The first time I met this particular fellow, the conversation veered into religion and that wasn't good. He is a conservative, evangelical Christian, and I'm more on the liberal end, but he's a very good Christian, indeed -- mission trips to hard places, long hours, all in the name of helping humankind. He demonstrates, in other words, the courage of his convictions and is doing a lot more to make the world a better place than I probably am.

But I knew another great Christian who was decidedly not conservative and believed in making the world a better place by demonstrating for racial justice, for equality for women, against the Vietnam War and for 60 or more years, for the absolute separation of church and state, including that principle as it applied to public schools. The late Rev. Bill Finlator was as stalwart a man of faith as I've known, and his Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh remains a progressive monument.

The two philosophies ought to be able to coexist, but the Baptists, in particular Southern Baptists, are unlikely to accept that. Even though Southern Baptists pride themselves on independence, these days some on the conservative side of the denomination have seemed to want to develop a common and strict set of beliefs. As The N&O's Yonat Shimron reported Sunday, of late that's meant voicing a dissatisfaction with public schools, including the belief by some Southern Baptists that those schools are not only absent religion, but against it.

Some groups are forming their own schools. Others are becoming more vocal about the public schools, and lobbying for religion -- prayer in particular -- to be "put back in" to public education.

The story reminded me of a comment my acquaintance made on that first meeting: "This country started having problems when we took God out of the schools."

We who are products of the Raleigh Public Schools of the late 1950s and '60s are admittedly well into middle-age and thus not as sharp in the recall of times past as we used to be, when those times were, well, closer to us. But I gotta tell you -- I've had a hard time finding people who remember much about God and religion getting a heavy emphasis in the schools even then. Doubtless that may have been the case in some places, but there are few of my acquaintance who can recall a great deal of actual religious instruction in day-to-day school activities -- and this was in a time when pretty much everybody, it seemed, was going to church, and most of the churches were Protestant.

Time and growth have diversified religion as they have everything else, thank goodness. Which makes one wonder: would the conservative Southern Baptists who want religion back in schools want it to reflect the multitude, literally, of the religious denominations and philosophies hereabouts, or would the religion explored in schools reflect only one such theological viewpoint?

Obviously, those who want to form their own private schools with one viewpoint or a thousand of them are welcome to do so. We have, gloriously, a free country. But just because the public schools do not adopt (and are not constitutionally permitted to adopt) a religious doctrine doesn't mean they're against religion. That's a pretty severe blanket accusation to make, and if you're one of the thousands of public school employees who also is active in your church, you couldn't be blamed for being offended by it.

By law, church and state are separated, to protect both. The men who drew up those laws, our founding fathers, were by the way often of deep religious conviction.

And then there are examples of peaceful but independent coexistence. My grandfather, Pappy, was a conservative Baptist minister in western North Carolina -- and an evangelist. He saved as many souls as he could under tents around the Southeast, and in the last half of his career, in the sanctuary of his own church. His wife, my grandma, was a much-loved public school teacher in the same town. Pappy didn't tell her what to teach, and she didn't tell him what to preach. His work was in the tent. Hers was in the classroom, inspiring small town kids to expand their dreams and their horizons.

In the end of Shimron's story, a clear-eyed view of the situation came, as it often does, from a solitary citizen, a Southern Baptist as it happens, who seemed to have a tolerant attitude toward everyone. His kid is at Enloe High School in Raleigh. "Enloe High School," he said, "is a great school. It's real diverse, and there's lots of opportunities. I think it's possible to get a good education about your faith at home. It's not essential you get it at school."