Christians in Government?
If you spend enough time going to school, it will enable you to rouse yourself to mortal combat over ideas that other people regard as trivial. This may not be the principal benefit of education, but it is certainly a feature.
For those who study Baptist history, the relationship between Baptists and Anabaptists is one of those contested ideas. Some see in the Anabaptist movement the early seeds of the Baptist movement. Indeed, for some Baptist historians, the Anabaptists are the immediate antecedent for the Baptists in a chain of antecedents (in one way or another) connecting modern Baptists to the primitive New Testament churches. Others are dubious about the connection, disjunctively tracing the Baptists to a group breaking away from English Separatism. Occasionally you'll run into someone who acts as though Baptists and Anabaptists first discovered one another sometime in the 1900s.
Even among the most Anabaptist-adjacent Baptists out there, we just can't sidle up to some of the quirkier aspects of Anabaptist theology. It was an interesting thing, back in the day, to spend time with so many Anabaptist scholars wearing .38 specials concealed in their waistbands. Anabaptists are against violence and war. They don't carry firearms. Baptists, on the other hand, generally subscribe to Augustine's Just War Theory. We Southern Baptists are periodically against everything else except war.
Because of their pacifism, Anabaptists have generally stayed somewhat aloof from government, skeptical about the degree to which true Christians could be involved in the work of government (Anabaptists have varied from one another in this regard). In the Schleitheim Confession, a group of early Anabaptists weighed in pretty decisively on the question of whether Christians should consider serving in any governmental roles that included enforcement of the law.
Thirdly, it will be asked concerning the sword, Shall one be a magistrate if one should be chosen as such? The answer is as follows: They wished to make Christ king, but He fled and did not view it as the arrangement of His Father. Thus shall we do as He did, and follow Him, and so shall we not walk in darkness. For He Himself says, He who wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Also, He Himself forbids the [employment of] the force of the sword saying, The worldly princes lord it over them, etc., but not so shall it be with you. Further, Paul says, Whom God did foreknow He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, etc. Also Peter says, Christ has suffered (not ruled) and left us an example, that ye should follow His steps.
Finally it will be observed that it is not appropriate for a Christian to serve as a magistrate because of these points: The government magistracy is according to the flesh, but the Christians' is according to the Spirit; their houses and dwelling remain in this world, but the Christians' are in heaven; their citizenship is in this world, but the Christians' citizenship is in heaven; the weapons of their conflict and war are carnal and against the flesh only, but the Christians' weapons are spiritual, against the fortification of the devil. The worldlings are armed with steel and iron, but the Christians are armed with the armor of God, with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and the Word of God. In brief, as is the mind of Christ toward us, so shall the mind of the members of the body of Christ be through Him in all things, that there may be no schism in the body through which it would be destroyed. For every kingdom divided against itself will be destroyed. Now since Christ is as it is written of Him, His members must also be the same, that His body may remain complete and united to its own advancement and upbuilding.
Baptists can admire the Anabaptists' level of commitment, but we have reason to doubt the soundness of their hermeneutics. From Cornelius to Joanna, the New Testament story of Jesus' ministry and the life of the early church features a significant number of people closely connected with the government, and there is no indication that either Jesus or the apostles called upon them to disavow those connections. A ban preventing Christians from serving in the military, law enforcement, or any branch of government is unsupportable from the Bible.
This Anabaptist ban on Christians serving as magistrates? We reject it. But that does not mean that we also have to disregard the Anabaptists' reasons for concern. Both theology and history give us reason to fret over how well any Christian can protect his spiritual wellbeing from his heavy engagement in the work of government. The occasion of Jimmy Carter's death makes for a good moment to ponder this issue.
Jimmy Carter: The Born-Again President
I was alive for the Nixon and Ford presidencies, but the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter marks the first time that I paid any attention to the Federal Government. You see, my mother was a Carter before she married, and the name on all of those yard signs caught my attention.
Jimmy Carter's faith preceded his highest political achievements. He attended a small Baptist church in Plains, GA, for many years. He taught Sunday School. He volunteered for a Billy Graham crusade. He shared the gospel with others and wanted them to come to faith.
Carter received some negative attention for being too Christian early on. He was the first president to call himself a "born-again Christian." He nearly scuttled his winning 1976 electoral campaign when he admitted in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had "committed adultery many times in [his] heart" because he had "looked on many women with lust." Quoting and applying the Sermon on the Mount nearly did in the Carter presidency before it started.
The late-night talk shows ridiculed Carter for uttering these lines, portraying him as a lustful man. Ironically, he had been answering a question from Playboy about whether he was so pious, self-controlled, and circumspect that he would be some sort of inflexible theocrat if he were to occupy the Oval Office. Whether they used it to portray him as a prude, a would-be philanderer, or a backcountry buffoon, many people in the country were uncomfortable with Jimmy Carter's overt religiosity.
