Has there ever been a former President as irrelevant and ignorable as Jimmy Carter? Recently the man from Plains wanted to express his dismay at the misogynistic ways of Muslim, Southern Baptists, and other religious agents of intolerance. But apparently, no newspapers in the country he was once President of wanted to print his op-ed because it only ran in the U.K. and in Australia. The Rodney Dangerfield of politicians begins his rant by renouncing his denomination:
I have been a practising [sic] Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief—confirmed in the holy scriptures—that we are all equal in the eyes of God.
I was initially encouraged by this statement. For decades we Southern Baptists have been trying to trade him to the Methodists, though they’ve persistently refused the terms (in exchange for taking the former POTUS off our hands we’ve offered to throw in three pews, a parking lot in Dallas, and a signed copy of Justin Bieber Blog Billy Graham’s autobiography). Unfortunately for us, Carter’s severing of ties is bit of a misnomer—and more than a bit misleading. He forgets to mention, for instance, that this “unavoidable decision” was made more than eight years ago.
As the New York Times noted at the time, “Mr. Carter’s announcement is largely symbolic, since he has not had an official role in the national group.” Indeed, like most Baptists, Carter’s only connection to the SBC is that he attends a Southern Baptist Church.
So Carter quit his Baptist church, right? Well, no. In fact, Carter still serves as a a deacon and Sunday school teacher at his home church in Plains, Georgia, Maranatha Baptist Church, which is still affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Indeed, if you happen to be in Plains, Georgia, you can stop in to see the former President Sunday School class. As the church’s website points out, “A 36-inch television set gives the group a good view of President Carter as he teaches. He will come into that room first and greet them personally before going on the sanctuary.” (Ironically the church says that, “While we admire and respect President Carter, our focus is on Jesus Christ . . .” Yet on the website Christ gets mentioned twice while Carter’s name appears eleven times.)
No doubt Carter will receive fresh praise for his “painful and difficult” decision—even though it was made almost a decade ago. When faced with a church that believes that woman are not equal to men in the eyes of God, the martyr for feminism had the courage to limit his involvement to merely being a deacon and Sunday School teacher.
What a long, sad, strange trip it’s been for Jimmy Carter. In twenty-eight years he’s gone from being the President of the United States to the King of Empty Gestures.
(Via: Outside the Beltway)
July 21st, 2009 | 1:03 pm
Just like his presidency, that is so…”Seventies.”
July 21st, 2009 | 4:41 pm
There is no reason to [sic] the non-American spelling.
July 21st, 2009 | 4:57 pm
“Has there ever been a former President as irrelevant and ignorable as Jimmy Carter? ”
If that is so, why are you devoting an entire blog post to the man???
Could it be that his criticism of your denomination rankles, after all, despite his supposed irrelevance and ignorability?
July 21st, 2009 | 5:07 pm
Wolf: If that is so, why are you devoting an entire blog post to the man???
Cause this is a blog and we have to talk about something. ; )
Carter’s criticism’s don’t bother me at all. He has a relatively low of view of scripture so I don’t give much weight to his his silly criticisms. What does interest me, though, is the fact that he claims to have “severed ties” with a denomination whose sole requirement for admission is being a member of a Southern Baptist church.
Carter is still a Southern Baptist yet if you read the op-ed he pretends to have left the denomination. Either he is being intentionally misleading or (my preferred reading) he simply can’t see how hypocritical is grandstanding really is.
July 21st, 2009 | 5:49 pm
Your opening question is so astonishingly ignorant that it’s hard to keep reading for some legitimate point. It doesn’t help that you make it sound like Carter is deceitfully announcing a recent decision, when in fact he simply mentions the decision in the past tense. As for his legacy, I encourage you to visit the Carter Center website and see how his it stacks up against other former Presidents (http://www.cartercenter.org). You might also want to google “guinea worm,” and see just how irresponsible it is to declare Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency “irrelevant and ignorable.” I would finally point out that other, presumably more favored politicians, such as George W. Bush, have openly acknowledged and celebrated this same record of service. When I volunteered for the Habitat blitz build in Houston in 1997 (100 houses in 1 week, and Jimmy Carter went around to meet each and every one of the 100 teams), then-governor Bush launched the blitz build with a speech in which he joked about how some former Presidents have gone on to do remarkable things (implication: Carter) and some have gone on to jump out of airplanes (implication: Daddy). Your way of defending the Southern Baptist Convention is only going to win favor with the ignorant and the spiteful.
July 21st, 2009 | 7:11 pm
Rather ironic with him being in the tank for Muslims. Hello? Yes it is Southern Baptists that mistreat women.
