‘You don’t have any Baptist ministers going on jihad’

My former senator, Rick Santorum, offered his unique perspective on Christian history last week at the religious right’s annual “Values Voter Summit” pep rally.

“Christendom [once] expanded by the sword, that doesn’t happen anymore,” [Santorum] continued, but “you don’t have any Baptist ministers going on jihad.”

“The Western world,” Santorum said, “has come to terms with religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and that persuasion is the way to spread the faith.”

If Santorum really understood what he was saying there, this would constitute a major reversal for a politician who has, for decades, treated the phrase “separation of church and state” as liberal lie and a dangerous threat to Christianamerica. But I don’t think that reversal is intentional, or even conscious, in his case.

As with most of the speakers at the Values Voter Summit, Santorum speaks of “religious liberty” from a framework that regards the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment as something in conflict and competition with the No Establishment clause. He thinks of the free exercise of his religious liberty as something that requires the legal establishment of his religion.

The truth is that the two religious clauses of the First Amendment are necessary components of each other. The free exercise of religion cannot be guaranteed without the prohibition against government establishment. The Establishment Clause is what makes religious liberty possible.

The framers of the American Constitution knew this from American history. They didn’t have to look back across the ocean to the recent history of Europe’s religious wars and the bloody Reformation, they could see this clearly enough just from the very recent history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where the establishment of official religion had circumscribed the religious liberty of Quakers and freethinkers and, yes, Baptists.

Santorum’s invocation of “Baptist ministers” above shows that he doesn’t understand that history. And it shows that he doesn’t understand what Baptists are or where they came from.

It’s right there in the name: Baptists. The idea — the dangerous, radically subversive idea — is that Christians shouldn’t be baptized just because they were born into Christendom. Christian belief, the Baptists said, should be something freely chosen, and thus baptism should follow belief, not birth. Baptism should be an expression of individual choice, not a consequence of citizenship. The church and the state, Baptists insisted, must be separate and distinct.

Santorum’s odd joke about Baptist jihad shows that he doesn’t understand the history of Baptists and the Christian “jihadis” who once established Christendom “by the sword.” Baptists and Anabaptists arose in reaction to that violent establishment of official Christendom. The existence of Baptists is a consequence of violent religious establishment — what Santorum calls “jihad” — on the part of Catholics and Puritans and Calvinists and Lutherans. That’s why Baptists fled Calvin’s Geneva and Luther’s Germany and Winthrop’s Massachusetts, because religious liberty was impossible wherever the establishment of religion was the law of the land (i.e., wherever Christendom was enforced “by the sword”).

Santorum doesn’t understand that affirming “religious liberty” requires him also to affirm that government “shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” He doesn’t understand that religious liberty and freedom of conscience require the separation of church and state.

In a sense, here in America, we’re all Baptist now. It doesn’t matter if you were baptized as an infant and remain a faithful Roman Catholic, or if you’re an atheist raised by parents in a household without religion. At some point, you get to choose for yourself what you’re going to believe for yourself. If you’re Catholic, you choose to remain Catholic. If you’re an atheist, or a “none,” or a Presbyterian, or a Mormon, it’s because you chose to be that — chose to believe or not to believe whatever it is you’ve chosen. That choice may be heavily influenced by your upbringing, but it isn’t wholly determined for you by the circumstances of your birth into an officially established religion. It’s your call, based on your ability to exercise the soul freedom that Baptists asserted is every human’s birthright.

But of course this insistence on individual religious liberty and soul freedom isn’t exclusively Baptist. The separation of church and state may be a Baptist distinctive, but it’s also a fundamental human right. Secular government is not a sectarian idea, it’s the thing that guarantees we’re not going to be compelled to accept sectarian ideas — compelled, ultimately, “by the sword.”

Rick Santorum is right to say that everyone born in the Muslim world also ought to be free to choose what they will or won’t believe. Soul freedom should be the birthright of every Iranian as well as of every Pennsylvanian. But he doesn’t seem to understand where that freedom comes from or how it can be protected. He imagines its a consequence of Christian hegemony in “the Western world,” rather than something that arose here in the west in reaction and rebellion against official Christian hegemony.