The older I become, the more I appreciate and reaffirm that my baptistic theology is one that offers the world — beginning with America — solid principles by which to live respectfully with neighbor.
Even if only the four foundational principles (which Walter Shurden calls “Four Fragile Freedoms”) are named, these are enough to call sinners to repentance — from America to Russia, China and Israel — and not a few European nations to jubilee, reparations and restitution.
Michael Friday
Regrettably, most American news media houses never carry the most consequential speeches made at a United Nations General Assembly. Especially when their own president’s speech is lamentably and atrociously deficient, it would be a relief for Americans to hear what serious world leaders have to say. As I’ve listened to multiple international leaders’ speeches at the United Nations General Assembly, I heard, repeatedly, a hunger for reform, respect, rejection of the perspective that “might makes right,” and more.
As expected, those were not the tones from the United States, one of the biggest sinners judging by what I call the Baptist Code.
The Baptist Code
And what is the Baptist Code? Those four fragile freedoms include soul freedom, biblical freedom, religious freedom, and church freedom. At the heart of those freedoms is sovereignty and the required recognition of that sovereignty by others, who themselves enjoy the selfsame sovereignty.
Soul freedom is a person’s complete and sovereign freedom to believe and to “faith” as they will, without being browbeaten into or out of that position.
Biblical freedom similarly allows an individual to read and interpret the Bible with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This does not nullify Bible study or growing in community and tempering one’s perspectives through the perspectives of others in community.
However, this tempering is always from inner expulsion, never from outer compulsion. The biblical position to which a person holds is totally their sovereign right. Any change that occurs is through ℎ own growth either in community discussion or in private reflection — never from force or coercion.
“Religious freedom is not about singling out your religion for freedoms to the exclusion, deprivation or demonization of all others.”
Religious freedom flows naturally from the first two freedoms. Baptists who remain truly baptistic (for you see, there are “BINOs” all over America and the world) fiercely defend the right of people to hold a religion — any religion — or to no religion. It is a tightrope evangelical Baptists walk; for evangelical initiatives in our age has often meant proselytizing, which itself frequently skirts disrespecting other religions.
It goes further than that, though. Religious freedom is not about singling out your religion for freedoms to the exclusion, deprivation or demonization of all others. That would be religious bigotry, not freedom; and unfortunately, it is burgeoning in America.
Church freedom makes Baptists unique. Baptists have no monarchical denominational bishop (although some ambitious people in individual Baptist churches call themselves “bishop”). Baptists hold no creed; nor should they create any “statements” or “policies” by which they expect Baptist congregations to abide.
There isn’t a single clause in the Apostles’ Creed to which an average Baptist would take exception. Yet, Baptists are so skittish about creeds or anything that smacks of binding congregations to any formatted, pre-determined, constructed document meant to bind people and congregations — save the Scriptures themselves — that even that creed is disallowed as a requirement in Baptist circles.
Creeds and statements are viewed as inimical to freedom and regarded as portals to control, which is the next step beyond invading or removing freedoms. This has loud implications for civil and political discourse, and for the vexed matter of making moral decisions in controversial matters.
Baptist gatherings (such as the American Baptist Churches USA) are exactly that: “churches” — not “a” church. Each congregation is sufficiently competent and sovereign to determine its own governance, vision and mission without interference from anyone else, whether a bishop, another church or a denomination (for neither do Baptists, strictly speaking, possess “a” denomination).
A corrective challenge
These Baptist positions, for anyone who knows the American Constitution, and for anyone who knows the United Nations Charter, bear severe corrective challenge for nations that seek to impose their will upon other nations, or whose people within seek to impose their religions upon others, or who disrespect another sovereign nation’s right to determine its own governance, even if that nation’s approach harms their people. In that latter matter, this is why the United Nations exists and why it is not only arrogance for one nation to take upon itself unlawful policing ways, but also sabotage to the U.N. Charter.
Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine is patently unjust. It violates Ukraine’s freedoms and sovereignty; and no Baptist should be comfortable with that.
Israel’s ways with Palestine abrogate divine balance and deny Palestine’s divine right to sovereignty and freedom. America is guilty as charged, for continually supplying Israel the military support that obliterates Palestine, while fostering policy that delays their freedoms.
“When America proposes on the United Nations dais to ‘annihilate’ Iran, does that not make America just evil as Iran who chants ‘Death to America’?”