Post-inauguration, Jimmy Carter's faith remained an integral part of his life. He immediately joined the First Baptist Church of Washington, DC. He attended church there more than 70 times during his term in office. That's a remarkable track-record of church attendance for a sitting president.
The fact that it is a remarkable attendance record is itself remarkable. Most of the people who will read my blog make it to at least fifty Sunday services a year. Count in Wednesdays and other gatherings, any many of you will chalk up more than seventy appearances at a church service in just six months. Certainly that was true for an enormous number of Southern Baptists in the late 1970s.
Even if 70 times in four years is lackluster, as church attendance goes, Carter was more committed to his faith than Reagan, either Bush, Clinton, Obama, or Trump. To be clear, I do not identify regular church attendance as a reliable indicator of good spiritual health, but apart from very good reason (confinement, for example), I identify regular church non-attendance as a reliable indicator of poor spiritual health. The fact that it is so rare for a president to attend church regularly may give us reason to join the Anabaptists in questioning whether it is good for the soul to get too involved in politics.
Carter's church attendance picked up after he left office. He and Rosalynn worked hard as volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. He received less attention for his efforts to eradicate Guinea worm disease, which painfully afflicts people in some of the poorest countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Jimmy Carter tied all of these initiatives to the outworking of his faith in Jesus.
You know what: I think it was sincere. I think Jimmy Carter really was born again. I hope to see him in Heaven. In his personal behavior, he demonstrated the walk of a Christian better than we have come to expect from our political leaders.
The Infidelities of Jimmy Carter
His admission to Playboy notwithstanding, I suspect that Jimmy Carter was faithful to Rosalynn for the duration of their marriage. He ought to be commended for that. Where he will receive criticism from many believers—well-deserved criticism—is less in the area of his practice than in the area of his beliefs.
His most important infidelity is this, even if others get more attention: Jimmy Carter believed that people could be saved apart from trusting in Jesus Christ for salvation. He tended to hedge his statements along these lines quite a bit. Rather than just asserting that people are saved apart from the gospel, Carter tended to say that (1) there's wiggle-room in what the Bible says, (2) Carter preferred not to be judgmental, and so (3) he chose to believe that people could be saved even if they rejected the gospel. He was wrong on his first point, which made him wrong in his conclusion.
How tragic it is that people from all over the world and from many different faiths stopped by for Sunday School at a Baptist church and heard an unclear message as to whether they needed to be saved and as to how they could be saved! His charitable work was admirable and thoroughly Christian, but you can't build enough houses or cure enough diseases to make up for failing to love people enough to give them a clear understanding of their need for salvation in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jimmy Carter also wandered away from biblical Christianity on lesser (but still important) items. He famously declared himself to be leaving the Southern Baptist Convention because of his egalitarianism, but two other questions most prominently divided him from other Southern Baptists.
On the question of abortion, Carter said that he personally considered abortion to be wrong. He also said that he did not think Jesus would approve of abortion. He opposed federal funding for abortion. But he supported the legal regime of Roe v Wade, which made abortion legal at every stage of pregnancy.
This approach to abortion is incomprehensible, which is why it has died out. The person in the womb either is or is not a person in the womb. If there is not a person in the womb, why is abortion wrong? Why shouldn't the government fund it? If there is a person in the womb, what reason other than barbarism could we find for failing to protect that person's life. Carter's position was always a halfway-house to the "Shout Your Abortion" position of the Democratic Party today, but for Carter himself it seemed to be his sincere conviction. If he ever gave evidence that his position had changed, I was unaware of it.
In contrast, his position on homosexuality moved constantly over the course of his adult life. His was the first administration to welcome gay-rights activists to the White House. He claimed (falsely) that Jesus never said anything about gay marriage. He first came out in support of same-sex civil unions, then he came out in support of full-fledged gay marriage. After the 2015 Obergefell ruling, Carter espoused a thoroughly non-Christian sexual ethic: "I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else." This approach would open the door to condone adultery (if kept a secret or condoned by the other spouse), polyamory, and whole host of other forms of debauchery.
It's not a sexual ethic; it's an explanation for not having a sexual ethic.
Which is surprising coming from the most ethical president in my lifetime in terms of sexual behavior. That puzzle—the gap between the unmistakable Christian nature visible in the rhythms of Carter's life and the striking absence of Christian influence in some of his policy positions—is worthy of analysis and introspection on the part of his fellow believers. Carter is a paradigm in some ways of the liberal wing of late-twentieth-century Evangelicalism. In other ways, he is emblematic of the entirety of Evangelicalism, conservative and liberal alike.
Please Learn Something from Jimmy Carter
We need to learn a lot from the good things Jimmy Carter did. His faithfulness to his church, his faithfulness to his wife, his steadfast charitable voluntarism, his yearning for peace for people who are trapped in zones of combat—these things are waning in our culture, and they need to be reinforced. I hope that the occasion of his death will be a time when people champion these virtues.
