Recommit To Religious Liberty, Speaker Urges Expert Visits Spokane To Stress Importance Of Defending Values, Even If They Aren’t Our Own

In 1654, a group of Jewish settlers arrived in New Amsterdam. The Dutch allowed the immigrants into the settlement, but refused to give them the same rights as other citizens.

Four years later, another group of Jewish settlers arrived in colonial Rhode Island. There, they were treated like equals.

For America to maintain the principles of equality and tolerance on which it was founded, everyone must recommit themselves to the Rhode Island example, an expert on religious liberty said Saturday in Spokane.

And those principles must continue to be at the cornerstone of public education, said Vanderbilt University professor Charles Haynes.

“We have built a nation despite our historical differences,” he said, but the struggle continues today.

Across the country, school districts, communities and courts wrestle with divisive issues, such as school prayer, sex education and multicultural curriculums.

Haynes’ stirring speech at the Spokane Convention Center drew a standing ovation from about 200 educators representing the Washington chapter of the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Drawing heavily from America’s roots, Haynes said a lot can be learned by studying the life of Roger Williams, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his support of religious freedom.

Williams was a Christian fundamentalist who once “rowed a boat 30 miles upriver to participate in a public debate against the Quakers,” Haynes said.

Despite privately believing the Quakers’ beliefs were wrong, Williams was instrumental in allowing them to settle and practice their religion in the New World.

“That, my friends, is a model for civic responsibility,” Haynes said. “Guarding someone’s rights even if you disagree with them.

“The arrangement will not last if we don’t debate our differences in a civil discourse. Burning churches and bombing abortion clinics isn’t the answer.”

And don’t begin the discussion with how different we all are, Haynes added.

“Begin with the civic agreement that we all have a lot in common,” he said. “Let’s move to a unity that’s in the interest of our diversity.”

As for that first group of Jewish settlers who called Rhode Island home and built a synagogue, more than three centuries later their descendants still worship there, Haynes said.

But in the sanctuary, the wary pioneers had built an escape hatch: a trap door near the pulpit.

“You can only imagine what they were thinking when they were building the synagogue,” Haynes said. “After all the persecution they went through …” Who would have thought that the colonial experiment in religious liberty would last so long, Haynes asked.

“Does the experiment work? Yes. The Jews of Rhode Island have never had to use that trap door,” he said.

“That’s America at its best.”

, DataTimes