JIMMY CARTER'S RELIGION
Baker, James T.
JIMMY CARTER'S RELIGION JAMES T. BAKER As a practicing if somewhat jaded Southern Baptist, I find the recent, tardy hand-wringing concern of the Max Lerners about Presidential candidate Jimmy...
...he talked of his vital faith for a full hour...
...Carter would then be the first President to be both a southern and a Baptist, a true "born again" Southern Baptist, and the first to permit it to be made a public, political issue...
...and with it, just like Bryan, he attracts legions of fellow redeemed travellers while turning off an influential handful of doubting sophisticates...
...Carter, unlike the others, may be our next President...
...Carter is not the Baptist candidate, and he should not be denied the Presidency because he is saved any more than another candidate because he goes to confession or another because he wears a yamulka to services...
...The book he wrote about it, called Why Not the Best...
...Neither side gave an inch...
...But, as Ms...
...It has given him a certain inner peace without neutralizing his ambition...
...Though there have been only one Roman Catholic and no Jewish Presidents (thus thirty-seven Protestants) the peanut farmer from Georgia would be the first to say publicly that he has been "saved...
...He is even now the first serious contender with anything like a well-developed "Salvationist" theology since William Jennings Bryan...
...He is therefore essentially a new phenomenon in American politics...
...JIMMY CARTER'S RELIGION JAMES T. BAKER As a practicing if somewhat jaded Southern Baptist, I find the recent, tardy hand-wringing concern of the Max Lerners about Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter's Salvationist Southern Baptist religion just a bit amusing...
...From Calvin's devout children they took their belief in a God who initiates saving relations with men...
...It was then mat his sister Ruth, herself a victim of severe depression before spending three months alone in a backwoods cabin and then finding "pentecostal salvation," took him for a long walk...
...Significantly but not surprisingly, he told Moyers (a fellow Southern Baptist, also presumably saved but according to a lot of southern Baptists "backslidden" up there in New York) that his favorite hymn is the old Baptist and new pop folk ballad Amazing Grace: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me...
...It may not happen to all...
...Southern Baptists are the southern branch of the American Baptist denomination descended from a seventeenth century British nonconformist sect which originally had little distinctive theology except that they required "adult" participation in the sacraments...
...Jimmy Carter is of course a Southern Baptist, a specific kind of saved person...
...Catholics are sometimes "saved" too...
...It is given to all who agree to let Him come in...
...It there were, I feel sure that even the Republican Billy Graham would be on the bandwagon...
...Would purity...
...Or maybe it's because they have not had the audacity to claim a personal experience with God...
...It has turned his attention to theologians like Tillich, Barth and Niebuhr...
...So for Carter's people and for Carter, salvation has for three centuries been identified as a freely and inevitably offered gift of God...
...Jimmy Carter is in short the very best that Southern Baptist religion and culture can offer...
...Even Richard Nixon, perhaps the most overtly pious candidate in our history, never claimed to be saved...
...Haughton points out, Catholicism has always believed in and taught "Protestant" salvation too...
...It tends to occur most regularly among those trained by Salvationist churches to expect it And it is most common in those desperately seaching for personal recognition, fullfill-ment, and security: children seeking to earn the mature world's respect, sexually ripening adolescents, runaway teenagers, menopausic men and women, and to certain people at each of these stages: Bat all in all it's a perfectly natural experience that answers perfectly normal needs...
...Which is not to say there is some sinister Southern Baptist Salvationist plot to elect Jimmy Carter President any more than there was in John Kennedy's candidacy a Papist plot to put a Catholic on top...
...Neither side admitted the least bit of truth in the other's definition...
...In her Drama of Salvation, for example, die Catholic writer Rosemary Haughton calls this stereotype to account...
...there is not to my knowledge a concerted Southern Baptist effort to put Carter in the White House, no plan to create a cabinet-level, Salvationist Clergy General, no dream of making liturgi-cals sit at the rear of the bus...
...Putting Jesus first," he went on to be Governor of Georgia and run for President...
...He believes "God wants me to be the best politician I can possibly be...
...It is desirable...
...But this is not really the case...
...These modern days it most often first comes to the young-younger and younger it seems as in our society the young mature ever faster- and when it does, the child can be baptized and enjoy the privileges of full adult church membership...
...It comes through "conviction" at hearing the Word preached...
...He is fond of quoting the latter's definition of the purpose of government: to establish justice in a sinful world...
...For their other theological principles, especially concerning salvation, the English, American and Southern Baptists looked to their closest allies, the Calvinists and Westeyans...
...They prayed...
...On "The Bill Moyers Journal" for P.B.S...
...Salvation" is a much more common experience among contemporary Americans than many people, even professional theologians, seem to think...
...Carter's "salvation experience" seems about as healthy as possible...
