Metro Pulse/Cover/Buzz Thomas

Comment
on this story

We Are a People
The Rev. Oliver "Buzz" Thomas evangelizes for church/state separation as stridently and confidently as any pastor or clergyman anywhere calls for religious expression in government institutions. Here, in part, is what he preaches.

Buzz Thomas is a Baptist preacher. An educator. A songwriter. He's called the leading attorney in the country on issues of church/state separation and religious liberty. And he hails from Maryville.

by Barry Henderson

Oliver Thomas, former all-state linebacker at Maryville High School, former pastor, lawyer and educator, turned 47 this year. He's not retired or anything like that. He has a new job as director of a non-profit foundation. Along with his new duties, he still harbors an abiding sentiment that has been both vocation and avocation to him. He is passionate about the First Amendment to the Constitution and what he says is its fundament: religious liberty.

"Buzz" Thomas, as he's been called since he was a baby, will go just about anywhere just about anytime to preach the gospel of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Under the sponsorship of the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, he does so, often. Speaking without accepting a fee, he will address any group, but especially groups of educators, about what freedom of religion means to believer and non-believer alike.

With a background ranging from pastoring in the rough-and-tumble Irish Channel district of New Orleans to lobbying Congress and arguing before the Supreme Court for the Washington organizations of major American churches, Thomas has achieved standing in the legal and religious communities that few people have ever attained.

Thomas has co-authored both the American Civil Liberties Union's handbook on the right to religious liberty and, for the First Amendment Center, a broadly accepted set of guidelines on religious freedom, religious restraint and religious education in public schools. Endorsed by an eclectic assortment of secular and religious organizations, those guidelines have been distributed to every public school district in America by the U.S. Department of Education.

The operative passages in those guidelines are these:

"Public schools may not inculcate nor inhibit religion. They must be places where religion and religious conviction are treated with fairness and respect.

"Public schools uphold the First Amendment when they protect the religious liberty rights of students of all faiths or none. Schools demonstrate fairness when they ensure that the curriculum includes study about religion, where appropriate, as an important part of a complete education."

For this, the first Independence Day since our nation was shattered by the events of September 11, when the risk is great that the war on terrorism may be viewed by an American majority as a religious conflict between Christianity and Islam, the life and work of Buzz Thomas help illustrate that politics, religion and individual liberty can coexist peacefully in separate spheres.

Thomas' paths to Constitutional righteousness, and to his role of national leadership in explaining the meaning of full religious freedom, are the result of complex forces and turns of fate. From the outset, his goals were not all that typical of a man who grew up in a comfortable, supportive family in East Tennessee.

"I grew up thinking lawyers were heroes," Thomas says, because his late father, D.K. Thomas, would represent "any woman, any black person or any juvenile who couldn't afford to pay" for legal counsel in the elder Thomas' general practice in Maryville.

Buzz Thomas' older brother, D. Kelly Thomas Sr., hung the nickname "Buzz" on him. Kelly followed his dad into the family practice; initially Buzz thought that might be good for him, too.

When he graduated from Maryville High in 1973, he had been ready to pursue pre-law and pre-medical courses side by side until he was sure of his calling. He also thought he'd play college football, first for Alabama, until a leg injury took him out of that picture, then for Vanderbilt. Other injuries as an enrolled freshman and football walk-on at UT convinced him otherwise. He went on to law school at UT, married, and was first in his class until, "as we Baptists say, I started feeling the call," he says. He went home and told his dad he wanted to go to seminary and enter the ministry. He got what might have been a reluctant blessing, but a real one.

At New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, he also stood first in his class, and at his ordination, he had all kinds of opportunities, he says, with big, flourishing Baptist congregations. Instead he chose the depressed Irish Channel neighborhood, where his pastoring began in 1978 for $65 a week. His ministry to a mixed racial group often involved "keeping their sons out of jail or preventing midnight evictions." He says one of his most vivid recollections is of comforting a young woman whose brother died in her arms on a city bus after his throat had been cut.

"It changed my life," Thomas says of the New Orleans experience. He says he survived in the neighborhood under the wing of "a semi-retired pimp with a diamond stud in one front tooth" who escorted him around the housing projects.

Ultimately, his seminary professors, aware of his work with congregants, so many of whom needed legal help, advised him to go back to law school. UT offered him a full scholarship and restoration of his class standing. He stayed involved in work with the poor and disadvantaged, graduated at the top of his law class, and took his wife and daughter back to Maryville to his dad's practice for a couple of years, during which time his second daughter was born.

Restless, he applied for an opening on the legal staff of the Joint Baptist Committee, whose member conventions shared a Washington office to represent their more than 20 million members. He said he found out the job was as senior counsel, which he hadn't anticipated. "None of the good lawyers would take a job in Washington at their money. They offered me $37,000, and I took it. This was 1985. I'd had some training in the First Amendment, but I'd never handled a First Amendment case, so I read everything I could get my hands on."

