Obituary: Rev. Dean Kelley, 70, Champion of Religious Freedom

New York Times    May 14, 1997
By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

The Rev. Dean M. Kelley, a leading proponent of religious liberty who used his position at the National Council of Churches to speak out for the rights of religious groups large and small, died Sunday at his home in West Swanzey, N.H. He was 70.

The cause was cancer, the council said.

Kelley, a minister in the United Methodist Church, served as the council's executive for religious liberty for 30 years until 1990, during which he filed friend of the court briefs in many church-state cases, testified before congressional committees on  religious freedom issues and defended controversial groups like the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church and others.

After his retirement, Kelley served as the council's counselor on religious liberty, at one point reviewing government documents on the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, by federal law-enforcement agents, which ended in a fire that killed about 80 members of the religious sect.

Kelley wrote that the FBI had been fundamentally mistaken about the Davidians, viewing them as hostages to a "cult leader" rather than as "a band of adults voluntarily and devotedly following a visionary."