...With Ruth Carter Stapleton this seems to have happened...
...Jimmy's burden was lifted...
...It may therefore be unusual...
...from Wesley's tireless workers they took the idea that He comes with his offer to all who patiently wait for his inevitable knock at the heart's door...
...I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see...
...With Jimmy it didn't, and probably just as well for his political career...
...Despite the Broadman biography and the obvious support of a lot of Baptist ministers (remember the nuns pouring out to vote for J.F.K...
...It is believed by many alien, perhaps even an ideological opponent, to what is called salvation in Roman Catholic and other high-church liturgical fellowships...
...Salvation, especially the second or later experience, can lead-though Southern Baptists generally discourage it as Pentecostal-to "signs of the spirit" such as faith healing and speaking in unknown tongues...
...Maybe it's because no one gave any of them a chance to win...
...Carter's autobiography tells of a dissatisfied graduate of Annapolis and nuclear submarine commander who resigned his commission to go home to his peanut plantation and the Georgia state legislature-who lost a race for Governor in the racial confusion of 1966- who at the age of forty-one, discouraged by his failure, unfulfilled by the accumulation of wealth, a loosely committed but unenthusiastic Baptist church member since before bis eleventh birthday, reached his psychological and spiritual nadir...
...But it is a natural act of God...
...It makes saints...
...It attracts millions to Lourdes and Fatima...
...It is calling upon God and believing he responds, or better, it is being called by God and responding...
...It is usually accompanied by great emotion...
...When it occurs in childhood, it is often followed in later years by one or more further, usually much deeper experiences which can be interpreted two ways: (1) as a sign the person was not in fact "saved" before, in which case there is often a second or "true" baptism...
...Only Warren Harding and Harry Truman before him could claim that perhaps dubious distinction...
...Since he has been a Southern Baptist all his life, since his latter-day salvation experience probably drove deeper the values of early conservative social mores, could he bring to the Oval Office bizarre programs for a new Prohibitionism, an end to legal divorce, a censorship of what Baptists consider pornography...
...It is requisite for church membership...
...It has made him something of a social reformer, though not verbally radical enough to alienate his southern constituency, a crypto-liberal who learned long before Presidential politics to fuzz public statements while secretly going on with progressive programs...
...Only a Charles Colson, a former Nixon aid who was conveniently "saved" after the scandal broke (Bom Again, his book), could cheapen it or make it seem the least bit suspicious...
...She described her own redemptive experience- mystical, healing-in which she, also a church member since childhood, had met Jesus and found peace and fulfillment...
...When it comes to an older person, it is supposed to cause great changes in lifestyle...
...Jimmy Carter, assuming his popularity holds and he is nominated and elected, would be our third Baptist President...
...His is the kind enlightened Southern Baptist ministers encourage...
...She told Brother, Jimmy that he would find joy only when Jesus was more important to him than politics...
...Ruth Carter Stapleton is now an interdenominational faith healer...
...As a stunning act of God at a specific time in a person's life, salvation is often stereotyped as a low-church Protestant phenomenon, as a cultic characteristic of Methodists and their unacknowledged Holiness stepchildren, or "Wesleyan" Baptists and Presbyterians...
...and he speaks openly, voluntarily of his salvation...
...Despite the great American love affair with Billy Graham, and the fact that most Americans neither know nor care what a potential President believes in, there are some rather thoughtful people who feel it's just a tad risky to have an American President who has been "saved by grace through the blood of the Lamb...
...She says that this false dichotomy was created during the Reformation and its aftermath by theologians looking for differences to exploit While Protestants identified salvation as an act of God, a sudden, often unexpected gift, an "event" that sets a person permanently on the road to heaven, Catholics defined it as the final reward at death for a life of virtue, or at feast of dying in sacramental grace...
...It may not be quite as common...
...Yet his candidacy, because he has been willing to testify to his faith by permitting his salvation to become an issue, does raise some possibly troubling questions...
...2) as a return to or deepening of faith, in which case the person makes a public rededication of life to Christ and his church...
...As a professional student of American religion- Protestant, Catholic and Jewish-I find the concern perfectly understandable and, given certain widespread assumptions and a couple of historical precedents, entirely justifiable...
...It was not an age for tolerance...
...Only Truman, whose family had moved to Missouri from Mississippi, was a Southern Baptist, and Harry never made much of his affiliation...
...There has been little concern for Udall's former Mor-monism or Ford's misguided, Nixon-pardoning Epis-copalianism or Jerry Brown's strange Zen Catholicism...
...Only adults could be baptized (they early came to believe immersion to be the only true form of baptism) and actively participate in ec-clesial celebrations because for them Christianity was a faith of the consciously aware...
...that's Jesus Christ, not Jimmy Carter), was just released by the Southern Baptist Broadman Press and is a Bantam paperback...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
