Race, Religious Freedom, and the Institutional Limitations of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs

In 1936, Baptists from across geographic and racial lines cooperatively began working together to address questions of common social concern—specifically, religious freedom. Ten years later, this cooperative work spurred the formation of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, later known as the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC). Recent scholarship has critiqued conceptions of religious freedom in the United States from a multitude of perspectives. Tisa Wenger has shown the ways in which religious freedom in the first half of the twentieth century functioned as a cover for white Christians to avoid addressing questions of race and segregation. This article further explores this idea through the history of the Baptist Joint Committee. It shows how BJC and its board members were unable to foster significant interracial collaboration in its early years not only because of its singular focus on religious freedom but also because of the denominational and bureaucratic social networks that helped establish this organization. White BJC staff and board members lacked the necessary relationships with and knowledge of Black Baptist denominational leaders and organizations. This article shows that the challenges facing BJC in cultivating an interracial conception of religious freedom were far more than solely intellectual. These challenges were social and bureaucratic.