By Stephen Fox

Mr. Fortner's letter (“Not on my watch”, Letters to the Editor, Jan., 2) is heartbreaking. He is a member of the church where my mother was baptized. But representing a grand contribution to the church where my mother's family attended in the first half of the 20th century, lamentably, does not make Mr. Fortner the expert he purports to be on church-state history in his rebuttal to editor Scott Wright’s column (“A Christmas message for conservatives,” The Wright Angle, Dec. 19, 2005).

I applaud Fortner's Christian witness the last few years in our community. His recent testimony in our church was an authentic and eloquent witness to his conviction. I delight in being his brother in Christ Jesus. It is in his interpretation of the Baptist tradition and church-state issues where he and I differ.

In many ways, I come at this from the same direction as JSU history professor Harvey Jackson, who approached segregation in his masterful personal history of Alabama: "It is hard to explain after so many years just why segregation worked … Why so many good white people who would give to the poor, visit the sick and shut-ins, comfort the afflicted and bring hope to the hopeless, would allow it. But they did."

The same has happened in local Baptist congregations in the last 30 years. For fear of dissension and disharmony in the church, members have sold their Baptist legacy for a mess of porridge and today we have ill-informed, passionate provincial statements like Mr. Fortner’s passing for mainstream Baptist thought. Our church congregation has forfeited its heritage, become silent on our legacy, and when dismally pip-squeaking the thickets have whitewashed them at best. You would think that a church that counts among its members a JSU trustee, a winner of the Girl Scout Woman of the Decade Award for the region, an assistant county school superintendent, a retired school principal, as well as graduates of Duke, Virginia, Auburn, Alabama, and Samford universities -- among other schools -- could do better.

Like Pulitzer Prize nominee and Baptist historian Wayne Flynt has said, every Baptist preacher in the state knows they need only offend or disturb one influential family in a congregation and anything resembling a prophetic voice, any semblance of truth-telling on the gut issues, becomes problematic.

Our church is not alone. According to Bob Terry of the Alabama Baptist, 99 percent of Baptist churches in Alabama, through the Cooperative Program Dollars, support the Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Its leader, Richard Land, through minions like Jesse Helms, the Texas Regulars, and right-wing demagogues like Tim LaHaye, Judge Roy Moore, Jerry Falwell and Alabama's own Steve Gaines, have all shredded the church-state Baptist legacy of Alabama greats Hugo Black and Judge Frank Johnson.

According to The Washington Post, in the fall of 2004 Land -- whose salary is paid through the Cooperative Program -- was on the phone weekly with Karl Rove working to reelect President Bush with the bait and switch, flim-flam operation of the Values Vote Crusade. Bishop Will Willimon's Christian Century got the Crusade right in a recent book review of Mark Miller's “Fooled Again” where it was asserted: “Most of their tactics are out in the open or, at best, thinly veiled. They have the enthusiastic participation of ordinary, everyday Americans who believe they're doing what they must … The Aim is not to master politics but to annihilate it. Bush, Rove, DeLay, Ralph Reed, and others believe in politics in the same way they and their corporate beneficiaries believe in 'competition'. In both cases the intention is not to play the game but to end it, because the game requires some tolerance of the opponent and tolerance is what these bitter-enders most despise.”

Compare what Mark Noll says of the first hundred years of Protestant witness in America to Mr. Fortner's letter on religion in America. On page 438 of Noll’s magisterial “America's God”, he writes: “Certainly the evangelical juggernaut was working too well for a few souls who, if they could not stop wrestling with God, still wondered if the energetic God of the Protestant evangelicals was adequate for the complexities of the universe or the turmoil of their own souls. So Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and supremely Abraham Lincoln may have been pushed by the successes of 'American Christianity' into post-Protestant, even post-Christian, theism. The tragedy of these individuals was that to be faithful to the God they found in their own hearts -- or in the Bible, or in the sweep of events -- they had to hold themselves aloof from the organized Christianity of the United States and from its preaching about the message of Jesus Christ.”

Please don't try to dismiss Noll as a liberal, either. You would embarrassingly show your ignorance, as Noll is a ranking academic on evangelicals in America, from Billy Graham's Wheaton College in Illinois. Noll and I have a mutual friend in Columbia University’s Randall Balmer, another evangelical Christian academic who has written of the erroneousness of the church-state view that Mr. Fortner championed in his letter.

There is a glorious witness of Baptist history in America, a legacy of the likes of the Great George Truett, in whose namesake church I was saved and baptized in Hayesville, North Carolina. But you won't learn much of it now at my church. Like the Laodicean church of John the Revelator, they have forsaken their first love -- their Baptist heritage -- and become lukewarm.

If Baptists can't do better at the grassroots, with the promise a church like my former one holds, no wonder we have an attorney general like Troy King who told me just before Christmas that the church-state opinions of Hugo Black in the 60's were a “perversion” of the Constitution. No wonder the Alabama Third District chose a carnival barker like Mike Rogers over Joe Turnham in 2002 – Turnham, a more virtuous and capable Methodist Sunday school teacher. And no wonder otherwise good people will go to the GOP primaries and with misguided conviction and passion cast a vote for Judge Roy Moore for governor of Alabama.

Stephen Fox, Collinsville, is a graduate of Furman University. In the 1990's, Fox was a frequent freelance contributor to "Baptists Today," a mainstream Baptist publication of Macon, Ga. Mr. Fox is in no way affiliated with the publisher of The Post. His opinions are his own.