One day after Jimmy Carter’s death, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian accused him of unspecified international crimes.
Meanwhile, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Clint Pressley, offered a one-sentence summation of Carter’s death at age 100: “A remarkable man and the first president I remember.”
Those are kind words compared to what Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, had to say Dec. 30. On his “The Briefing” podcast, Mohler accused the former president of criminal interference in world politics.
Mohler, who fashions himself as an interpreter of world events from a “Christian” worldview, lamented that after Carter left the White House, he “still wanted to play a role in American foreign policy. He still wanted to play a role in global affairs. It was largely a self-appointed role.”
“He began to involve himself in American foreign policy in ways that may well have been illegal.”
“Jimmy Carter never got over the 1980 election and quite honestly in an unprecedented way he began to involve himself in American foreign policy in ways that may well have been illegal but certainly broke precedent in terms of his open criticism of his successors in the Oval Office, particularly in terms of foreign policy.”
That was a detriment not only to his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, but also to later Republican president George W. Bush, Mohler asserted.
Al Mohler
“Carter also made very ill-advised statements in the international context against President George W. Bush in terms of the American effort in response to the attacks of 9-11. Without going into a lot of detail here, it’s just important to say that once leaving office, it was clear that Jimmy Carter did not intend to conclude his involvement in foreign affairs.
“But the United States legally has only one person in the White House at a time, and that person is responsible for American foreign policy. And at that point, Jimmy Carter, by the way, there is no office of former president. Jimmy Carter was a private citizen, and it’s really beyond question that he broke the law in terms of his involvement in these international incidents, at least in some of them, and in his public criticism of the foreign policy of the United States, also his dealing with foreign leaders.
“It’s really beyond question that he broke the law in terms of his involvement in these international incidents.”
“And Jimmy Carter was probably not the first, and he probably won’t be the last former president to be involved in such situations, but he was involved at a stature and at a level that was unprecedented in American history.”
Accusations of Carter committing crimes are not the stuff of mainstream political discourse.
Mohler, who speaks often of the threat to evangelicals of secular culture, commented on Carter receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002: “That doesn’t come out of a political vacuum.”
He also criticized Carter’s stance on race relations, accusing the former Georgia governor of lying to Southerners in order to get elected and then advancing a more inclusive agenda.
Carter, he said, ran his Georgia gubernatorial race with “coded” messaging and therefore was elected on a lie about his positions on race.
Mohler also criticized Carter as too progressive on social issues.
“Jimmy Carter was far to the left of where most Southern Baptists were even when he was elected president in 1976 on an issue like abortion. He declared himself to be personally opposed to abortion and he made that statement more than once, but he also affirmed the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade in 1973 legalizing abortion. He was also very friendly to feminists and to the feminist movement.”
Carter’s theology, although shaped as a Southern Baptist in rural Georgia, was “neo-orthodox,” Mohler charged.
“There is no verbal understanding of inspiration, which is what I would argue is absolutely essential to Christian orthodoxy.”
“When he spoke of Scripture, and he did so repeatedly, what he demonstrated was what was known in the more conservative sense, perhaps, as a neo-orthodox understanding of Scripture, which is to say, just in shorthand, that the Bible can be called the word of God, but it is not the word of God in terms of the actual words. There is no verbal understanding of inspiration, which is what I would argue is absolutely essential to Christian orthodoxy and indeed is absolutely essential to evangelical identity. Carter had a far more liberal understanding of Scripture, and quite honestly, it may have been even more liberal than the neo-orthodox position, because when he mentioned theological mentors, he did mention one neo-orthodox figure, who was Reinhold Niebuhr, but he also mentioned Paul Tillich, who was far more liberal than neo-orthodoxy.”
Carter famously left the SBC after its rightward turn in the “conservative resurgence” of the late 20th century. That put him at odds with Mohler, who was briefly editor of the Christian Index, the state Baptist newspaper in Georgia. There, Mohler used his editorial platform to champion conservative causes.
More recently, Mohler told a podcaster he has to “hope and pray” Carter really was a born-again Christian — a comment that drew outrage from other Christians who saw Carter as a model Christian.
Although Carter became perhaps the most popular former living president in American history — making the Gallup list of “most admired men” 29 times — Mohler advised his listeners to use a different measuring stick.
“Jimmy Carter, of course, a one-term president, losing his race for the second term in a landslide, is not going to go down as a political winner in American history, although his milestone in winning the presidency itself in 1976 is historic.”
Then he added: “Christians understand that the final verdict, and the only verdict that really matters, is before the throne of God, where all of us one day will stand. Sadly, you’re not likely to hear that truth or that context in the national ceremonies soon to come.”
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