NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — Charles Haynes didn't know he would be receiving a painting of colonial Providence, R.I., and its historic First Baptist Church in America when he praised the founder of both that city and congregation.
The First Amendment expert, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va., received the framed print April 29 in recognition of receiving the 10th annual Associated Baptist Press Religious Freedom Award. Haynes was singled out for his work to advance religious liberty in America's public schools since the mid-1990s. He is the principal organizer in an effort to create a set of consensus guidelines on teaching about religion in schools.
In an acceptance speech that focused on the need to preserve religious freedom as enshrined in the Constitution, Haynes told the story of Roger Williams, the Rhode Island colony he founded and a group of religious refugees who moved there.
He said the first Jewish families to settle in the New World came to Rhode Island in 1654, after being kicked out of their earlier homesteads in Brazil by an intolerant Portuguese governor. A more indulgent previous viceroy, Haynes said, had tolerated the Jews there before — but had not ensured their absolute religious freedom.
“Toleration by government is not enough — it can be taken away,” Haynes said. “It can be limited, because it is not freedom.” And, he warned, “A lot of people in America believe it should still be that way.”
By 1658, a second boatload of Jewish colonists had landed in Rhode Island — the world's first government offering absolute religious freedom. For a people who had been persecuted and sometimes slaughtered for their faith in many different countries across hundreds of years, Haynes said, the Jewish settlers in Rhode Island couldn't believe they had found a place where “[f]or the first time in human history, your standing in the religious community didn't affect your standing in the civil community.”
However, Haynes noted, Roger Williams' commitment to religious liberty in a civil context didn't mean that he thought all religions were equally right or good. The “eccentric, Puritan, strange and wonderful man” thought that religious liberty “is what God required.”
Williams “wanted everyone to come to understand the gospel as he did,” Haynes said. However, they could only do that truly and freely without the pressure or aid of government to do so.
Haynes noted that the Jewish settlers founded what would later become the oldest Jewish house of worship in the New World — Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I. He told a story about how he once visited the congregation's 1763 building, which included a trap door by the pulpit.
Such an escape door might have come in handy for Jews in the Old World, who were regularly subjected to pogroms and other persecution, Haynes said. But, he added, “Here's the great thing about our country…. In all these hundreds of years, those Jews have never had to use that trap door.”
Haynes said that legacy needs to continue, despite pressures to limit religious freedom or curtail the rights of religious minorities. “We need to preserve — even expand — the world's greatest experiment in religious liberty.”
In a keynote speech commemorating Haynes' award, Freedom Forum founder and legendary newspaper editor John Seigenthaler praised supporters of Associated Baptist Press — created in 1990 when the editors of the Southern Baptist Convention's news agency were fired by conservatives — as “people of Christian courage.”
However, he said, the United States in the age of terrorism may be facing its own crisis of courage when it comes to dealing fairly with one of its newest religious minorities — Muslims.
Many in the majority, Seigenthaler said, “do not understand and have failed to demonstrate Christian care for” Muslims in America. “They feel as persecuted today as the Jews who came to this country in the 1600s,” he said.
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