The Southern Baptists invited discord by hosting Vice President Pence and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as speakers at their annual gathering.
For much of the annual SBC meeting this week, held as a scandal swirls — something we wrote about a few weeks ago — it seemed hopeful that progressive secular values might be infiltrating the enclave. But things ended on a sour political note as Vice President Mike Pence took to the stage Wednesday. He preached a toxic brand of Christian nationalism — conservative politics, historical revisionism, absolutism, and Christianity — that he and Donald Trump rode into the Oval Office. This was exemplified when Pence once again proclaimed that he is “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican . . . in that order.”
Pence wasn’t the only Christian nationalist at the meeting. Long-time hater and FFRF-obstructor, Abbott, also preached this poisonous strain of religio-politics to the ministerial gathering.
Overall, Pence’s speech sounded, as one CNN op-ed commented, like a “shameless suck up to the boss.” These believers were there to talk about their god and, as the op-ed pointed out, Pence seemed to want to sing the praises of another savior: Trump. The newly minted SBC president, J.D. Greear, even took to Twitter to condemn Pence’s “mixed signal.”
But the SBC had a politician, granted Pence is terribly religious, address its meeting. What did it expect? (Actually, the veep invited himself, which makes the state-church angle even more pronounced.)
An attendee accused the VP of “hijacking our unified religious meeting.” That encapsulates, perhaps unintentionally, one of the very reasons the founders chose to keep state and church separate.
We often think of the wall of separation as keeping the government free from the taint of religion, and that’s true, but the founders also built the wall to keep religion free from the taint of the government. James Madison explained this in an 1822 letter to Edward Livingston, writing that religion and government “will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
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