The same week that Confederate president Jefferson Davis decrees that churches and individuals in the Confederacy observe a day of fasting and prayer, North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder newspaper prints a letter to the editor warning about entangling church and Confederacy. Entitled “Appointing Chaplains by the Civil Authority,” the letter-writer declares:
“No subject more intimately concerns the Southern Confederacy than this. Its only tendency, which tendency no other civil legislation can prevent, is, to destroy the last and the least vestige of Religious Liberty.
The old law in Massachusetts was deemed offensive and onerous, because it levied a tax upon all, to maintain a Ministry to which three fourths or nine tenths of the tax payers were strenuously and conscientiously opposed.
It is equally so of Congress, Legislatures, Navies, and Armies. Nay, in these, it is more objectionable than the Massachusetts Law, for in New England, the people had opportunity to sit under the ministry which were supported by their taxes; but in Congress all the country are taxed to pay preachers and prayers whom one in a thousand never saw.
But if all could see and hear them, the case were little better. For if the member of Congress has no decided and particular creed, then he is not concerned about religion, either for himself, or for other people. And if he has a defined creed, then he is doomed to hear and pay a man who is, or may be powerfully burdensome to him.
Again, if it is the duty of Government to appoint a Chaplain, say, for the army, or any other place, then it is their equal duty to compel attendance, and equally so, to fine or punish for non-attendance. If the power to rule the church, that is, religion, in any aspect, is given to civil authorities, they will then demand, and ought to have the SWORD.
Prayers mixed with legislative proceedings, is religion out of time and place. The closet, the family circle, and the church, are the place for devotional exercises, and instead of its being proof of great piety, it is rather an evidence of the want of it, to be lugging the forms of worship out of place.
If Legislative bodies have the right to assign a religious functionary to one time and one place, which time or place is not constitutionally provided, then they have the same right to appoint one to any other time and place. And in the Confederate States of America, the law making powers have as much right to elect and Episcopal preacher to be the pastor of a Baptist Church, as they have to send a Chaplain to any Regiment, which Chaplain is paid by the taxes of the whole Confederacy. And they have the same right to tax that church, or that regiment to support the Pastor, or the Chaplain.
It is lamentable enough if this country has not learned in Eighty-five years, that, it does not belong to civil law, to give religion to people, and more than to rule that they possess. And the sires of this Confederacy would better look to this subject now, than for their posterity to wish we had.
If this modest shaking the sword over the church is not stopped where it is, it will some day produce a strife more bloody than that which is now pending between the United States and the Confederacy. May God save our Legislators from this misplaced zeal, and make them willing to leave religion to people, and to keep State and religion asunder.
Every Regiment, or company, can provide itself with a minister of its own choice. And if they neglect it, the case is no worse than it is through all the country. At all events, for the state to provide him at the public expense, him too, disagreeable to a very large majority of the soldiers, is, for Satan to keep house in the absence of Christ.
M. Bennett
Yet, church and state are already entangled in the Confederacy, and the leaders of the southern nation do not heed Bennett’s advice. Many state-supported chaplains of other denominations are appointed throughout the war, vexing Baptists, who chose in this one particular area (but not in other matters) to uphold church state separation. Relatively few Baptists serve as army chaplains, for their churches prove unable or unwilling to raise funding necessary for a robust chaplaincy presence in the armies.
Source: Biblical Recorder, November 13, 1861
