ERLC: Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, appeared in an Easter Day showing of the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” He said he had read President Kennedy’s speech on religion in politics “about 30 times” and explained there is a role for religion in politics but that it shouldn’t be an “institutional role.”
Cardinal Dolan expressed concern that the notion of separation of church and state has been misinterpreted to also mean a “wall between one’s faith and one’s political decisions, between one’s moral focus and the way one might act in the political sphere.” He said it was incorrect to suggest that faith has no place in the public square. “I think the public square is impoverished when people might be coerced to put a piece of duct tape over their mouth.”
Land agreed, noting it was an early Baptist, Roger Williams, who contributed the concept of religious liberty as a major plank in America’s founding. “We believe absolutely in the separation of church and state to protect the church from the state,” Land said. “There are many of us who are concerned about government intrusion on the free exercise of faith. It never was intended to mean the separation of religiously informed morality from public policy.”
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