse the same melding of church and state.
Whereas the other presidents invited Walker to White House meetings, even when there was disagreement, President Bush does not. "The religious right and the political right have gained ascendancy in the country in the last 15 to 20 years and have captured the Republican party in a way I don't remember before," he says.
In the current political climate, fewer political moderates remain in the Legislature, he says - people like former senators Mark Hatfield of Oregon and John Chafee of Rhode Island - and polarization is jeopardizing the future of democracy in this country.
For instance, he points out that during the last legislative session, Republican Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado proposed Senate Bill 1558, which would strip federal courts of the ability to hear state-level disputes over the Ten Commandments and toss the responsibility to state legislatures. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule later this year whether monuments to the commandments should be permitted on publicly owned grounds in Texas and Kentucky.
Then there's Frist. The senator's proposal to weaken the filibuster - which allows unlimited debate on an issue and essentially forestalls a vote - would reduce the number of votes needed to end a filibuster, changing it from the current 60 percent to a simple majority. Frist peddles this change (the so-called "nuclear option") as a short-term goal, to counteract the threat that Democrats will filibuster seven nominated judges whom they deem as unfit for the bench - although the Senate has already approved 205 of the president's 229 nominated judges.
For Walker and other moderate Baptists, the fundamentalists' systematic attempts to co-opt the legislative process are not only disturbing but familiar. Right-wing factions used similar tactics when they began their gradual assumption of power in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).The fundamentalists first showed signs of becoming a force in the Southern Baptist church in 1979, turning out en masse during the annual convention and managing for the first time to win the presidency of the then-134-year-old group. As outlined in Nancy Ammerman's Baptist Battles, rifts within the church have occurred throughout its history, yet the sexual, civil and cultural wars of the '60s and '70s stoked the fundamentalists' fury anew.
Led by Texas Judge Paul Pressler, the fundamentalists for the next 12 years jammed the halls of the conventions, blocked conservative and moderate candidates and initiatives, and started taking over Southern Baptist publishing houses, schools and seminaries. The fundamentalists called for heightened, circumscribed rules for women, and literalist - what many moderates would call grossly selective - interpretations of the Bible. By gaining access to the presidency and important boards, which allowed them to outlaw anyone who veered from their doctrine, they were able to determine the rules and remove seminary professors and scholars who disagreed.
Molly Marshall was a respected professor and associate dean during this time at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship seminary for Southern Baptists. Like other Baptists, she witnessed the changes in the church with alarm. By 1994, she was out of a job (she calls it a "coerced resignation") along with close to a hundred other SBC seminary faculty members.
This mass cleansing "was egregiously unfair and based on falsehood and on patriarchal power," says Marshall, now president of the Central Baptist Seminary, an affiliate of the American Baptist Church (see sidebar).
Moderate Baptists fought back during those years, but it was never enough. The infamous Resolution No. 5 struck the final blow. Issued in 1988, the "Priesthood of the Believer" resolution established an unprecedented hierarchy in the church, which was to be played out in the homes: pastor over believer, husband over wife. This from a faith that prided itself on religious liberty, and which had suffered horribly in both England and the colonial U.S. because of its worshippers' desire for independence. When No. 5 was approved, the moderates marched out of the San Antonio, Texas, convention center and headed out to the Alamo, where they ripped up their copies of the resolution, singing "We Shall Overcome."
Three years later, the split was permanent: The moderates left the Southern Baptist Church - or were forced out, as many would say - to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
"Baptists have lost many thoughtful persons because they thought there was only one way to be a Baptist," says Marshall.
For Walker, it's been a long road. When the split in the church occurred in 1991, he had been with the Baptist Joint Committee only a few years. He remembers how the fundamentalists attempted to squelch the BJC by trying to stack the board, but were ultimately blocked. The fundamentalists retaliated by yanking their funding of the BJC, which had provided roughly 50 percent of the committee's total budget. Today, Walker says he has no regrets about the estrangement. "It was a difficult time," he says. "You never want to lose half your budget, but it was liberating in a sense."
Can the takeover of the SBC be seen as a trial run for strategies that have proven successful on a national political level? Some recent exchanges suggest it's more than likely. The same patterns of manipulation, selective rigidity and power brokering seem to be playing out on the national level.
