On September 9, 1917, in Dallas, TX, George Truett (the longtime Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas) stood before a crowd of more than 6,000 at the Coliseum. The purpose of the event was to urge citizens of Dallas County to vote in favor of prohibiting the sale of alcohol, that is, to make Dallas a “dry” county. The Texas Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were both likely organizers of the event, and local pastors and civic leaders probably united their voices to promote prohibition.[1]
1. I found no sources to confirm the organizers or other speakers, but these are educated assumptions based on historical context.
The temperance movement had been a public crusade in Texas for more than six decades by the early 1900s, and by 1908, Texas had 152 dry counties, 66 partially dry counties, and 25 “wet” counties where alcohol was still legal. Dallas was home to the Texas Anti-Saloon League’s headquarters, and the League collaborated with the Dallas Central chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as well as the Dallas Pastors’ Association. The temperance advocates successfully connected the sale of alcohol with immorality, and they presented it as unpatriotic during a time of war (World War I, 1914–1918). The movement was gaining widespread public support, and this event in Dallas was a final push for prohibition in one of the biggest and most influential cities in the South. But what was this Baptist pastor doing meddling in politics trying to whip up a vote? Don’t Baptists believe in the separation of church and state? Well, it turns out that Baptists have often practiced a political theology quite different from pure separation or absolute religious liberty, as I will show.
Separation of Church and State
George Truett was representative of a common Baptist conviction regarding religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Edgar Young Mullins (the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1899–1928) published his Axioms of Religion in 1908, wherein he wrote, “the State has no ecclesiastical and the Church no civic function.”[2] Mullins articulated and promoted what he believed was a distinctly Baptist contribution to civics—the “complete separation of Church and State.”[3] He affirmed that the church had an obligation to promote morality among Christians (i.e., church members), but he said, “It does not follow, however, that because an institution is the expression of moral relations in one sphere that it is meant to promote moral ends in all spheres.”[4] In other words, for Mullins, government and society is no place to exercise ecclesiastical authority or responsibility.
2. E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1908), 185.
3. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion,187.
4. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion, 194.
George Truett made similar statements. In a public address from the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to messengers and friends of the 1920 Southern Baptist Convention, Truett said, “Our fundamental essential principles have made our Baptist people, of all ages and countries, to be the unyielding protagonists of religious liberty, not only for themselves, but as well for everybody else.”[5] Truett went on, “A Baptist would rise at midnight to plead for absolute religious liberty for his Catholic neighbor, and for his Jewish neighbor, and for everybody else.”[6] Indeed, Truett said, “it was written into our country’s Constitution that church and state must in this land be forever separate and free, that neither must ever trespass upon the distinctive functions of the other.”[7] Clearly, Truett agreed with Mullins that there is and should forever be a line of absolute separation between church and state.
5. George W. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses Comprising Special Orations Delivered on Widely Varying Occasions, ed. J. B. Cranfill (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1923), 34.
6. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 38.
7. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 50.
Christian Civics
And yet, Truett rose in September of 1917 to urge his fellow citizens (Christians and non-Christians alike) to exercise their civic duty to vote, and he had an overtly Christian argument and purpose. Truett said, “there is an overshadowing moral issue in the city of Dallas, [and] I cannot, I dare not, be silent.”[8] He said, “we meet to settle a great issue quietly at the polls tomorrow… [and] the moral issue… is to be decided at the ballot box in Dallas.”[9] The question to be settled was whether Dallas County would allow citizens to buy or sell liquor.
8. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 153.
9. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 153–54.
Truett asked, “Why should we vote, my fellow men, tomorrow for the cause of prohibition in this fair city?”[10] Then he answered, saying, “If [the saloon traffic], as thus protected and carried forward, is morally wrong, then tomorrow we have clearly set before us our plain duty… to cast [a] vote for the ending of the reign of such legalized wrong here in our fair city and county.”[11] Plainly, Truett was making a moral argument based on Christian principles as he understood them, and his conclusion was that the government should act to prohibit immorality.
10. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 154.
11. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 154–155.
Truett acknowledged that some were making pleas “to encourage us to retain the liquor business in Dallas.”[12] The first plea Truett addressed was that “it is an infringement of personal liberty to take liquor away from the people.”[13] This was a pertinent objection and a particularly striking one related to what Truett and others believed was a Baptist principle—that of liberty. However, Truett responded with a clear statement of limitation upon civic liberty based on Christian ethics. He said, “Evil has no rights on the earth—not one. Evil is an impertinence; evil is a presumption; evil is an intruder; evil is an interloper—and our business, please God, is to drive evil wherever we find it from the face of the earth.”[14] It seems Truett believed liberty was no cover or justification for absolute libertarianism on ethical matters.
12. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 164.
13. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 164.
14. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 164.
On September 10, Dallas County voted overwhelmingly in favor of prohibition, and it became a dry county. Whatever impact Truett had cannot be known for certain, but it is clear that he saw it as his Christian duty not only to vote a certain way, but also to compel his fellow citizens to do the same. This episode displays one of the primary and regular inconsistencies of those who claim absolute religious freedom in America and the complete separation of church and state.
Truett was Right and Wrong
Truett was wrong to place the moral blame upon the substance or sale of alcohol. It was not the drink that made men degenerate; degenerate men over-indulged in alcohol and thereby extended their sinfulness. However, I think Truett was right to make a public and civic appeal for his fellow citizens to vote according to what he believed was a Christian standard (i.e., a true and transcendent standard) of morality. Indeed, citizens will always engage in civics according to some moral standard, and the Christian standard is the only consistently good and true one. On this point, Truett was right in his practice, but he was wrong in his definition of religious liberty (which contradicted his practice).
As we look back on Christian civic engagement in America, especially for those of us who are Baptists, I think we ought to celebrate the progress of religious liberty. It is right and good that no person should be compelled to be a member of a church. It is right that no state law should prohibit a person from joining a Christian church. It is right that the state should feel no freedom whatever to dictate a local church’s beliefs, membership, or leadership. However, we ought to be more clear-eyed about what religious liberty means and how religion necessarily has an influence upon civics and the state.
George Truett is a great example of sloganeering about absolute religious liberty but also acting to press religious convictions onto the consciences of his fellow Americans. Truett said that the church and the state have distinctive functions and that neither should ever trespass the other. And yet, Truett appealed to religious authority (not secular) and to religious duty (not merely civic) as the basis of an obligation for citizens to vote and for government to act. This is clearly an occasion where the church was (according to Truett’s logic) trespassing the state’s jurisdiction and telling the state and its citizens what to do.
In our own day, we could list a number of immoral activities that are legally practiced and publicly promoted. Men dressed in sexualized feminine attire legally host reading times for children at public libraries, homosexual couples take legal custody of vulnerable children through adoption or surrogacy, and two-thirds of the annual abortions in the United States are legally executed by the use of pills that can be mailed anywhere in the nation. Must Christian citizens in America sit by and allow these immoral activities to continue without taking political action of any kind? One wonders what George Truett might say to many Baptists in America today who argue against Christians pursuing political power and influence in order to combat such rampant immorality in our nation. We can at least know that Truett wanted America “to be Christian in her commerce, and in her politics, and in her art, and in her education, and in her literature, and in every phase and fibre [sic] of her social order.”[15]
15. Truett, God’s Call to America and Other Addresses, 23.
Of course, Baptists are notorious for their prioritization of evangelism and disciple-making as their primary mission in the world. Often, Baptists have understood that evangelism and disciple-making also produce good results for society in general. Indeed, populating the churches of the Lord Jesus Christ through conversions and edifying church members through teaching all that Christ has commanded are the primary aims of Baptists. We are a voluntary people—one must hear and believe the gospel for himself, and one must conscientiously and willfully seek union with a local church for himself. However, this does not mean that Baptists are forbidden to use any other means for the good of their society.
