Pluralism, Secularism, and Religious Freedom in the Southern Baptist Convention

In 2001, David Hollinger proposed that historians of American religion jettison the language of “secularization” and replace it with “de-Christianization” as a more analytically precise way to think about the (alleged) decline of Christianity’s cultural and political authority across various institutional spheres of American life. For this panel, in conversation with Hollinger’s piece and the other panelists, I will reflect on the problematics of secularism and pluralism as they relate to my current work on religious freedom in twentieth-century America. I am engaged in charting the ways in which diverse groups of Americans employed the ideal of religious freedom, the cultural and political work this ideal performed, and how all this changed over time. Mid-century liberal (Protestant and Jewish) assertions that religious freedom relied on the absolute separation of church and state were increasingly challenged by an ascendant (Protestant and Catholic) conservatism, which defined religious freedom in opposition to the doctrine of separation and to the perceived encroachments of secularism. Across these debates religious freedom has simultaneously been presented as an integral component of the secular, and as a rallying cry against the secular, or in Hollinger’s terms, as a conservative backlash against the attempted de-Christianization of the public sphere. Focusing on the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1980s, I will interrogate the competing formulations of “religion” and the “secular” that emerged in the late twentieth-century culture wars, asking how they might illuminate the ongoing dilemmas and exclusions of pluralism and secularism in the United States.