When I think of Jimmy Carter, I'll always think of the little song that we sang in Sunday School each Sunday when Sunday School ended and we gathered to walk across the street to church.

William Lindsey :toad:

I think this can be said about few political leaders, if we're honest.

I do think it can be said about Jimmy Carter. He earned the accolade, "He did good," and I can think of few other political leaders to whom I'd apply that accolade.

As Wendell Griffen writes,

"President Jimmy Carter and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were native Southerners from Georgia."

#JimmyCarter #MartinLutherKing #character
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IN MEMORY OF PRESIDENT JAMES EARL “JIMMY” CARTER

Heather Cox Richardson’s assessment about the life and career of President Jimmy Carter is commendable, yet incomplete. https://heathercoxr...

(fierceprohetichope.blogspot.com)

William Lindsey :toad:

"Carter was rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant denomination). King was rejected by the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc.(the largest Black Protestant denomination). They each were rejected by their respective religious groups because they refused to embrace the false gods of racism, capitalism, and militarism."

#JimmyCarter #MartinLutherKing #character
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William Lindsey :toad:

"The world has become a more hateful and dangerous place because American voters and other American leaders rejected Jimmy Carter and disrespected Martin Luther King Jr. We will suffer the vicious and violent consequences of those misjudgments for generations to come."

Yesterday, the man who drove my husband and me to the airport for our flight out of Atlanta was a Black man, 60 years old, who told us that his parents grew up in Plains, Georgia.

#JimmyCarter #MartinLutherKing #character
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William Lindsey :toad:

We talked about Carter, who had not yet died when we had that conversation. My spouse mentioned that Christmas had been hard for me because my brother died not long before Christmas. The taxi driver spoke of how his nephew was killed by a neighbor last year when the two men quarreled.

When we got out of the taxi and he helped us unload our luggage, the taxi driver hugged us and said, "God bless you." Then, "I'll be praying for your family."

#JimmyCarter #MartinLutherKing #character
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William Lindsey :toad:

Good is possible in the world. So is evil. How we choose to live depends on what we permit ourselves to aspire to or succumb to. We can aspire to doing good, to treating others around us as if their humanity matters.

Or we can let ourselves descend into the maelstrom of hate, where we give ourselves permission to treat others as despised objects and not human beings, where we permit ourselves to vent prejudice and hostility to others.

#JimmyCarter #MartinLutherKing #character
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William Lindsey :toad:

Carter chose the former path, and I will always admire him for doing so.

#JimmyCarter #MartinLutherKing #character
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Blurry Bits Photography

@wdlindsy I think people would be more challenged by identifying a single altruistic, social-good the Southern Baptist Church has ever performed?

William Lindsey :toad:

@BlurryBitsPhoto I think Wendell Griffen's point is that Jimmy Carter was nurtured by a Southern Baptist tradition that repudiated his very Christian commitments that had been instilled in him by the SBC.

Blurry Bits Photography

@wdlindsy We are mostly saying the same thing.
Perhaps in nuance, but those 'church values' aren't anything original to the SBC. They were adopted.

Their conduct, and what causes they support in the public sphere are.

I won't denigrate Carter for having such values, as he's one of the few that actually practiced Christ's teachings, rather than use it as a wedge to divide people

William Lindsey :toad:

@BlurryBitsPhoto I don't think the point is that the values Carter upheld are in any way unique to the SBC. The SBC was born in defense of slavery, and the SBC went on to uphold racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, and to oppose rights for women and LGBTQ people. Carter broke with the SBC for all of those reasons. But the glaring irony of his story is that the very values by which he lived were instilled in him by the very religious community that repudiated him.