The New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta was Jimmy Carter’s baby.  Among Baptists, only the beloved ex-President has the name recognition and the hard-won credability to pull off an event of this magnitude.  For the first time in living memory, Baptists from North and South, and Baptists from Black and White denominations came together in Atlanta.

True, by the time Carter and Bill Clinton spoke on Friday night most of the people in attendance were white refugees from the Southern Baptist Convention.  More than anything else, Carter’s New Baptist Covenant framed with these folks in mind.

On Friday night, Jimmy Carter paid the ultimate tribute to the SBC of his youth.  He told us how Southern Baptist mission trips pulled him out of a crisis of faith he in the mid-1960s as he watched unlettered men share their simple faith with strangers.  These stories ended with a period; there was no semi-colon followed by a diatribe against the current leaders of the SBC.

The best reporting from the New Baptist Covenant appeared in a Los Angeles Times article by Richard Fausset.  The focus is on Carter the man, the meeting he inspired in Atlanta remains in the background, but Fausset addresses all the important issues.

On the opening night, former Southern Baptist President Jimmy Allen asked if the Atlanta gathering would be a movement or simply a moment.  One thing is clear, a movement sparked by an octogenarian can’t remain a cult of the personality.  Carter’s active years are numbered; he knows it, and so do the folks who flocked to Atlanta.  This poignant fact added a sense of urgency to the meeting.

Richard Fausset plucked a telling quote from Bill Leonard, currently dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest.  “The curse and the genius of the Southern Baptist Convention for Carter’s generation is that it inculcated a sense of Baptist identity that is so deep in people that it was hard to give up.  It shaped your spirituality — but also your own sense of who you were.”

Leonard was a newly minted church history professor when I enrolled at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1975.  He was still there when I returned for doctoral work in 1989.  I served briefly as Leonard’s grader before he yielded to the inevitable and left Southern for a more hospitable academic climate.  Southern boasted one of the best church history faculties in America in 1990; three years later, all four professors had left the fold.

Bill Leonard grew up in Texas, attending Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth (20 miles west of where I currently live).   For men like Leonard and Carter, the rift in the Southern Baptist Convention meant exile.  It was like being disowned by your own mother.

As a Canadian Baptist ordained by the American (Northern) Baptist Churches, I had a hard time relating to all of this.  I suspect many of the Black and northern white Baptists who attended the Atlanta gathering wearied of all the nostalgic references to what had been. 

From the beginning, Southern Baptist leaders have regarded Mr. Carter’s religious experiment with suspicion.  Paige Patterson, currently President of Southwestern Seminary, said the rift in the ranks boiled down to epistemology: how you know what you know.  “We believe that we know what we know because God has flawlessly revealed to us in the Bible what his will and thought and purpose is; they do not believe that.”

Here we come to “the curse” of Southern Baptist life professor Leonard mentions.   Growing up Baptist in the South created such a strong connection between person, place and piety that most believers would sacrifice anything to hold onto it.  The myth of the perfect Bible proved to be a wonderful debating ploy against “liberal” opponents–no Baptist wants to be defined as anti-Bible.

But there has been a profound and tragic downside.  Almost by definition, a flawless Bible is a “flat Bible” free of internal contradiction.  If a teaching (stone the adulter) appears in any part of Scripture it is God’s own truth.  In fact, since Jesus is the Son of God, all Scripture can be read as the very word of the Savior. 

Unfortunately, Jesus self-consciously set himself against many of the legalistic traditions in the Hebrew Scriptures; other prophetic teachings were radicalized and expanded.  In the fifth chapter of Mathew, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment; But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment . . . You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’  But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Jesus’ moral teaching flies in the face of conservative American ideology.  In a desperate attempt to preserve a culture, Baptist leaders in the South allied themselves with cold warriors and free market capitalists (hardly natural allies for followers of Jesus; but you gotta do what you gotta do).

Which brings us to the ultimate irony: Southern Baptists leaders accusing a pious Baptist deacon of embracing “the religion of secular humanism” while they embrace a politician who rarely attended church and his horoscope-consulting wife.  It was neither pretty nor logical, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The Atlanta event was organized around the incendiary words of Isaiah, amplified by the teaching of Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

I was drawn to Atlanta because (a) the American Baptists invited me to participate and (b) all this talk about “good news to the poor” squared perfectly with my criminal justice reform work with Friends of Justice.

Southern Baptist leaders have charged that the New Baptist Covenant is a not-so-subtle smokescreen for liberal politics.  The involvement of Bill Clinton and Al Gore did little to counter this impression.

I didn’t attend Gore’s Climate Change luncheon (the $35 fee stuck in my craw), but I did hear Mr. Clinton on Friday evening.  I have been critical of some of Clinton’s racially polarizing remarks during the current election campaign, but I was pleased with the tone of his comments in Atlanta.  He talked about his attempts to find common ground with Southern Baptist leaders.  He urged the audience to be gentle with their co-religionists because, after all, we might all be wrong.

Throughout his address (delivered without notes) Mr. Clinton demonstrated an impressive familiarity with the Scriptures.  He gave particular attention to a phrase from the King James rendering of 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see as through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.”

Unlike Paige Patterson, who, thanks to his flawless Bible, already sees face-to-face, we must be humble and respectful of diversity because we are all stumbling about it a dimly lit room.

Good thoughts; but can you build a movement on shadows?

In his interview with Richard Fausset, Jimmy Carter worked hard to temper his criticism of the estranged members of his religious family.  “The Southern Baptist Convention has become increasingly narrow in its definition of who is welcome,” Carter began.  “They now have decided that women can’t teach men, and that women can’t be deacons, and women can’t be pastors, and women can’t be missionaries and so forth.”

The ex-president paused.  “Which–I’m not criticizing them.  That’s their prerogative.” 

Richard Fausset was irritated by Carter’s reserve.  “It is the kind of staement that doesn’t help matters,” he observed.

Fausset is right.  The glorious thing about the New Baptist Covenant was the opporunity to bridge the North-South and Black-White divides that have haunted Baptist life for generations.  For ex-Southern Baptists, the grieving process will never end.  We understand that.  We sympathize. 

But a new world of opportunity awaits.  We are now free to take Jesus’ radical teaching at face value without ignoring or explaining away the clear import of his teaching.  To follow the Jesus of the Gospels is to work for the poor.  That means undermining a criminal justice system that preaches bad news to the poor.  It means seeing the defendant and the prisoner not just as American citizens but as the very face of Jesus–Christ in his distressing disguise (to borrow a phrase from Mother Theresa).

The time has come for Mr. Carter, Mr. Clinton and their spiritual kinfolks to let go of the Southern Bapist Convention so their hands can be free to enthusiastically embrace their American Baptist and Black Baptist brothers and sisters.  It’s tough, I know; but we all gotta do what we gotta do.

Alan Bean

Executive Director

Friends of Justice