My mother had finished only the Third grade, due to the occupation of her father, who was a drayer, a person who worked on roads and other infrastructure projects. This required her family to move quite often without being able to attend school. She became a self-educated person by attending movies and then writing the plot of the story on her own. She told me that in school she had attended, her class had always used the Bible as a book to teach reading. She felt that schools should still be using the Bible in the classroom, rather than all the other books we had at our disposal. History shows that most schools were either religious in nature or continued to use religious material in their studies up until the turn of the century and even much later.
Mother’s thinking was very prevalent in the early day communities in that people saw education as a religious function, rather than as the teaching of reading and math for achieving educational understanding. All three of the Southern churches (Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterians) believed as the Southern Baptist Convention declared, in 1913, that God believes in education but that their endorsement of public education be coupled with demands that they operate under a religious influence. Obviously, as a school principal, my mother and I did not share the same religious convictions about education.
Shortly after this time, I attended the Royal Ambassador (R.A.) camp at Lake Brownwood for three days and what was supposed to be a enjoyable Summer outing turned out to be a three day confinement in a Baptist penal institution for boys too young for prison confinement. The girls and boys were not allowed to swim together as this might lead to lustful thoughts and I hadn’t had enough experience to know of any lustful ideas. We began each day with morning vespers, had religious training in the afternoon and ended the evenings with long boring sermons by young College ministerial students. They saw all of the young boys much like the football team would see the tackling dummies – something to pound hard on while getting in lots of free practice. I remember telling my mother on return from the camp, “Don’t you ever try to send me back to one of those camps again!”
I think that this experience helped to inoculate me against the Baptist subordination and indoctrination techniques (modus Operandi) more than anything else ever did. I am not saying that I did not find many good convictions and Christian ideals from the Baptist Church to follow but I don’t think they were taught by the preachers. Rather, they were caught from those around me who really practiced religious behavior in their daily lives, such as my mother and father.
The one thing I most value about my experience as a Baptist is a devout belief in the separation of Church and State and the partition which separates Church and politics. It is a belief that is good for both the Church and the State. Baptists used to believe in this precept and I respect those who were able to cling to this idea that religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed – for if left unchecked, one can so easily destroy the value of the other – an actuality or occurrence which has been playing out on the World stage for years!
Click below for more on separation of Church and State