And what's noteworthy is that the gains in the SBC were not temporary. The fundamentalists, once in office, changed not only the constituency, but also the rules - rules, as with Resolution No. 5, that determined who was seen, heard and had overarching power.
Walker fears that many Baptists have forgotten or ignored the church's history as a proponent of church-state separation. Now, his alma mater, Southern Baptist Seminary, is run by fundamentalists who are working to dissolve church/state boundaries - and who, as with Marshall, want nothing to do with him. The sentiment is mutual, although "heartbreaking."
Seminary study, he says, "was a wonderful part of my life. It had to do with who I turned out to be, and I loved what it was, the freedom, the intellectual challenge that it was, and it's no longer that way … In every class one was free to question what the professor was saying or to disagree with a student - how do you understand the Trinity; how do you understand Christ being holy and human; how does one achieve salvation? There was a true sense that you are engaged in serious scholarship rather than being spoonfed."
At the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Florida, state coordinator Carolyn Anderson speaks from her Lakeland office. Like Walker, Anderson is a Christian believer who predicts "some cloudy days in America." She jokes that as a moderate Baptist female she is hated in many circles, but she is personally encouraged by Walker's actions and that of BJC. "I have high regard for Brent," she says "He is a man of great commitment to the separation of church and state issue." Also, like Walker, she is frustrated by the newfound church-state closeness. If government underwrites and streamlines religion, it lessens one's choice to seek God, an issue paramount to Baptists.
"Everyone [in the Baptists' fundamentalist wing] thinks they're born a Christian, and that loses a little of the impact, as opposed to being baptized by choice," she says. "That's who Baptists are; they've always wanted separation of church and state."
She too fears that the dynamics that overturned the SBC in the 1980s have finally hit larger turf. "We keep seeing it relived in a larger constituency."
In Florida, moderate Baptists remain, though in small numbers. The same week Justice Sunday aired, about 250 moderates gathered for a spiritual retreat in Leesburg - but the surrounding politics remain. "Speaking personally, it appears that Dobson, Mohler and those involved in hosting [Justice Sunday] are simply trying to rally the troops to continue in their efforts to turn the country to the right, which includes their very narrow goal of limiting the role of women in society as well as in the church," she says.
If many white moderates resent being depicted as lacking "values," then many African Americans also resist their recent "conservative" or "fundamentalist" labeling.
Emmanuel McCall, who is slated to become the first black leader, or moderator, of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, says minorities don't fit neatly into those categories, since the handful of major black Baptist conventions have historically operated separately from the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention. The soft-spoken pastor moved his church in the direction of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship once it became clear that a permanent division was taking place at the SBC. In truth, he doesn't see that many differences exist. He maintains that all Baptists embrace the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth and the authority of the scriptures. Yet McCall has seen the religious right try to exert pressure - especially when they attempt to pigeonhole minorities.
"No, we have not been taken under the wing of the religious right," McCall asserts. "You let an election come up with any issues that affect the black community, regardless whether it's Republicans or Democrats, and we will support what's in the best interest of the black community."
However, he says the Faith-Based Initiative has complicated the political alliances of blacks. The program, intended to give grassroots leaders easier access to federal dollars and support, has placed many minorities in uncomfortable situations.
"When you buy into that program you have to sell your soul," says McCall, a former pastor at the Christian Fellowship Baptist Church in College Park, Ga. "[The initiative] is not paying off like people thought. It's a Republican initiative and there's an understanding you would support them … There are strings attached that may be outspoken or upfront, or subtly and assumed."
As for the separation of church and state, McCall says that should be clear: "They ought to be firmly separated."
Which brings us back to Walker. It doesn't matter if it's Frist and the Family Research Council wrongly suggesting that God has cast a decision on a political matter, or a Colorado senator wanting to deprive federal courts of the ability to oversee Ten Commandment disputes. There is a reason for church-state separation. This is a message he's mastered, and one he continually repeats.
"The best thing government can do for religious liberty is to simply leave it alone," he says. "If any of us are going to be free, then all of us have to be free. This is not a pick-and-choose proposition."
allyson.gonzalez@weeklyplanet.com
