{"id":102,"date":"2010-10-30T08:19:45","date_gmt":"2010-10-30T08:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html"},"modified":"2010-10-30T08:19:45","modified_gmt":"2010-10-30T08:19:45","slug":"va-baptists-4-separation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html","title":{"rendered":"VA Baptists 4 Separation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, the Virginia Baptist Mission Board decided it was time to push back against the historical revisionism of Barton, Skousen, and Beck. that tries to pretend that the United States was not founded on the principle of separation of church and state. So it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abpnews.com\/content\/view\/5811\/53\/\">voted to commission<\/a> a pamphlet for lay readers setting the record straight. If anyone is entitled to do so, it&#8217;s the Virginia Baptists, who worked hand in glove with James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to get the state legislature to pass the aboriginal American charter of separation, Jefferson&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom\">Statute for Religion Freedom<\/a>, in 1786. <\/p>\n<p>The VBMB is an arm of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Baptist_General_Association_of_Virginia\">Baptist General Association of Virginia<\/a>, an umbrella organization dating back to 1823 that retains a good deal of the old Baptist separationist spirit, and finds itself regularly at odds with the Southern Baptist Convention. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the folks at the SBC will do with the pamphlet after it is published and distributed to the thousands of Baptist churches in Virginia and beyond that belong to the BGAV. Will they stand with the old-time religion, or with Beck and company, or ignore the whole thing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, the Virginia Baptist Mission Board decided it was time to push back against the historical revisionism of Barton, Skousen, and Beck. that tries to pretend that the United States was not founded on the principle of separation of church and state. So it voted to commission a pamphlet for lay readers setting the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>VA Baptists 4 Separation - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"VA Baptists 4 Separation - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last week, the Virginia Baptist Mission Board decided it was time to push back against the historical revisionism of Barton, Skousen, and Beck. that tries to pretend that the United States was not founded on the principle of separation of church and state. So it voted to commission a pamphlet for lay readers setting the&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-10-30T08:19:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"VA Baptists 4 Separation - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"VA Baptists 4 Separation - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Last week, the Virginia Baptist Mission Board decided it was time to push back against the historical revisionism of Barton, Skousen, and Beck. that tries to pretend that the United States was not founded on the principle of separation of church and state. So it voted to commission a pamphlet for lay readers setting the&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html","og_site_name":"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","article_published_time":"2010-10-30T08:19:45+00:00","author":"Mark Silk","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html","name":"VA Baptists 4 Separation - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website"},"datePublished":"2010-10-30T08:19:45+00:00","dateModified":"2010-10-30T08:19:45+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/va-baptists-4-separation.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"VA Baptists 4 Separation"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/","name":"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","description":"Beliefnet Voices","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d","name":"Mark Silk","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","caption":"Mark Silk"},"description":"Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}