Thomas says the move was "another life change," in which he built associations with such figures as Sens. Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch. "There were New York Times interviews, Supreme Court cases and testimony before Congress," he says, "and I was only 30."

He forged a lasting friendship with another young attorney representing the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Mark Chopko, who says, "Buzz had an almost single-minded devotion to religious freedom. We had our disagreements, but we got so close it got to the point where we could give each other's talks."

In the celebrated 1987 case brought by Vicki Frost, the Hawkins County, Tenn., mother who sued her school district for teaching "secular humanism," the attention drew disparate legal and religious organizations into the court fray. Thomas says he surprised the group of attorneys and clergy by suggesting, "Let's just all sit down and deliberate how religion should be dealt with in the public schools." To his own surprise, they agreed.

Those deliberations led to the endorsement of the Freedom Forum's guidelines by several former foes: the civil-liberties advocates who saw no room for religion in the schools, the government and school administrators who feared mentioning religious subjects at all, and the church groups who saw the government as hostile toward religion itself.

"It was a time of great tension," says John Siegenthaler, director of the First Amendment Center, former editor of The Tennessean, and editorial director of USA Today. "There was so much skepticism because school districts had accepted as a legal mandate that you just could not mention religion, and if you did, you'd get sued. It took a person of Buzz's background. To hear him talk in practical terms was to have your eyes opened. I've watched rooms full of teachers and administrators as they listened to him, and you could almost see the heads and hearts turn.

"Buzz would tell them: 'We are going to get sued, because people are going to demand that their children be exposed to the religious history of this country, and they are entitled to it.

"I saw an earth change in attitudes. I can't tell you the impact he had," Siegenthaler says.

Charles Haynes, a college professor and executive director of First Liberty Institute at George Mason University before joining the First Amendment Center as senior scholar, says of Thomas, his co-author, "I think most people in the field of religious liberty would consider him the best attorney in the country on that issue."

Haynes says Thomas' success comes from his "willingness to bring people from all sides together and take them seriously, to listen to them and respect their opinions. I know of no one who's achieved that level of credibility on all sides."

"It's been his mission and it doesn't pay well," says Haynes, who says Thomas has taken on the mantle "as a service to his country and the First Amendment."

Likewise, Rabbi David Saperstein, the oft-quoted director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, says Thomas "gets his satisfaction in strengthening American freedoms and making the lives of millions and millions of people better." Thomas, the rabbi says, "has been an extraordinary presence on issues of religious liberty." The two taught a class together at Georgetown University Law School after Thomas moved to the office of general counsel for the National Council of Churches.

On the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which upholds the rights of religious practitioners to pursue vastly varying rituals and procedures without government interference, Rabbi Saperstein says, "Buzz formed coalitions Washington had never seen before."

Indeed, Thomas says testimony in favor of that law was heard from representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, the first-ever occasion in which a Mormon had testified in favor of national legislation of a religious nature.

For the Baptists, Thomas says, he was representing "everyone from Jesse Jackson to Jesse Helms, from Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrinch—all Baptists." With the National Council of Churches, his constituency was, if possible, even broader, and it gave him a further appreciation of the differences among the faithful. He says his father was horrified at the switch, thinking of the NCC as "some kind of communist organization."

Both Buzz's dad and his brother, Kelly, who is now a judge in the Circuit Court for Blount County, were Democrats in a Republican stronghold. Kelly Thomas in the only Democrat officeholder in the county, and he won re-election in 1998 without opposition, a minor miracle. "I'm a yellow-dog Democrat, too," says Buzz, who served a couple of terms on the Maryville City School Board after returning from Washington out of family considerations in 1995. Being a Democrat around home is what taught him not to seek too much attention and to "run under the radar, sort of," he says.

A school-board colleague, Patsy Lunde, who succeeded him in the board chair, says Thomas "brought so many areas of expertise and insight to the board that ... it's not fair, no one should have to succeed him. I've told people that having a person like Buzz on the board is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I'm a staunch Republican.

"I do have to laugh and say our meetings are a little shorter now," Lunde adds, pointing out that she is neither a lawyer nor a preacher, and is, as she says, "more succinct."

Which brings us to Buzz as songwriter. One of his hobbies has been writing country music. He started a rock & roll band in high school, playing guitar and singing, but his bassman, Charlie Anderson, was the one who stayed with his music and drifted into the country genre, where he's now with Reba McIntyre's band. "Charlie and I get together every so often and work up some songs," says Buzz. "We haven't sold any, but playing your own music in a studio with a good band is the nearest thing to flying."

Ordinarily the lyricist of the pair, Thomas has penned a few lines that offer a hint to how he's been able to work with people across a range of differences that sometimes seems unbridgeable to anybody else. In his groaner, "See Ruby Fall," in which a Baptist preacher's wife succumbs to temptations of the flesh, Thomas included the couplet:

"Between the saints and the sinners

There ain't much space at all..."