No Baptist who cherishes their four fragile freedoms should sleep well so long as this prevails. When America proposes on the United Nations dais to “annihilate” Iran (which would be another war crime), does that not make America just evil as Iran who chants “Death to America?”
Along with the yet-to-be-adjudicated mass boat murders in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Paria near Venezuela, the United States crowned those multiple atrocities with its unilateral, unauthorized and illegal incursion (not “excursion”) into Venezuela, overthrowing their national leader and, arguably, now stealing Venezuela’s most valued mineral resource.
Whither the unrelenting Baptist voices everywhere, excoriating this wickedness?
The war (neither incursion nor excursion) on Iran has snatched multiple freedoms from many — including the freedom of many Americans to buy food, or gas, or heat their homes economically or even at all, not to mention the worse chill of gathering at Christmas without a loved one, killed by bullets or bombs in a senseless war.
Haiti’s abject condition today still stands as judgment to France (since 1804) and the United States (since 1806, exacerbated in 1919). Cuba, too, is unnecessarily and iniquitously punished, its innocent babies, children, women and men being robbed of energy, left in darkness and literally being starved to death by a bully whose largest Protestant religion is Southern Baptist. This is infernal diabolism.
Enough!
Judgment
All this is Matthew 25 judgment upon Baptists — both those Southern ones who thoughtlessly support successive U.S. governments that have perpetrated this wickedness and other Baptists anywhere who’ve silently remained indifferent and unconcerned.
We should not consider our Baptist polity an ethic good enough for our churches yet somehow inapplicable for our nations’ treatment of international neighbors. It is worse when the world’s largest Baptist convention mutilates Baptist principles and then marries a depraved, deceitful and destructive political party.
The false prophets those conditions produce further creates a vile and exceptionalist worldview that is perfectly supremacist, hegemonic and violative of God-given freedoms and national sovereignties.
“It is worse when the world’s largest Baptist convention mutilates Baptist principles and then marries a depraved, deceitful and destructive political party.”
How is it that Baptist voices have not sustainably joined the calls from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom for reparations due to grave atrocities in the past that not only violated national sovereignty then, but have also left residual injustice and social and economic malaise in their wake? What role might Baptists play in challenging the powerful to assess the cost of freedoms and the price to pay when they have robbed the less powerful of theirs?
Anyone looking on at the United Nations for decades now, with objective lenses, could not avoid concluding that the biggest stumbling blocks to true progress in the United Nations, besides some smaller rogue nations, are three of the five who hold permanent seats on the security council: China and Russia (for their perennial irascibility), and the United States (for its perennial arrogance and self-bloviating supremacy, depending on who is in the White House). John the Baptist himself would bristle at this.
Through the lenses of Baptist freedoms, and the Baptist ethic, Christian supremacy cannot be anything but sinful. Through the same lenses, religious nationalism is evil, especially if misnamed “Christian.” Both were leveraged by Europe as they brutally “Christianized” the Americas, Africa and Asia. In our times, both may seem American; but both are unamerican, based on what the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence proffer. Stigmatizing and demonizing Muslims is un-Christian, and undoubtedly un-Baptist. Blindly supporting Israel in every position their criminally indicted prime minister takes on Palestine is myopic and would not survive a stress test if interrogated or prosecuted against Baptist principles.
It is time for Baptists worldwide, but starting in these United States, to take the blinders off, to disabuse themselves of any idea that their polity and freedoms are for church only, or “sweet fellowship and joys divine, leaning on the Everlasting Arms” and not also for engagement in the public square as Christian citizens, and to serve them as agents of reconciliation.
At home, among many other things, this should go a long way to interrupting the silence too many Baptists still hold when masked goons of the state wickedly manhandle, maim and kill both citizens and immigrants alike on American streets. Abroad, this should go a long way to removing the arrogance with which America, and other unjustifiably privileged security council members, go to the United Nations, free to use their freedoms to curtail the freedoms of the weaker and smaller nations.
As for the International Criminal Court, who, except international criminals, are taking umbrage that it exists?
Michael Friday serves as executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Greater Indianapolis and is author of the book, And Lead Us Not Into Dysfunction: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, of Church institutions and Their Leaders. He is a member of BWA Commission on the Healthy Churches and the Commission on Gender, Racial and Economic Justice. He has served Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the USA.