April 7, 2006

‘Genius of America’ found in individual rights, claims Saperstein

By John Pierce

MACON, Ga. — Baptists and Jews, both having suffered historically as minority faiths, share a strong commitment to religious liberty, said Rabbi David Saperstein during the inaugural Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty held April 4-5 at Mercer University.

          “A robust religious liberty, free of government interference, is the indispensable component” that Jewish and Baptist communities share in common, said Saperstein, who has directed the Washington-based Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism for 30 years.

          The lectureship was created through a gift from the Shurdens to the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. BJC Executive Director J. Brent Walker and Saperstein, both attorneys, work closely with lawmakers on religious freedom issues and jointly teach classes on First Amendment church-state law at Georgetown University.

          The “genius of America,” said Saperstein, is that rights are granted to individuals rather than to groups from which an individual can be excluded or excommunicated.

          “It doesn’t matter if all 290 million Americans … believe your way of worshipping is wrong,” said Saperstein, an individual retains the freedom of religious expression.

          Saperstein said the framers of the U.S. Constitution, that includes the First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom, “did something revolutionary” in clearly stating that citizenship does not depend on one’s religious convictions.

          Those who make claims of America being “a Christian nation,” said Saperstein, must look to the early Puritan settlers who “really believed they were the new Israel” and “created a political structure based entirely on God’s law.”

          However, those who later framed the U.S. Constitution “captured the spirit” of religious liberty that has been upheld by the courts through the years, Saperstein added.  He noted that now-retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner provided the deciding vote outlawing government-sponsored prayer in public schools.

“Sandra Day O’Conner is not there!” said Saperstein, expressing concern about whether new justices will continue to keep Americans free from majoritarian religious views and control.

Saperstein said Jews — “the quintessential victims of religious persecution” — have not won cases before the Supreme Court but have benefited from decisions on cases brought by Seventh-Day Adventists and other religious minorities.

No country in the world, said Saperstein, has more people participating in religious communities than the U.S. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he added, than the claim that “separation of church and state is anti-religion or anti-God.”

The principles of complete religious liberty advocated by Baptist pioneers Isaac Backus and John Leland “have served us,” said Saperstein. “Jews I know who care about this study the Baptists.”

(John Pierce is executive editor of Baptists Today, an autonomous, national news journal based in Macon, Ga.)