RICHMOND, Va. — The Virginia Baptist Mission Board has approved a “2010 History Project” to publish a document to correct “certain influential versions of American history [which] … mistakenly minimize or deny the grounding in this nation’s history of the Baptist principles of religious liberty or its safeguard, the Baptist principle of church-state separation ….”
The project, recommended by the Baptist General Association of Virginia’s religious liberty committee, is a response to what the religious liberty committee called recent revisions of American history which minimize or deny separation of church and state or government neutrality toward all religions and non-religions.
The history project aims to publish a “layman-accessible” pamphlet of about 100 pages within a year. BGAV executive director John Upton is asked to name an unpaid director of the project, who will work closely with the religious liberty committee in developing the document.
The final text of the document will be approved by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board.
In presenting the proposal to the Mission Board, Rob James, religious liberty committee chair, referred to a resolution which the committee is recommending at the BGAV annual meeting next month, which calls on Virginia Baptists to “regard it as a threat to the flourishing of religious liberty when any version of our nation’s history minimizes or denies the historical basis of either” church-state separation or government neutrality in religious matters.
Robert Dilday is managing editor of the Religious Herald.
The full text of the proposed resolution and its supporting documentation follows:
Explanation of the Resolution
The following resolution says how important it is, if we Baptists are to remain true to our principles, that we know how we got them, humanly and historically speaking, and that we be on guard against mistaken and misleading accounts as to how all this came about.
The Religious Liberty Committee of the Baptist General Association of Virginia believes that the resolution below speaks for itself. However, one thing needs to be emphasized. The Committee is well aware that, at the present time, few members of the General Association have knowledge of the writers mentioned in the fourth “whereas” clause.
For this reason the resolution is careful to say only that the Committee has knowledge of these writers: it does not say that the messengers to this or any meeting of the General Association have knowledge of these writers, or that these messengers have reached any conclusions about these writers.
Thus, as the “therefore” clause makes clear, in adopting the resolution, the messengers will only be saying that they regard it as a threat to the flourishing of religious liberty when any version of American history minimizes or denies the historical basis of either of the two Baptist principles named at the beginning of the resolution.
Resolution: Inaccurate history threatens religious liberty
Whereas, the Baptist principles of religious liberty and its safeguard, separation of church and state (or government neutrality toward all religions and nonreligion), are well grounded in this nation’s history, and
Whereas, the labors of Virginians, notably Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, and the Baptist minister John Leland, were crucial in the historic events that made these two principles part of our nation’s Bill of Rights, and
Whereas, no people, Baptist or otherwise, can remain true to its principles if its knowledge or collective memory of these principles is tampered with, altered, or replaced by a false version of history, and
Whereas, the Religious Liberty Committee of the Baptist General Association of Virginia has concluded that systematic efforts have been under way in recent decades to write and teach versions of American history that minimize and sometimes deny the historic basis of one or both of the principles named above, including, so the Committee judges, in the work of David Barton (1), the late W. Cleon Skousen (2), some “Reconstructionist” authors (3), and those who shaped some of the textbook recommendations made by the Texas Board of Education in May, 20104, and
Whereas, resources are available for correcting any such mistaken history, including a 1999 article by Stephen Stookey of Fort Worth, Texas,
Now therefore be it resolved, that the Baptist General Association of Virginia calls upon Virginia Baptists, and all who cherish religious liberty, (1) to redouble their efforts to know and teach the historical foundation and meaning of the two principles named above, (2) to regard it as a threat to the flourishing of religious liberty when any version of our nation’s history minimizes or denies the historical basis of either of these principles, and (3) to be diligent in resisting and correcting any such mistaken version of our history.
Notes:
(1) The Myth of Separation (Aledo, TX: WallBuilder Press, 1991, fourth edition). Here and in the next three endnotes, only one or two examples of historical errors in each source are given. On page 14, Barton says the idea that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state was not announced by the Supreme Court until the 1947 decision of Everson v. Board of Education. In fact, it was first announced in the 1878 decision of Reynolds v. United States.
(2) The Five Thousand Year Leap (Franklin, TN: American Documents Publishing, 2009; foreword by Glenn Beck). On page 60 Skousen says the Founders of our Republic wanted public schools to teach those religious tenets “which were universally accepted by all faiths and completely fundamental in their premises.” But at the time of the Constitution’s adoption, most states did not have public schools, and there was no agreement on what religious tenets, if any, should be taught in such schools.
On page 70 Skousen says the Founders, including Jefferson, believed that state governments should “encourage” religions of all kinds. The Founders did believe that persons should be religious and that state governments should be accommodating to religions, but by no means did they all believe that state governments should be promoting religion. Madison said, “Religion is wholly exempt from its [government’s] cognizance;” Jefferson said “that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;” and Washington, explaining why God and Jesus Christ are not mentioned in the Constitution, said “The path of true piety … is more properly committed … to the guidance of the ministers of the gospel” than to government.
(3) Among the representatives of different kinds of Reconstructionists, George Grant may serve as our example. On pages 16-17 of his The Changing of the Guard (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1995), Grant provides a fictitious account of what happened after Benjamin Franklin moved that the members of the Constitutional Convention pray. The fictitious account, based on the false memory of a member of the Convention nearly 40 years later, is at odds with the minutes of the Convention. Further, James Madison tried to correct the fiction in at least two letters. This information, and that in the next note, comes largely from Stephen M. Stookey. For this endnote, see “In God We Trust: Evangelical Historiography and the Quest for a Christian America,” Part Two, Southwestern Journal of Theology (Summer 1999), 15-17.
(4) The late Peter Marshall, Jr. was one of the six supposed experts named to a review board by the Texas schoolbook commission. With David Manuel, he was co-author of the very influential book, The Light and the Glory (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1977). On pages 193-94, Marshall and Manuel criticize one of the great heroes of religious liberty, Roger Williams, because of Williams’ stand on church-state separation; and they describe his stand on liberty of conscience as unbalanced, and as “a license to disregard all authority with which one does not agree at the time” Stookey, Part One (Spring 1999), 56.