by Bruce Gourley » Sun Jun 23, 2013 10:51 pm
Sandy, I truly do not understand why you insist upon betraying your Baptist faith heritage. Our faith forebears shed their blood to separate church and state, insisting that the government had no business allying with or peddling any faith, including Christianity. Many non-Baptist Christian leaders in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were angered that America had been founded as a secular nation, and denounced our nation's founders -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison and others -- as heretics and infidels for their part in leading America away from Christianity. Baptists, however, had finally fulfilled their two-centuries long quest, and were very pleased.
This heritage has been true for almost all of our history. In very recent history, in the early 1960s, Baptists -- liberal, progressive, moderate, conservative and fundamentalist -- collectively supported Supreme Court decisions outlawing government-sponsored prayer in public schools. As Baptists of old had insisted, these modern Baptists knew that government had no business allying with or peddling any faith; coerced faith is false faith.
That many Baptists today have turned their back on their faith traditions astounds me.
Today's public school system in America, in its secularness (thank you, Baptist forebears), is in some respects more Christian than many so-called Christian schools -- public schools strive to treat children equally, educate the poor and marginalized, follow the Baptist tradition of church state separation, and strive to teach truth when it comes to science (and other disciplines) rather than dispensing religious mythology (it is telling that only in the late 20th century did it become popular among some Christians to insist that Christians must believe in six-day creationism; and how would you like for your kids to be taught the Hindu creation story, or a Native American creation story, or fill in the blank).
The problem for some Christians today is that they want to indoctrinate their children in religious dogma, are afraid of people outside their religious ghetto, and are also afraid of following the search for truth, wherever that search leads. That people of God -- the God of all truth -- would be afraid of the search for truth is another thing that mystifies me.
(Disclaimer: I am a proud product of public schooling. And I'm very pleased that my child is in a public school.)
Bruce Gourley
BaptistLife.Com owner