George Truett’s public effort to stop the liquor traffic in Dallas County reminds us that even the most ardent Baptist advocates of separation of church and state do not have to absent themselves from the public square, from politics, or from social reform groups and efforts. No one can accuse Truett of trying to establish a state church in Texas, but Truett did want Dallas County laws to reflect Christian ethics and principles. In this way, Truett stands right in line with many Baptists in America before him, and many Baptists today ought to consider his example.[16]
16. Aaron Menikoff has done great research on this point and published his Ph.D. dissertation in book form. See Aaron Menikoff, Politics and Piety: Baptist Social Reform in America, 1770–1860, Monographs in Baptist History, vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014).
Christian Nationalism?
Since at least the middle of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly assumed that religious liberty is tantamount to secularism.[17] At least since the mid-twentieth century, many Americans have come to believe that the First Amendment prohibits any religious argument or belief in civil government or public schools. Justice Hugo Black’s “high and impermeable wall” between religion and civics is nearly unquestioned as a quintessential American principle.[18] As the decades have marched on, secularism (or anti-religion) has thus become a new religion of its own.[19] Secularism has an orthodoxy concerning transcendentals, namely that of naturalistic evolution and atheism. It has a catechetical system which is employed and policed in America’s public schools. And secularism has an entire media and social ecosystem to shun heretics and praise the faithful.
17. Daniel Dreisbach and Phillip Hamburger have both written compelling arguments that describe a dramatic shift in American religious liberty as a direct result of Justice Hugo Black’s ruling and argument in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education. See Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, First Harvard University Press paperback ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
18. Hugo Black, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947), No. No. 52 (U.S. Supreme Court February 10, 1947).
19. This is the thesis of Nathan Chapman’s and Michael McConnell’s 2023 publication. Nathan S. Chapman and Michael W. McConnell, Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience, Inalienable Rights Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
So too, secularism has embedded itself in American political institutions. Religious arguments are often disallowed on matters of jurisprudence and legislation. Until quite recently, politicians in America were loath to ascribe much weight at all to their religious convictions. For all intents and purposes, secularism has become America’s established church or religion. Such a statement may be denied by proponents of progressive secularism or secular libertarians, but the fact remains. One can observe the defensive posture of the present secular establishment against any mention of a Christian influence in American civics. Secular establishmentarians (to borrow from the old vocabulary) are as fundamentalist in their pseudo-religion as the wildest caricature they might imagine of any Christian zealot. Thus, to speak any positive word about government aligning with a Christian standard of morality will inevitably result in the pejorative moniker “Christian Nationalist.”
In this milieu, Christians would do well to recover a robust political theology. Simply put, it is impossible for governments to have no religious assumptions or influence, and Christians in America once believed that the religion undergirding and animating American civics was Christianity. The primary sources for such a claim are so numerous and pervasive that any honest observer must admit it. Furthermore, those who argue today for a kind of religious liberty that assumes a secular government are unavoidably assisting the further ascent of the secular anti-Christian establishment. Some Christians may not like to be associated with the politics or rhetoric of their brethren who embrace the label “Christian Nationalist,” but ardent secularists do not care in the least to distinguish winsome Christians from aggressive ones. If you are for biblical and traditional marriage, gender norms, and sexual expression, then to them you are a Christian Nationalist bigot, whether you speak gently or severely.
It may be that “Christian Nationalism” as a label is fraught with confusion, and the phrase may conjure all sorts of negative connotations. However, it is not surprising that the secular religious establishment would fight to defend what it has won and label opponents with some derogatory appellation. The surprising feature of our present political debate is the contributions of many Evangelicals in America who are (unwittingly or intentionally) taking up verbal arms to defend the secular establishment. I fear that these Evangelicals may discover that they were fighting for the very enemy who will soon turn upon them at the first opportunity. If this is where Christians in America are headed, then Evangelicals for absolute religious liberty, pluralism, and secularism will inevitably suffer right alongside their rowdier brethren in the end.