July 21st, 2009 | 9:33 pm
Jimmy Carter, the most inept president of the 20th Century, may actually be a worse ex-president than president. What an empty bag of wind.
Obama threatened that McCain would be the third term of G. W. Bush. I fear that Obama (another empty bag of wind) is the second term of Jimmy Carter, but on steroids. I predict it will end in similar disgrace.
July 21st, 2009 | 11:19 pm
Like I said.
July 22nd, 2009 | 3:10 am
It is clear, from the seminal work that Marcus Wright-Borg published twenty years ago (see Wright-Borg 2735: 122-24) that “J Carter” was a common title of honour used by members of the Southern Baptist sect in the Ancient North American Empire of that era. The title had variant spellings and pronunciations according to the diacriticals added to it…
July 22nd, 2009 | 6:00 am
[...] that women should not be pastors and should be submissive to their husbands. But the thing is, as Joe Carter (no relation) reports, the ex-president took this step eight years ago. And he still attends the [...]
July 22nd, 2009 | 9:33 am
“I would finally point out that other, presumably more favored politicians, such as George W. Bush, have openly acknowledged and celebrated this same record of service. When I volunteered for the Habitat blitz build in Houston in 1997 (100 houses in 1 week, and Jimmy Carter went around to meet each and every one of the 100 teams), then-governor Bush launched the blitz build with a speech in which he joked about how some former Presidents have gone on to do remarkable things (implication: Carter) and some have gone on to jump out of airplanes (implication: Daddy). “
Bush’s comments says far more about the graciousness, humility, charm, and self-deprecating sense of humor of the Bushes than it does about the man who engaged in unseemly, ungracious, and self-aggrandizing sniping from the sidelines throughout the terms of both Bushes (Carter was, at the very least, somewhat self-interested in trying to pin “the worst in history” label on George W. Bush, given his own glaring failure in office).
July 22nd, 2009 | 12:48 pm
Joe DeVet and Jeffrey L. Miller bring the ignorance, while Jay Anderson rushes in with the spite. Joe Carter, are you paying attention? I guess this really is about knee-jerk conservative touchy-feelies for all things Republican; and not, as Joe Carter’s post purported, about the awful post-presidential legacy of Jimmy Carter, or even about Carter and the Southern Baptist Convention.
It really is hard to back up the claim that the man who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Peace Prize; the man who authored numerous bestselling works of nonfiction; the man who has done yeoman’s work for democratic accountability around the world; the man whose efforts have contributed to the eradication of major diseases threatening the poor in Africa; the man whose Presidential center is involved in stunning humanitarian and political work on every continent on the globe; the man who helped make Habitat for Humanity into an organization that has built 175,000 homes for the poor—that the man who did all of this AFTER he left the White House is “irrelevant” and “ignorable.” Please, Joe Carter, step up and defend your slander.
July 22nd, 2009 | 1:01 pm
I’m just astonished that someone with a (presumably) straight face offered up the Carter Center website as proof of Carter’s outstanding presidential legacy.
July 22nd, 2009 | 1:26 pm
Uhhh, Joe? Do you realize how stupid it makes you look when you create a blog post about such an “irrelevant” ex president, claiming he said things he didn’t say? All he’s doing is talking about the time when he left the church, nowhere does he say he’s doing it again.
Were you kicked in the head by a large farm animal as a child? And I’m a republican for god’s sake!
July 22nd, 2009 | 1:58 pm
Charlie: It doesn’t help that you make it sound like Carter is deceitfully announcing a recent decision, when in fact he simply mentions the decision in the past tense.
Let me ask you (and I hope you’ll answer honestly): Were you even aware before reading my post that Carter had claimed to have severed ties with the SBC eight years ago? If so, then are certainly more aware than most people. Do a search on Google News and see how many news reports assume that the news is recent (example: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/669261)
To be fair, I don’t think Carter was being intentionally misleading. I think it is a mix of ignorance on his part (he doesn’t even know what it means to leave the SBC) and an inability to communicate. Or maybe he thinks people care so much about what he’s been doing that they’ll remember a tiff he had with the church almost a decade ago. In that case, he would be simply self-delusional.
DUHHH: All he’s doing is talking about the time when he left the church, nowhere does he say he’s doing it again.
Apparently, you didn’t read my post very carefully. As I pointed out, Carter has never “left the church.”
July 22nd, 2009 | 2:07 pm
Paul Zummo: please check your astonishment by re-reading Joe Carter’s post and my responses, which are about President Carter’s POST-presidential legacy. For a thoughtful effort to revise our estimation of Carter’s presidential legacy—from a conservative Catholic no less—see Andrew Bacevich’s new book, “The Limits of Power,” esp. chapter 1, “The Crisis of Profligacy,” where Bacevich argues convincingly that the (in)famous “Malaise speech” was actually filled with honest truth that Americans chose to ignore to their peril.
