Texas Baptist Pastor Defends Courthouse Nativity Display

A church-state controversy is brewing in Athens, not the home of my Dawgs but Athens, Texas.

Here’s the lede from Associated Baptist Press:

ATHENS, Texas (ABP) – An East Texas town is being dubbed Ground Zero in this year’s round of skirmishes known collectively as the Christmas Wars.

Attention turned to Athens, Texas, about 50 miles southeast of Dallas, after the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation asked Henderson County commissioners to remove from the courthouse lawn a nativity scene seen as an unconstitutional establishment of religion by government.

Typical nativity controversy.  At least a couple of these pop up each year around the nation.

The Freedom From Religion organization is arguing that:

When the county hosts this manger scene, which depicts the legendary birth of Jesus Christ, at the seat of its government, it places the imprimatur of the county government behind the Christian religious doctrine.

Meanwhile, the county’s attorney contends that the nativity display is constitutional because it includes other symbols and thus has a secular purpose.

What are those symbols?  Santa Clause and snowmen.

Sorry, but surrounding Baby Jesus with a “festive atmosphere” doesn’t mean your government-sponsored nativity display is any less unconstitutional.

Kyle Henderson, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Athens, Texas has weighed in on this controversy in his own backyard.  Henderson has long been involved in Texas Baptist life and most recently chaired a committee that studied how to increase participation and attendance at the annual meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

So what did the Baptist pastor have to say?

Here’s a snippet:

1. Our county officials have followed our constitutional protections and legal precedent in affirming that the displays put up by Keep Athens Beautiful meet the standards of protected, secular speech and therefore are not a governmental support of religion.

That’s a very lawyer-esque statement coming from Pastor Henderson.  I gotta admit, it makes me cringe each and every time I come across a minister characterizing a nativity as “secular speech.”

In what way does this nativity qualify as “secular speech.”  What is the secular dimension of a display depicting the birth of Jesus Christ?

What struck me the most – the reason I decided to cut short my blogging absence and take a break from working on the dissertation – was Henderson’s rationale for affirming the decisions of his local government.  Check it out:

These constitutional protections were put into place because Baptist and other minority groups were persecuted, harassed, taxed, beaten, exiled and put to death for their beliefs. At the founding of our country we were a minority. The law protected our ability to teach that people should come to faith in Christ and be baptized as believers. We had to do this in the face of the opposition of the “majority.” Majority rule can be a terrible thing, that is why we have the Constitution and the legal system, to protect the rights of all people. We should not stand up because we have the majority and can intimidate others, but we should stand up because we believe every citizen has the right to freely express their opinion.

Now, I’m pretty sure that Baptists in particular weren’t harassed, beat down, and banished in their quest for religious liberty, they weren’t doing so in order to put a NATIVITY display ON GOVERNMENT PROPERTY (alongside snowmen).

Henderson makes an appeal to the Constitution.  He makes an appeal to Baptist history.  But what Henderson doesn’t offer is an explanation as to why a local government should sponsor a nativity display on government property?

Is this display in Athens, Texas constitutional?  Maybe.  If the county officials allow the presence of other religious symbols and/or turn the courthouse lawn into a true public forum, then the answer is yes.  According to the article, that has not yet happened.

Can we really say though that their intent was non-religious?  That the display depicting Jesus’ birth was not an endorsement of the Christian faith?  That somehow the presence of snowmen made the display sufficiently secular?

What message was this courthouse display communicating?

Christians, and Baptists especially, are most faithful when we don’t secularize the symbols of our faith even for the sake of legal argument.  We are most faithful when we don’t use government to communicate the message that “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” !

The Baptists of yesteryear knew this to be true.