Truett's 1920 religious liberty speech to be honored in D.C.

DallasNews Religion | Sam Hodges:

“On and on was the struggle waged by our Baptist fathers for religious liberty. ... They pleaded and suffered, they offered their protests and remonstrances and memorials, and, thank God, mighty statesmen were won to their contention. Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Patrick Henry, and many others, until at last 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. It was preeminently a Baptist achievement.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

The quote above is from a speech on religious liberty that George W. Truett gave at the US Capitol on May 16, 1920. Truett was pastor of First Baptist Dallas from 1897 until his death in 1944.

My, how times have changed. Less than a century ago, Baptists were not only extolling the virtues of separation of church and state, they were claiming credit for it. Today, the religious right is reinventing history to claim that America was founded as a Christian nation and the separation of church and state is only a myth.

Truett seems willing to join hands with Protestants in promoting liberty, but Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc., are ignored. It's Catholicism that is declared to be the exact opposite of the Baptist message. Truett challenges all Protestants to do away with infant baptism and by doing so, he predicts that every last Catholic church on the face of the earth will be wiped away in less than a century. All in all, not a speech that I would pay tribute to as a paean to liberty. More something worth studying in history and noting that it's best left there.