George Washington Truett (1867-1944) was a Baptist pastor, who helped financially rescue Baylor University, where he served as a financial agent and trustee. He also established the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and was president of the Baptist World Alliance.
As a Baptist, Truett was especially proud of his religious heritage, which had long emphasized freedom of conscience and separation of church and state, and he made his case in an erudite speech that blended historical references, poetry, biblical citations, Baptist doctrine and patriotism.
Truett delivered his best-known speech on the subject on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building on Sunday, May 16, 1920, to a huge audience composed of many governmental officials. It was entitled “Baptists and Religious Liberty.”
The importance of religious liberty
Truett touted the idea of “religious liberty” as the most important contribution that America and Baptists had made to the science of government. He further distinguished such religious liberty from mere “toleration.” He explained that “Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle.”
Truett tied such liberty to the Baptist belief in “the absolute Lordship of Christ,” and the acceptance of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, as “the rule and faith” for life.
Contrast with Roman Catholic doctrine
Although he clearly indicated that he believed in working with other believers and extending freedom to Roman Catholics and Jews, Truett contrasted this Baptist belief to Roman Catholicism: “The Roman Catholic message is sacerdotal, Sacramentarian, and ecclesiastical. In its scheme of salvation it magnifies the church, the priest, and the sacraments. The Baptist message is non-saceradotal, non-sacramentarian, and non-ecclesiastical.” He argued that “the Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration and transubstantiation is to the Baptist mind fundamentally subversive of the spiritual realities of the gospel of Christ,” and allowed the Catholic Church to exercise “a ghastly tyranny in the realm of the soul.”
Truett was particularly critical of the doctrine of papal infallibility and, as befitted a Baptist, of child baptism, which he did not believe was warranted by scripture and which he linked to the ritualization of Christianity. Truett connected Christianity to individualism and individual responsibility to freedom: “The individual is segregated from family, from church, from state, and from society, from dearest earthly friends or institution, and brought into direct, personal dealings with God. Every one must give account of himself to God. There can be no sponsors or deputies or proxies in such a vital matter.”
In a bit of triumphalism, which must have left any Roman Catholics ill at ease, Truett observed that “if all the Protestant denominations would once for all put away infant baptism, and come to the full acceptance and faithful practice of New Testament baptism . . . the unity of all the non-Catholic Christians in the world would be consummated, and . . . there would not be left one Roman Catholic church on the face of the earth at the expiration of the comparatively short period of another century.”
Church as a democracy
Truett lauded the Baptist view that the church is “a pure democracy, all its members being equal, a local congregation, and cannot subject itself to any outside control.” He observed that such terms as “‘The American Church,’ or ‘The bishop of this city or state,’ would be strangely incongruous to Baptist ears.” He observed that “there must be no union between church and state, because their nature and functions are utterly different.” He condemned every “state church” as “a spiritual tyranny.”
Truett traced such tyranny to the Roman Emperor Constantine and contrasted “the idea of absolutism” with “the idea of individualism” and “the idea of autocracy and the idea of democracy.” Although he believed that Protestant Reformers deserved praise for breaking with the Catholic Church, he argued that they had brought ideas of the union of church and state with them, even after they left the Church, and practiced their own forms of persecution.
Truett further traced the manner in which Baptists, like Roger Williams, and other Christians had been persecuted in colonial America prior to the adoption of the First Amendment. He interpreted this amendment to mean “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.”
Acknowledging support from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison, likely with Baptists John Leland and Isaac Backus in mind, Truett still proudly proclaimed that this amendment “was pre-eminently a Baptist achievement.”
Rights and responsibilities of Christians
Truett believed that religious liberty brought with it civic responsibility. He observed that “We will take free speech and a free press, with all their excrescences and perils, because of the high meaning of freedom, but we are to set ourselves with all diligence not to use these great privileges in the shaming of liberty.”
Truett encouraged newspaper editors and “moral and religious teachers” to so “magnify the ballot box, a free press, free schools, the courts, the majesty of law and reverence for all properly accredited authority that our civilization may not be built on the shifting sands, but on the secure and enduring foundations of righteousness.” He observed that “Liberty without law is anarchy. Liberty against law is rebellion. Liberty limited by law in the formula of civilization.”
Truett further stressed the role of legislators in adopting “humane and righteous laws.” He believed the nation could not afford isolationism but should practice Good Samaritan care for others. Truett advocated for the League of Nations, which Woodrow Wilson had supported, urged members of his audience to be “world citizens,” and, demonstrating that separation of church and state did not mean governmental neutrality on moral issues, lauded the demise of “the legalized saloon” through national alcoholic prohibition.
Truett wanted Christians to be “the right kind of Christians,” who took civil obligations seriously. He lauded Christian schools, while also calling for support of public institutions. He also lauded Christian missionary work throughout the world, tying the need to bring the gospel to all to the fact that all individuals were created in the image of God. The people of God needed to be “a holy people” who acted in the spirit of the early apostles.
At a time when many were disillusioned by the carnage of World War I, Truett anticipated progress: “The people are everywhere breaking with feudalism. Autocracy is passing, whether it be civil or ecclesiastical. Democracy is the goal toward which all feet are traveling, whether in state or in church.”
Truett’s legacy
Truett spoke prior to the great fundamentalist-modernist divide, and he advocated social justice without identifying himself with the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch. At a time when many southern pastors turned a blind eye to racial and other injustices, Truett warned against “that terrible trinity of horrors — suicide, lynching, murder — [which] still mock us, with their awful carnival in every section of our great country.” He also helped establish medical facilities and orphanages, engaged in ministry to Texas cowboys, and insisted that the meeting of the Baptist World Alliance in Atlanta in 1939 be racially integrated (Yarnell, 2022, 79).
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.