The 1970s-era Saturday Night Live made famous the comic catchphrase, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Former President Jimmy Carter has made famous an annual announcement that he is still no longer a Southern Baptist. Only President Carter is not trying to amuse.
This year’s Carter announcement comes in an article on evangelicals and politics on the MSNBC website. Carter joins with evangelical liberal Tony Campolo in concern with the social conservatism of evangelical Protestantism. The article also quotes Daniel Vestal, head of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), a dissident group of left-leaning Baptists of whom Carter is the most famous member. Vestal laments that evangelicals are “defined” by opposition to abortion rights and homosexual marriage.
This is quite interesting given the CBF’s stance on these issues: public silence. In the CBF divinity schools and ideological leadership, the “progressive” stance on these issues are standard fare. Indeed, the CBF itself is internally torn apart over the issue of homosexuality between a younger cadre eager to embrace sexual liberation and an older group who don’t think Baptists ought to talk about such things.
Caught in the middle is Vestal and his fellow leaders who cultivate the social liberals while seeking to sound bland and traditional enough to keep donations coming in from little old ladies in North Carolina. It is kind of like, well, come to think of it, the 1976 Carter presidential campaign.
But remember: Jimmy Carter is still not a Southern Baptist anymore. Oh, and, this just in, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner are still divorced.
