Jimmy Allen responds at an event introducing a new book about his life and career.
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JASPER, Ga. (ABP) — Jimmy Carter said July 23 he doubts he would have been elected 39th president of the United States without the aid of Jimmy Allen, a Texas Baptist preacher who endorsed him at a time when his 1976 presidential campaign was floundering.
Carter credited Allen's help in an address to about 260 guests at a Georgia event introducing a new biography by McAfee School of Theology professor Larry McSwain titled Loving beyond Your Theology: The Life and Ministry of Jimmy Raymond Allen. The former president said he came to the realization years later as he listened to his long-time minister friend respond in a meeting with African-American Baptist leaders to the question, "When did you first meet Jimmy Carter?"
"I began to realize that when I first came to Texas — I had won in Iowa and New Hampshire and Florida — that I was a forlorn, woeful, forgotten, hopeless candidate for president," Carter said. "Until I met Jimmy Allen — he was pastor of the First Baptist Church in San Antonio — and he took me under his arm."
"He was reluctant to get involved in politics," Carter said, "but he remembered that I said I was a born-again Christian."
"He pointed out that he wasn't really supporting me," Carter said. "He was supporting the right of somebody to say they are a born-again Christian. So he endorsed me."
Although Allen wasn't an official spokesman for Texas Baptists, Carter said, "because of the introduction and endorsement I got in San Antonio, Texas turned around."
"Loving Beyond Your Theology" is published by Mercer University Press.
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An oral history of a preacher's life
Carter, 85, wrote the foreword to the new book, published by Mercer University Press. McSwain, a lifelong admirer of Allen who during the last few years has become a personal friend, said interviewing Carter was a highlight of the project. It revealed "the long and enduring friendship of a president and a Baptist preacher," he said. "That's pretty unusual in our world these days."
McSwain, associate dean of the doctor-of-ministry program and professor of leadership at the Atlanta theology school associated with Mercer University, described the book as an "oral history" of Allen's life and career. It was based on extensive interviews. Some were done by Jim Newton, a veteran Baptist journalist who originally planned to write as co-author but became sidelined due to illness.
It details in 255 pages the story of a preacher's son raised in poverty, influenced by the sermons of the legendary Baptist preacher George W. Truett and taught to meld a conservative reading of the Bible with a progressive social agenda under the tutelage of longtime Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary ethicist T.B. Maston.
Allen's career included working as an ethicist, pastor and SBC agency head. He was the last moderate president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a visionary as head of the SBC Radio and Television Commission that launched the ACTS television network, a broadcasting venture that for a time was the fastest-growing religious network on cable. However, it eventually folded due to lack of funds.
Allen was also an early leader of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group of disenfranchised moderates who withdrew from efforts to defend the Southern Baptist Convention from domination by organized conservatives in 1990.
New Baptist Covenant inspiration
In April 2006 Carter invited leaders of 30 Baptist organizations to the Carter Center to discuss and explore opportunities for cooperation. Out of that came a three-day gathering early in 2008 celebrating a "New Baptist Covenant" that reaffirmed commitment to traditional values such as sharing the gospel, peacemaking, care for the poor and respect for religious diversity.
Jimmy Carter remarks in a July "roast" of Jimmy Allen at Big Canoe, Ga.
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Carter said Allen had approached him with the idea of "rejuvenating" the original Baptist convention in the United States. Organized in the early 1800s, it was nicknamed the Triennial Convention because it met every three years.
"It was racially integrated, and Jimmy Allen got the idea we should have another resurrection of Baptists of all races and beliefs working together," Carter said. "So we began to work on that as partners."
Carter said that in planning the meeting he worked closely with Baptists of various ethnic backgrounds whom he hadn't met before. But they all knew Allen.
The result was 15,000 Baptists of various traditions meeting together Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2008, in Atlanta under the theme "Unity in Christ."
"I think that is something that we need to repeat," Carter said, "and Jimmy is already pressing me to help him have another event that would be three years after the last one."
McSwain said he got the book's title from a line in Allen's 1995 book Burden of a Secret, where Allen tried to reconcile his belief in a loving God with his personal tragedy of losing a daughter-in-law and two grandsons to HIV/AIDS.
"He writes in that book, 'The God who calls us all to behaviors of redemption must live with one fact, and that is to love past our theology, to help meet the needs of dying people,'" McSwain said.
"It's where the book can make an impact in each of our lives, I think, as we, too, learn to live and love beyond the confines of the conceptions of God that have shaped our lives in too limited a way," McSwain explained.
Allen, 82, said he was "overwhelmed and deeply moved" by friendships represented at the event organized by his wife, Linda, to introduce the book.
"God created us in his image, and he created all of humanity to walk hand in hand," Allen said. "We are now in a fractured world that desperately needs unity and harmony and mutual respect."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.