We also need to learn from Carter's mistakes. In those places where President Carter got it wrong, he made substantial use of what I long ago named "The Hoover Hermeneutic." You can get away with almost anything while still claiming to believe that the Bible is absolutely true if you just keep alleging that the Bible is rarely absolutely clear. Carter did this a lot.
Can people who reject the gospel be saved? Well, the Bible doesn't really tell us definitively, so that leaves room for me to be a universalist.
Are people in the womb really people? Must we defend their lives? Well, you know, ruah and all of that…it is hard to know for sure what the Bible teaches. Abortion is probably wrong, but let's not be dogmatic without good cause.
Homosexuality? I don't really think Jesus talked about it. Yes, there's that part in Matthew 19 about marriage being between a man and a woman (and the fact that God made them with a fixed gender), but let's not go leaping to conclusions based upon what Jesus said there. And then there are those passages in the Old Testament, but since that's the Old Testament, we don't really have to pay much attention to that. Romans? 1 Corinthians? Well, that's paired with things like selfishness and the like, so maybe those are all pretty minor sins that all of us indulge in just a bit. Since the biblical testimony is so unclear, why don't we just live and let live?
It has a veneer of kindness to it. Declaring biblical truth seems harsh to some people. Why not lessen the impact by dialing down the certainty?
But ultimately, it is either an accusation against God that God is not kind, or it is a harmful refusal to let people know what God has said. Either way, it is neither Christian nor helpful.
There's another problem evident in Jimmy Carter's deviations from the truth. Carter had, I believe, a defective view of religious liberty (and that comes from someone who is 100% committed to religious liberty). The view of religious liberty enshrined in Hubmaier and Helwys, in Williams and Backus and Leland, in Mullins and Truett, is a view that poses no hindrance whatsoever to imposing Christian morality by law where practicable. A law against blasphemy would run afoul of the biblical and constitutional ideals of religious liberty, but a law against adultery would not. The former has to do with the "first table of the Law," which is beyond government's rightful authority. The latter pertains to the "second table of the Law," which is precisely what human government exists to govern.
Jimmy Carter was a member of that generation of liberals who, while personally beholden to Christian ethics, thought it was somehow inappropriate to "legislate morality." Well, that's just nuts. Every law—every single one—is legislating someone's morality. What they really meant was that they were uncertain about the validity and applicability of their Christian ethos and were therefore reluctant to impose it by law.
For my part, I'll tell you that I think we do need to think seriously in some ways about which parts of Christian ethics warrant enforcement by law, but not because it is in any way inappropriate for the government to legislate and enforce morality.
The government is a human institution and consequently is fallible in all that it does; therefore, every good law is going to be poorly enforced at least some of the time. Innocent people will be arrested and convicted. Guilty people will take advantage of corruption and go free. Disobeying parents is immoral, and the government would not be transgressing the boundaries of its authority to take action against this wrong. But the damage the government would do in its attempts to investigate, prosecute, and punish such a crime would likely outweigh considerably any good that might be accomplished.
That kind of practical thinking, however, is a far different thing from the reluctance that Jimmy Carter demonstrated when it came time to decide whether the boundaries of Christian ethics that he himself observed should be applied to the lives of others. Rather than deliberating whether government enforcement was practical, Carter hesitated at wondering whether it was appropriate. Again, although I shared and appreciated Carter's commitment to the Baptist doctrine of religious liberty, in cases like these, I think he misunderstood and misapplied it.
This final critique may be the most important one. I think that part of what motivated Jimmy Carter to minimize the clarity of the Bible on key issues and part of what motivated Jimmy Carter to shrink back from trying to apply the moral teachings of his faith to others was simply this: his political supporters and his political party were moving away from the Christian faith in those areas, and Carter wanted to be able to retain their affiliation and support.
It is at precisely this point that we Baptists need to show the Anabaptist project a little more respect. It is at precisely this point that Jimmy Carter has as much in common with Wolfe as he has with Wallis. How much can Christians give themselves to politics without giving themselves away to politics? How hard is it for a Christian to embrace government as a calling without embracing it as their first and highest calling?
Carter landed in a place where Democratic priorities of using the government to oppose greed, violence, and racism just happened to be the places where he thought Christianity ought to have a great deal of influence over society. The priorities embraced by the Religious Right of using the government to oppose debauchery, abortion, Islamic extremism, and government excess just happened to be the places where he thought that Christianity ought to restrain itself. Jesus determined much of Jimmy Carter's faith; the Democratic Party governed a lot of his message.
If this kind of thing is a coincidence, it is a coincidence that sure seems to happen a lot.
Maybe what we ought to learn from Jimmy Carter is that he actually was a Christian, and a good one at that, but that the arena of national politics is a place where even good Christians are hard pressed to remain true to their faith. His areas of compromise are not really puzzling. The politics explains them.
This kind of analysis is perhaps the least likely to take place, because that kind of question exonerates none of us. But it is the most needed for precisely the same reason.
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