July 22nd, 2009 | 2:26 pm
I read as much of it as I could stand to read, but eventually I feared I would grow dumber if I continued reading. And since the whole post seemed contrived and pointless from the get go, I wasn’t very motivated to read the whole thing. Let me go back and do that.
Yep, it’s still about Jimmy Carter describing what happened a long time ago. No mention of anything that you hint at. Quit making the rest of us republicans look stupid. We finally have a president in charge that may kill the democratic party for good, but I guess that’s not enough for some idiots.
July 22nd, 2009 | 2:40 pm
[...] En realidad, el gesto presenta -como el propio mandato presidencial del interfecto- algunas limitaciones remarcables. Más información, en First Thougts. [...]
July 22nd, 2009 | 3:31 pm
“Let me ask you (and I hope you’ll answer honestly): Were you even aware before reading my post that Carter had claimed to have severed ties with the SBC eight years ago? If so, then are certainly more aware than most people.”
Yes, I was aware of the claim—I read the New York Times. However, perhaps my memory is aided by the fact that I don’t maintain such a schizophrenic attitude towards the Grey Lady. Typically a bete noir at First Things, the NYT is here treated by Joe Carter as an authority on membership in the SBC.
I encourage everyone to actually read the 2000 NYT article for this and other scrumptious ironies. Joe Carter would have us place more trust in the NYT reporter than the SBC officials quoted in the article! It’s the NYT reporter who raises the question of the magnitude of the “symbolism” of the gesture, whereas the then-SBC President is quoted by the same reporter as saying, “I think it’s a sad day for him. It’s a sad day for us.” Why the sadness over a gesture that means nothing? I guess the President of the SBC didn’t know as much about the SBC as Joe and the NYT reporter. Score one for the evil liberal media on religion in the public square.
But that’s not even close to the best moment in the NYT piece. The reporter also quotes a historian at the University of New Orleans, saying of President Carter: “He made talking about Jesus Christ a part of our public discourse in politics.” Get that? The despised “irrelevant and ignorable” former President is the one who succeeded in rejecting the naked public square, instead talking openly about Jesus Christ as a politician. One would think he deserves respect from the journal that fancies this to be their own agenda.
Unless, of course, that agenda is really not about Jesus Christ, but rather about attacking “liberals/Democrats” and defending “conservatives/Republicans” at every turn.
Now, Joe, can you honestly defend your claim that Carter’s post-presidential record of public service is irrelevant and ignorable?
July 22nd, 2009 | 4:29 pm
Charlie: I encourage everyone to actually read the 2000 NYT article for this and other scrumptious ironies. Joe Carter would have us place more trust in the NYT reporter than the SBC officials quoted in the article!
I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see that the reporter and the SBC leader are in opposition.
The fact is that Jimmy Carter appears not to even understand what it means to be a Southern Baptist. As long as he is a member of a church that belongs to the SBC, he has not “severed ties” with the convention. This was pointed out in Christianity Today at the time (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/december4/14.17.html).
One would think he deserves respect from the journal that fancies this to be their own agenda.
Certainly, and I’ll give him credit for that.
Now, Joe, can you honestly defend your claim that Carter’s post-presidential record of public service is irrelevant and ignorable?
I’ll admit that he has done some good, especially his work with Habitat for Humanity. But while his works of charity are laudable and to be commended, they are not all that extraordinary. And for all his good works, there are an equal number of disastrous attempts by Carter to atone for his horrible presidency.
He is a mean and vindictive man who—in contrast to other ex-Presidents—took potshots at almost every sitting Chief Executive. He has stuck his nose in foreign affairs in ways that have been detrimental to our country’s interest. Even Clinton got tired of his antics.
His op-ed is typical of Carter’s habit of criticizing America and Americans on foreign soil.
You may not agree with my assessment but there is a good reason to view Carter’s post-presidency as a failure. Despite the flopsweat he covers himself in trying to redeem his image, he’s still got a long way to go.
July 22nd, 2009 | 6:38 pm
So it goes like this: witnessing to Jesus Christ in the public square and giving over one’s post-Presidential life to serving the poor, the sick, the victims of war and civil unrest, and the democratically disenfranchised—minor details deserving of grudging credit (but only when pressed); criticizing America and Americans on foreign soil or doing something to contradict the national interest—major details deserving of immediate, summary condemnation and dismissal. I fear these really are the priorities at First Things nowadays.
