Column

From Bible Belt to Nobel prize

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published October 28, 2007

Besides the Nobel Peace Prize, what do Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter and Al Gore have in common? They are Baptists. So what? you say. What does their religion have to do with anything? After all, before they were Nobel laureates, they had already made their marks, Dr. King as a civil rights leader, Carter as president of the United States and Gore as vice president and as the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee.

What intrigues me is how these three Southerners were shaped, as individuals and as public figures, by their faith in a Baptist community often at odds with them. Despite my upbringing in a Baptist church in rural Georgia, I try not to stereotype Southern Baptists. There are fundamentalist and progressive Baptist congregations, and like Episcopalians and Presbyterians, they often disagree about the Bible. Fundamentalists and progressives interpret its words differently. The good book has been used to both justify and condemn racial segregation.

In a recent commentary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert Parham, an ordained Baptist minister and executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics in Nashville, reflected on the moral trajectory of these three Nobel winners from the nation's most conservative region. (Gore, son of a U.S. senator, grew up dividing his time between Tennessee and Washington).

Parham asked this fascinating question: "How is it that three sons of the Bible Belt have each won the world's most prestigious award for their advancement of human rights, peacemaking and now Earth care?" (Not exactly the kind of issues you hear a lot about in most Southern Baptist churches.)

Parham believes the Bible is part of the answer "because of the role Scripture has played in shaping their moral vision and values."

He recalled a 2006 interview with Gore before the Nashville premiere of his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, in which the world's best known environmental advocate spoke of how his faith had shaped his convictions about global warming.

"I was taught in Sunday school about the purpose of life," Gore told him. "I didn't ever get a single lesson about the purpose of life at Harvard University or the prep school I went to. ... And I was taught that the purpose of life was to glorify God. How can you glorify God while heaping contempt and destruction on God's creation?"

Gore's view of climate change is not shared by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which passed a resolution questioning the science behind global warming and opposing government action to reduce greenhouse gases.

According to Parham, the SBC doesn't think much of Carter's peacemaking efforts either. When Carter won the Nobel prize, there was not a word about it in Baptist Press, the SBC's news service. "Since then," he wrote, "SBC leaders and their news service never pass up an opportunity to criticize Carter."

Of the three Nobel laureates, only Dr. King, a Baptist preacher, brought moral clarity, biblical authority and a calm courage to his cause. The Bible was central to his message of love, justice and equality. His name was reviled in all-white churches across the South. No one has deserved the Nobel honor more than this man of peace.

Unlike Dr. King, who paid the ultimate price for his dream and whose uplifting spirit still can be felt, Carter and Gore were constantly weighing the trade-off between their moral convictions and their political needs. For example, Gore rarely mentioned climate change, his signature issue, during the 2000 presidential campaign. His advisers told him the issue was a loser. Now he considers it God's work.

During the racial turbulence of the 1960s, Carter distanced himself from civil rights, the overarching moral issue for his generation of Southerners, because he had a peanut business and a political career (he was a state senator with higher ambitions) to protect.

For much of his life, Carter was a member of a segregated Baptist church in his hometown of Plains, Ga. He did not speak out forcefully against segregation until after he was elected governor of Georgia in 1970. In fact, Carter won that race by pitching his campaign to white segregationists, promising, among other things, to invite George Wallace to address the Georgia Legislature. Even as president, Carter continued to worship at his segregated church until 1978, when he joined a group that broke away and started the Maranatha Baptist Church, where Carter still teaches Sunday school and black worshipers are welcome.

Out of office and out of politics, Carter and Gore were liberated, free at last to dedicate themselves to the work for which they have been honored - Carter to promote human rights and disease eradication, and Gore to sound the alarm about climate change.

Now someone needs to tell them to resist sanctimony. It's unbecoming.

[Last modified October 27, 2007, 20:14:24]