An ambitious plan to unite Baptists in North America around the compassionate message of the gospel is not secretly a plan to get Baptists to elect Hillary Clinton as president, one of the plan's leaders said Jan. 23.
Bill Underwood, a co-organizer of the effort with former President Jimmy Carter, said former President Bill Clinton's offer to lend his star power to the upcoming Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant is not a covert political move.
“This has not been something that Bill Clinton has organized or worked towards or even been involved in,” said Underwood, president of Mercer University.
“This is really President Carter's brainchild,” he said. “I think he took the initial step on this. And President Carter … invited President Clinton to join us for our last meeting, and I'm grateful that he did.”
On Jan. 9, leaders of 40 Baptist denominations and organizations in the United States and Canada—led by Carter and “cheered,” as he put it, by President Clinton—announced a commitment to put aside social and theological differences to unite most Baptists behind an agenda of compassionate ministry. The effort will begin with the celebration, which is set for January 2008.
Since the announcement, conservatives who weren't invited have complained the intent is more than Baptist unity.
Richard Land, head of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told the Washington Post the timing was suspect.
“Purportedly they're going to hold a convention of several thousand people in Atlanta in early 2008, hosted by two former Democratic presidents, one of whom has a wife seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Some would see that as an overtly political activity,” he said.
Rick Scarborough, a Texas-based Southern Baptist minister who is the head of the Religious Right group Vision America, also noted the timing in an entry on the group's website. He noted that the January 2008 celebration is “not coincidentally nine months away from the next presidential election. (Perhaps Sen. Hillary Clinton will be invited to lecture on honesty in government—or Sen. Barack Obama [D-Ill.] can share his thoughts on abortion.)”
Both Land and Scarborough are vocal supporters of Republican political goals.
Mercer's Underwood noted that the Jan. 9 meeting at which Clinton appeared was the product of previous meetings Carter had conducted with representatives of the North American Baptist Fellowship. The fellowship is composed of the Baptist bodies in North America that belong to the Baptist World Alliance—including those that are conservative, moderate, predominantly black, predominantly white, American and Canadian.
The Southern Baptist Convention was not invited in its official capacity because the SBC has withdrawn from the NABF and the Alliance. But several of the Jan. 9 participants are members of Southern Baptist churches, and Carter and Underwood said they welcome participation of Southern Baptists.
They also noted that they hope for prominent Baptists who are Republicans to lend their influence to the effort as well. Clinton and Carter are the only two living former presidents who are Baptists. Carter is a long-time deacon and Sunday school teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., while Clinton is a longtime member of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark.
Clinton's involvement in the celebration is merely to provide a bigger platform to the effort to unite Baptists around a positive message, Underwood said.
“I think that when he described himself as a cheerleader, I think that's a good description,” he said. “But I think beyond that you have two men who, as former presidents of the United States, have a platform that very few other people in the world have.”
He continued: “I think that presidents Carter and Clinton have been very generous to share their platform with a wide array of Baptists and stand on that platform and declare the good news of Jesus Christ. And I think that's a cause for celebration.”
Carter, for his part, told the Washington Post he is focusing on the positive aspects of the meeting. “We hope … to emphasize the common commitments that bind us together rather than to concentrate on the divisive issues that separate us,” he said. “There's too much of an image in the Baptist world, and among non-Christians, that the main, permeating characteristic of Christian groups is animosity toward one another and an absence of ability to cooperate in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood.”