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No Religious Denomination Has Claim to Dominace in U.S. Baptists’ View

November 7, 1928
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(Jewish Daily Bulletin)

Interesting comment in connection with the campaign is made by “The Baptist,” official newspaper of the Northern Baptist Convention, published here. Under the caption: “Whose Country Is America, Anyhow?”, the paper writes:

“One of the vices of majorities is a habit of claiming a monopoly of possession, power and rights. In the United States this vice takes the form of claiming the nation for the major group, Because more people profess to follow Christianity than any other religion, this is called by some Christians a Christian country; for a similar reason, a Protestant country, a white man’s country, an Anglo-Saxon country, and so on. Such assumpteion on the part of majorities of any sort, contains a vicious fallacy. Rights are not measured by numbers. A nation that has 4,000,000 Jews, 12,000,000 Negroes 18,000,000 Catholies and more than 40,000,000 people of other origins than English, is neither Christan, Protestant, white nor Anglo-Saxon. It is what it is, a mixed nation, with population classifiable on lines that run crisscross in many directions, and with all groups equally American and equally entitled to all American rights. This is not over a business men’s country, or a capitalist country. It is everybody’s country.Whenever any group shall arrogale to itself special prerogatives and dictatorial powers, a revolution of the son provided in the national constitution is morally and politically due.”

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