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This week, April 27 marks the 165th anniversary of the organization of the Baptist Church in Needham.
This is, of course, an event to be celebrated within the congregation. But it is also important to the town as a whole since it lies at the convergence of two important events that created the downtown as we now know it.
The first event is the amendment to the MA Constitution in 1833 that ended taxation to support the established church. Massachusetts was the last state to sever the ties between church and state (no, it didn’t automatically happen in 1776).
In Massachusetts, going back to the early 1600s, the definition of a “Town” was a church, a school, and the tax base to pay the minister’s salary. The church was literally the foundation of the town and the concept of the separation of church and state would have been purely meaningless to these folks. ....

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