by Morris H. Chapman, posted Friday, November 11, 2005 (18 years ago)
By Morris H. Chapman
| What is surprising is that a man who professes to be devoted to democracy, and travels the world as the champion of democracy, decries the same democracy when it is faithfully exercised by Southern Baptists to declare our values. |
| Morris H. Chapman |
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Jimmy Carter, the globetrotting ex-president, spends a great deal of his time promoting democracy, as he sees it, around the world.
Interestingly, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical fellowship of churches in America, functions as a democracy. The majority of the messengers attending a given annual convention seek the mind of Christ and vote as a democratic body, an annual activity one would think Jimmy Carter would applaud. However, the SBC is a primary target of the former president’s harshest criticism in his latest book, “Our Endangered Values.”
What he writes is nothing new. Carter’s criticism of the conservative direction of the SBC is longstanding. In 1993, he and his wife publicly announced their allegiance with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (a breakaway group of liberals and moderates, formerly of the SBC but now stridently anti-SBC), and in 2000 he felt compelled to announce with fanfare once again his break with the SBC. Read More
