The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee (ERLC) recently presented their annual John Leland Religious Liberty Award to President George W. Bush.
According to Baptist Press News, ERLC President Richard Land presented the honor to the president in a Jan. 29 ceremony in the Oval Office.
The award’s inscription lauded the president for “courageously defending the right of all people to exercise freely their religious faith” and for being “A faithful witness to his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ to both his countrymen and the world’s leaders.”
The award is named after John Leland, a Baptist minister who fought hard for religious liberty in the fledgling American democracy. A contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, he believed that religion was the province of each individual conscience and that the government could not interfere with personal belief. He opposed “toleration” because it assumed that some faiths had official approval while others were merely allowed to exist. He argued instead that public officeholders should proactively protect everyone’s religious liberties.
Later in his life, he wrote in his Short Essays on Government, “Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another.”
“The liberty I contend for is more than toleration,” he continued. “The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence; whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”
To be sure, Leland was concerned about the free exercise of religion, but the ERLC award honors only half the man, therefore making it wholly unworthy of its namesake. Leland also resisted church-state unions, primarily government aid to religion. He insisted that religion is injured more by government favor than by government oppression.
Experience has taught us, he wrote in 1804, that “the fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity has done it more harm than persecutions ever did.”
Interestingly, and perhaps lost on or ignored by the ERLC, Leland abhorred politicians who flaunted their personal piety. He told a crowd gathered in Cheshire, Mass., in 1802, “Guard against those men who make a great noise about religion in choosing representatives. It is electioneering intrigue. If they knew the nature and worth of religion, they would not debauch it to such shameful purposes. If pure religion is the criterion to denominate candidates, those who make a noise about it must be rejected; for their wrangle about it proves that they are void of it. Let honesty, talents and quick dispatch characterize the men of your choice.”
The John Leland Religious Liberty award has been given for the past 15 years, most recently to outspoken foes of church-state separation. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) won the award in 2005 and former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) did so in 2004. Brownback and Santorum, like President Bush, are known for strident advocacy of a “faith-based” agenda, not support for true religious liberty.
John Leland must be spinning in his grave. It’s an absolute shame that a man who did so much to cement religious liberty is now being used to honor men who want nothing more than to tear down the wall between religion and government.
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