The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, Defender of Church-State Divide, Dies at 81

The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, who started his career in the Southern Baptist Convention but became increasingly troubled as the denomination grew more aggressively conservative, and who went on to lead the Interfaith Alliance, an organization devoted to religious and cultural diversity and to keeping religion and politics separate, died on June 7 in Monroe, La. He was 81.

Northminster Church of Monroe, where Dr. Gaddy was senior pastor from 1991 until his retirement in 2016, posted news of his death on its Facebook page, saying he had been having serious health issues for several months. The Interfaith Alliance, of which he was president from 1997 to 2014, also noted his death on its website.

“Across so many areas,” the group’s president and chief executive, the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, said in that post, “Welton used his platform to project a vision for America that was inclusive of different beliefs and respectful of every individual’s inherent dignity.”

Dr. Gaddy, while leading congregations in several Southern states, held various posts in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1970s and the first half of the ’80s, including serving on its executive committee from 1980 to 1984. But although he seemed to be a rising star in the denomination during this period, he was often at odds with its emerging conservatism, which was largely being orchestrated by the strategists Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson. Mr. Pressler and Mr. Patterson were on the warpath over what they perceived as liberal trends in doctrine and were putting like-minded people in positions of power.

Dr. Gaddy pushed back especially hard against these trends during the years he was pastor at the Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, from 1977 to 1983. He was often identified as a leader of the moderate faction of the denomination; opponents derisively labeled them “the Gatlinburg Gang” after they met in Gatlinburg, Tenn., in the early 1980s to discuss their concerns about the Southern Baptists’ conservative transformation. (Dr. Gaddy termed it “a steamroller, cloaked in piety.”)

In October 1983, Dr. Gaddy announced that he was leaving Broadway Baptist and would become the campus minister at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. He held that post from 1984 to 1988. In 1991, he became senior pastor at Northminster, a church affiliated with the progressive Alliance of Baptists, which now proclaims to people visiting its website that “every part of you is welcome here — your gender, your race, your politics, your theology, your sexuality.”

Dr. Gaddy became a key figure in the Interfaith Alliance, a group founded in 1994 “to celebrate religious freedom,” as its website says, “and to challenge the bigotry and hatred arising from religious and political extremism infiltrating American politics.”

In 1998, when the Southern Baptist Convention amended its statement of beliefs to include the idea that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband,” Dr. Gaddy, in an interview with NBC News, condemned the move.

“I think it’s unhealthy for the family,” he said. “I think it’s bad relationally. I think it’s heresy theologically.”

In May 2008, when Senator John McCain of Arizona, seeking the Republican presidential nomination, got into hot water when two conservative evangelical ministers he had been courting made particularly offensive remarks about Muslims and Jews, Dr. Gaddy was outspoken about the underlying problem.

“This is a perfect example of when politicians and religious leaders try to use each other, both of them end up getting hurt,” he told The New York Times.

In 2010, when news outlets reported that Trijicon Inc., which supplied telescopic gun sights to the United States military, had been embossing phrases drawn from the New Testament on those sights, he was among those expressing outrage. In a letter to President Barack Obama, he said that the gun sights “clearly violate a government rule prohibiting proselytizing.” He called the practice “only the latest in a long line of violations of the boundaries between religion and government within the military.”

Dr. Gaddy wrote some 25 books and was the longtime host of “State of Belief,” a weekly radio program produced by the Interfaith Alliance and broadcast nationally. Whatever hat he was wearing, keeping church and state separate was a foremost concern.

“I believe strongly in the First Amendment to the Constitution,” he told The News-Star of Monroe in 2016, “and think that practically, as well as historically, when religion and government get entangled with each other, it hurts both. But it probably hurts religion most.”

Curtis Welton Gaddy was born on Oct. 10, 1941, in Paris, Tenn. His father, George, was a clerk for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad and treasurer of the West Paris Baptist Church; his mother, Jenola (Rayburn) Gaddy, taught Sunday school there.

“I truly can’t remember when I didn’t go to church,” he told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1981. “We went twice on Sundays, once on Wednesday night and on most days of the week.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1963 at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., a Baptist institution where he was also a top tennis player. He received a master’s degree in theology from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., in 1968 and a Ph.D. there in 1970.

By then he was pastor at the First Marion Baptist Church in Paris Crossing, Ind. In 1971, he was named pastor of Beechwood Baptist Church in Louisville, and the next year he moved to Nashville to become director of Christian citizenship development for the Southern Baptist Convention.

His concerns about the mixing of politics and religion were evident even then. In 1973, during the Watergate investigations that would lead to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation, Dr. Gaddy offered a prayer at a Southern Baptist breakfast in Washington attended by members of Congress. Among other things, he asked God to “forgive our worship of a civil religion which equates nationalism with Christianity, confuses governmental policy with Your will, and interprets patriotism as blind allegiance.”

Dr. Gaddy married Julia Mae Grabiel (known as Judy) in 1962. She survives him, along with a son, James, and several grandchildren. Another son, John Paul, died in 2014.

In a 1981 speech, Dr. Gaddy expressed his growing frustration with what he believed to be the way the conservative faction and the Moral Majority, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, were hijacking religious discussion and twisting the views of himself and others.

“Opposition to the political platform of the ‘pro-family’ forces is interpreted as opposition to family life,” he said. “Disapproval of attempts to pass legislation governing the practice of prayer in public institutions is labeled as disapproval of prayer. The protest against tax credits for purposes of funding private education is peddled as opposition to education.”

“Our society seems to have an aversion to complexity,” he added. “Maybe we read too many bumper stickers.”