Washington • Charles Haynes, a First Amendment scholar, has spent more than two decades helping schools walk the line between religion and state and advocating for the rights of people of a range of faiths and no faith.
Over the past year, Haynes, 69, has been in the process of retiring from the Freedom Forum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center, continuing to serve as an adviser as he makes plans to write and volunteer in the future. The author and speaker says it “lifts his heart” when he can gather representatives of groups ranging from People For the American Way to the National Association of Evangelicals — along with Hindus and humanists — around the same table.