Metro Pulse/Cover/Buzz Thomas

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Before the Bench & in the Pulpit
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.

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:

"I think you could make a case that the American arrangement of religious freedom is our greatest and most unique contribution to world history. There are lots of things about America that have been duplicated [elsewhere] or have been designed in other places, but as best we can tell, Rhode Island in the 17th Century, under this eccentric preacher, Puritan that he was, Roger Williams, was the first place on earth to have real religious freedom...where your standing in the civil order is not contingent upon your standing in a religious order or church.

Now that's ironic, because we tend to think that conservative religious people are really not believers in church/state separation and real religious liberty... but the fact is that the whole idea of church/state separation sprang from the mind of America's first Baptist. Roger Williams started the first Baptist church in Providence, R.I., in 1636—this preacher who was too pure for the Puritans...he was banished from Massachusetts Bay.

This [founding of the Baptist church] came 150 years before the Virginia experiment, when Jefferson and Madison passed Mr. Jefferson's statute for religious freedom, which he listed as one of his three major accomplishments to be on his tombstone. He didn't mention that he was President of the United States, vice president or secretary of state, but he did mention that he was president of the university of Virginia, and that he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and that he wrote the Virginia statute for religious liberty.

That model, that we saw first in Rhode Island, and then in Virginia and later in Pennsylvania with William Penn, becomes the American arrangement embodied in the First Amendment—no establishment of religion, meaning that the government had absolutely no sovereignty over religious affairs, not to promote religion, even popular religions like the Protestant faith was at that time and still is in our country—and at the same time the government was to promote the free exercise of religion, which gave religious minorities a level playing field with majorities.

The American arrangement is still unique in the world...full-throated religious liberty for believers and non-believers alike. That is unique in the history of humankind and is, in my mind, the cornerstone of all human rights. If you don't have freedom of conscience, when you think about it, if you don't have freedom to believe and to act on that belief in the most important things in your life, your philosophical and religious beliefs, then freedom of speech, freedom of the press, assembly, and these other freedoms that we talk about don't mean much. They all sort of emanate from freedom of conscience, which was that important contribution to world history.

Other nations may espouse, or may have once espoused, religious toleration. That's not the American version of true religious liberty. Toleration...is a weasel word...it tends to have an established religion, and then others are tolerated, and of course that puts you in the very vulnerable position of having that toleration taken away.

Now the great irony today is that our wonderful arrangement, which has been so good for both our political order and our religious order, is criticized most often by deeply religious people.... There are a growing number of evangelical Christians in our country who feel very strongly that the government ought to embrace, if not the Christian faith, at least the Judeo-Christian faith, which is a sort of interesting way in which it is sometimes expressed. It's the folks who want to put the Ten Commandments up on the courthouse walls or the school walls and who want to make sure that students are being led in prayer. Of course, any person who really understands the American arrangement wants kids to be able to pray in school as long as they're not coercing others and as long as it's a voluntary thing, but it's an altogether different thing when the government puts its coercive power behind religion.

Putting the Ten Commandments up on a wall accomplishes very little. In fact, I think you can make a strong argument that it trivializes the Commandments. The Commandments, as I read the Bible, have to be etched in our hearts. I think putting the Commandments up in that way really makes our nation weaker. It makes us more like the Taliban, more like these states that have an established, official religion. That's not who we are.

I keep going back to Roger Williams, but he's one of my heroes, and he's one of the people who really understood what was at stake when government gets into religion. I'll paraphrase, but he put it this way: When the government gets into the religion business, on its good days, you get hypocrites—that is to say people who become religious not because they in their hearts choose to be religious, but because it's the thing one should or must do because the government is pushing you do it—and on your bad days, you get rivers of blood. He said history is the great example of how the government—he called it the bloody tenet—when the government gets into matters of faith, it always hurts religion.

The irony I spoke of is that those who have benefited most from this uniquely American arrangement of church/state separation have in fact been the religious people of this country. If we went to England today, for example, we'd see that the churches would be empty except for tourists, and of course they have state support for the church, and the queen is the head of the church, and they have state- sponsored prayers in their public schools, but the churches are empty...I have to stop and remind us that we have, arguably, the strongest religious institutions on earth, by any standard; we are the most religious of the developed nations, whether you want to measure it in terms of church membership or church attendance or dollars given...the American arrangement has worked for religion.

The real challenge of the 21st Century—though we have lots of technological challenges and ecological challenges, and many other challenges we face—the greatest challenge that we face is can we live together with our deepest differences? Can we build a nation and can we build a world out of our deep differences?

When we look at what happened on September 11, we think about how powerful religion is, that it would cause one young woman to go to the streets of Calcutta and give her life to the poor, but it would cause another young person to crash a jet airplane into a skyscraper and say, 'Praise God," while he did it, now that's pretty potent stuff.

But forget about the world; in the United States alone when you think about the Christian Coalition, the A.C.L.U., the People for the American Way, Mormons, Southern Baptists, Jews, Baha'is, Muslims, Hindus—they're all here—can we live together?

Only if we find common ground in these founding documents that we celebrate on the 4th of July.

Our Constitution does not begin, 'We the tribe...'

We are a people. We're united not by bloodline or kinship like most nations on earth. Most nations were a tribe at one time. We are a people united by principles and ideals. That's the only thing we have in common.

We will never find common ground religiously, we can't even find it in the Baptist Church. There are all kinds of Baptists in the United States, not to mention Lutherans and Catholics and Pentecostals. Christianity is a very diverse faith. Then when we begin to consider all the other types of religious groups, we don't even begin to find common ground religiously. We can find common ground civicly.

We come together only around these framing principles, these great, magnanimous, magnificent principles that are set forth in our founding documents, and we can live together when we make a solemn pact as American citizens to say, 'I will protect these rights for all of my fellow citizens. I want my rights, and I'm going to protect yours. I will defend this Constitution with my life.'

If anything was ever worth dying for, I'm saying the American arrangement is it. I'm a fanatic about it."