Old-time Baptists understood the danger

Mark Silk upbraids Baptists for failing to adhere to their own tradition.

First, he quotes from "The Remonstrance and Petition of a Convention of Elders and Brethren of the Baptist denomination assembled at Bristol [CT] on the first Wednesday of February, 1803:"

Your petitioners believe that all mankind are entitled to equal rights and privileges, esp. the rights of conscience...and that all human laws which obliged a man to worship in any lawfully prescribed mode, time, or place or which compel him to pay taxes or in any way to assist in the support of a religious teacher unless on his voluntary contract, are unjust and oppressive.

Then Mark gives us the current example of erstwhile Baptist pastor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, straining to assault the stimulus bill as "anti-religious" because it includes boilerplate language [.pdf] barring the use of tax monies for religious purposes.

There are Baptists, he acknowledges, "who still cleave to the old-time separationist faith--yo, Joint Committee!--but they are way too few and far between."

The danger for Baptists, as Dan Gilgoff explains, is that Huckabee & Co. will win.

Thomas Jefferson's 1808 "Letter to Virginia Baptists" tells us why Huckabee & Co. are making an argument that is dangerous to religion in general, not just Baptists:

Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the, "wall of separation of church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

The danger, as you see, is described in the lately often ignored second part of Jefferson's argument.

As the old-time Baptists and Thomas Jefferson both understood, accepting the state's money has a corrupting effect on religion.