AMANDA TYLER
Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty
Please listen to Amanda Tyler in the interview below in January 2023. This is who she is:
Amanda Tyler is executive director of BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty), leading the organization as it upholds the historic Baptist principle of religious liberty: defending the free exercise of religion and protecting against its establishment by government. She is the lead organizer of BJC’s Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign and co-host of BJC’s Respecting Religion podcast.
Tyler’s constitutional law analysis and advocacy for faith freedom for all have been featured by major news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News, ABC News, CNN, and MSNBC.
BAPTIST JOINT COMMITTEE - WHO ARE THEY?
Many people are not aware of the important work this organization has been doing since 1936. They advocate for religious freedom and the separation of church and state every day. Learn more at their website. Here is how they describe their work:
Does a woman have the right to wear a religious headscarf at work? Is a bakery owner justified in refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple? Can there be prayer in schools? Christian monuments on government property? Partisan campaigning in houses of worship? These are the kinds of questions BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) grapples with.
Our positions cannot be easily categorized as on the political “right” or “left.” Instead, the stand we take is the one that, we believe, best supports religious freedom.
We are attorneys, Capitol Hill insiders, ministers, mobilizers and scholars. We file briefs in pivotal Supreme Court cases, advocate for and against legislation, testify in Congress and unite with others across faiths to ensure that all Americans have, and will always have, the right to follow their spiritual beliefs. Founded in 1936, we bring our uniquely Baptist perspective of “soul freedom” to protecting religious liberty for all and defending the separation of church and state. BJC is the only faith-based group working on the national level with this singular focus.
Why? Religious freedom is a pillar of American life, written into the U.S. Constitution and spelled out in the first 16 words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As bold as those words are, however, it’s not always obvious how to apply them in our modern society.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, also works with this national project - Christians Against Christian Nationalism. Here is their statement, which you can sign and share here.
As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, we are concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.
As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that:
People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.
Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.
One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.
Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.
Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.
America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.
Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.
We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.
Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.