I certainly disagree with you about your assessment, as I think any honest reader of the record should. Say what you want about his presidency, his post-presidential years have been truly remarkable, an inspiration and more to tens of thousands of human beings. His efforts to eradicate the guinea worm alone deserve our respect and admiration. For you to trash him for partisan political reasons does absolutely nothing to help American Christians reclaim the public significance of Christianity before the watching world.
July 22nd, 2009 | 7:46 pm
Charlie: So it goes like this: witnessing to Jesus Christ in the public square and giving over one’s post-Presidential life to serving the poor, the sick, the victims of war and civil unrest, and the democratically disenfranchised—minor details deserving of grudging credit (but only when pressed);
Witnessing to Christ in the public square requires more than lip service. Too often Carter uses his faith to support whatever liberal political position he favors. His “personally opposed” view of abortion, for example, is inexcusable. You can run around the world monitoring elections but if you let the innocent be slaughtered in your own land there is something wrong with you.
His efforts to eradicate the guinea worm alone deserve our respect and admiration.
Again, I’ll give him credit where its due (though I think most of that credit belongs to Bill and Melinda Gates). But while I may be downplaying his accomplishments, you seem to be totally dismissing his faults.
What about his apologizing for terrorist groups like Hamas? Is that the way a witness for Christ should act?
July 22nd, 2009 | 9:46 pm
Joe, I have to say, again, respectfully, that you have no idea what you’re talking about. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have recently (as in, starting around 2005) pledged generous support for ***the Carter Center’s*** Guinea Worm Eradication Program, a program that has existed since 1986. It is precisely the Carter Center’s impressive accomplishments over more than a decade of fighting the worm that elicited generous support from the Gates Foundation. Read for yourself: Do a little research, for crying out loud: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/gates-award-global-health/Pages/2006-carter-center.aspx.
So you can’t have it two ways—you can’t pat the Gates Foundation on the back AND say that Carter’s post-presidential legacy is null and void. If you think the latter, then you better start casting aspersions on the Gates Foundation as well. After all, finding it neither irrelevant nor ignorable, the Gates Foundation awarded the Carter Center the 2006 Gates Award for Global Health.
So yet again we see you flying off at the keyboard on a subject about which you are simply not well informed. How is this helpful to the Church of Jesus Christ? Whom does it serve to make these ignorant denunciations?
I’m not going to let you turn this into a debate about abortion. The point has been to invite you to admit the ridiculousness of your description of President Carter’s post-presidential legacy. That was your opening slander, and that’s why I wrote. I have no need to downplay Jimmy Carter’s faults; I’ve never denied he has them. Rather, you’ve sought to drown his many wonderful virtues and achievements in a sea of faults. If you’re prepared to retract such an irresponsible and demeaning depiction, then great, I’m done. But I’m not going to chase another rabbit down a different trail.
July 23rd, 2009 | 12:48 am
Meanwhile, the undeserved “sic” has not been removed, though your mistake was pointed out by Nathan in the second comment.
You mention that Carter’s op-ed was only published in Australia and the UK. In those countries, “practising” is the correct spelling, and editors will revise “practicing” accordingly.
July 23rd, 2009 | 12:50 am
Can’t we just all get along. J Carter will have to answer for his shortcomings as we all will. We need to concentrate on the areas where we fall short “individually”. The SBC is a joke as far as I’m concerned. I’m a baptist whose church is affiliated with the SBC. Jesus said let the wheat and the tares grow together and I will separate them.
July 23rd, 2009 | 12:59 am
Paul
Is it not obvious that Charlie is arguing for the sake of argument, yet? Obviously he agrees with Joe Carteer. He even states the prestige of Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize…well Al Gore received one, too…good one Charlie! (wink wink) C’mon Charlie, the gig is up!
July 23rd, 2009 | 1:30 am
Michael: Meanwhile, the undeserved “sic” has not been removed, though your mistake was pointed out by Nathan in the second comment.
The use of “sic” (“as such”) is to show that the quoted material has been reproduced verbatim from the quoted original and is not a transcription error. It’s not a meant as a commentary on Carter’s usage—or on the fact that the Brits don’t know how to spell. ; )
July 23rd, 2009 | 4:46 pm
Is it accurate to compare Carter to Herbert Hoover, another commendable humanitarian who was a disastrous politician? Hoover may have the slight edge though. He was mixed up with the America Firsters in the 30′s. But after WWII he mostly behaved, and did not pander to anti-American dictators or undermine his predecessors.
July 31st, 2009 | 8:22 am
Read the best seller “Jimmy Carter – The Liberal Left and World Chaos” by Mike Evans. It will open your eyes.
Available at a deep discount at the link below:
http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/audioimagegroup_W0QQ_nkwZQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZQQ_ipgZ
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