Jimmy Carter & Evangelicalism

to talk about the magazine Christianity Today. Now, I am not here to cast stones on my against my evangelical brethren for having a kind of media outlet called Christianity Today that is straying a lot from Orthodox Christianity. Uh. That would be a pretty silly thing for a Catholic to do. Give that we have a magazine called The National Catholic Reporter that is not exactly very Catholic in

a whole lot of ways. So this isn't trust me that any critique that's happening here, my beloved evangelical friends, is coming from a place of love and sympathy, not empathy. Sympathy for your historic institutions being corrupted by the fingers of liberals Christianity Today was founded by Billy Graham and has been an important publication in evangelical circles for a long time. Russell Moore the former head of sort of the Baptists sort of what was what was his role exactly?

He was sort of the head of kind of the Baptist sort of lobbying outfit that was in Washington, d c. And he's become sort of progressively more more left leaning over the course of the last several years, especially over the course of COVID and the Trump era. Yeah, he was the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he's gotten a lot of flack from them for sort of being this liberalizing force. And he's now the

editor in chief of Christianity Today. Well, as some of you may know, yesterday Jimmy Carter passed away. And you know, there's this Latin expression de mortuis nihil nissi bonum concerning the dead nothing but good things, Meaning after someone dies, maybe let's you know, reserve all of our harshest critiques, maybe save them for later. This person just died, i'd let's be nice to that. You know, let's be nice to them for the sake of their grieving family and whatnot.

You know, someone who's kind of rotten passes away, you try to be civil. You be civil about him. You don't bring up old crap or just anyone who dies like you don't go to the funeral and during the eulogy talk about how yeah, and then when he you know, when he cheated on his wife and he you know, stiffed a couple of contractors who worked for him, and well, no, I mean that, you know, it's not to overlook those things,

but that's just not the appropriate time. On the other hand, though, the other side of it is that if you're at a bad guy's funeral, you don't during the eulogy talk about what a wonderful, faithful, uh faithful husband he was. You know, if he cheated on his wife, oh that's not Maybe you don't go on and on with hay geography of the person at the funeral. If this person was not a good husband, you don't talk about what

a wonderful, what husband he was. You emphasize the good and you mostly kind of stay silent about the bad.

That's a fine thing to do. But eulogizing someone by talking about what a wonderful devout Christian they were when they weren't really a wonderful devout Christian is a little bit dishonest, and especially if it's coming from a publication like Christianity Today, which occupies kind of an important space, especially in the evangelical world, of giving kind of almost near magisterial opinions about American culture and Christianity and where

we fit within that culture. So I found this long Twitter post from John G. West, who is the vice president of the Discovery Institute and some some kind of evangelical outfit, and he's talking about Christianity Today's sort of they're not their eulogy for Jimmy Carter, the sort of

their their obituary more or less for Jimmy Carter. Christianity Today published this kind of obituary piece about Jimmy Carter at the time, yes yesterday, after his passing, And it's clear that I think a lot of publications do this. I'm sure I'm sure a ton of newspapers do this, where they're getting the obituary ready, the obituary piece or the actual obituary for a famous person, they've got it ready to go, so that if someone eyes, they're ready

to publish something like right away. So clearly Christianity today had this in the hopper, and apparently this piece on Jimmy Carter was so just slobberrific about how wonderful Jimmy Carter is that it goes into the realm of eulogizing the guy who cheated on his husband for what a wonderful husband he was, sorry, the guy who cheated on his wife for what a wonderful husband he was. So let's John G. West sort of points out a couple of different points, and I think it's significant because there

is seemingly this strain of evangelical Christianity. I think a lot of times, especially those of us who are Catholics or people who aren't Evangelicals, we look at evangelical Christianity, which is, first of all, is kind of a very loose term that is hard to pin down precisely what we mean when we say quote evangelical Christianity. Obviously it means Protestants. It largely means, though not exclusively, Southern Baptists and Southern Baptist fellow travelers, whether they are actually part

of the Southern Baptist convention or not. Southern Baptist Christianity is kind of the most dominant single strain of Protestant Christianity in America, and a lot of non denominational churches who claim a non denominational status, they sort of fall into this sort of default Southern Baptist kind of theology. I think a lot of Catholics also, a lot of Catholics.

I think when you say Protestant, what actually comes to the mind of most Catholics is Southern Baptists, and a lot of like Catholic Catholic apologetics for discussion, for talking with non Catholics about the faith. Most Catholic apologetics seem to be in America anyway, seemed to be oriented towards

having a conversation with a Southern Baptist. So this is really significant for Christianity today to be talking from this sort of evangelical perspective about this, to be talking about as sort of the representative of evangelical Christianity, to be talking about Jimmy Carter. What is the legacy of this

very prominent public person. So within evangelicalism, though, there's this sort of liberalizing strain among Southern Baptists that really reared its head during the Trump years, and especially with regards to COVID, where there's almost this sense of like, if someone is a professing Christian, a professing Baptist, a professing born again Christian, that there's almost this willingness to overlook the liberal stuff that they did, including things that might

be contrary to historic little o orthodox Christianity. One of the people for whom this was really prominently seen in the last four or five years, in the last five years especially was doctor Francis Collins. Francis Collins was the head of the National Institutes of Health and he was one of the big villains of the COVID era. He was Anthony Fauci's boss actually, so within the hierarchy of the federal government there was Francis Collins was in charge

of the National Institutes of Health. And one of the subdivisions of the National Institutes of Health is USAID, which Anthony Fauci ran. And again just for I've discussed this on the show a number of times, but the roles of those two agencies was they give out federal research grants. That's what they do Anthony Fauci's job was not America's doctor. His job was he was a federal bureaucrat who gave out federal research grants for researching infectious diseases, and so

he and Francis Collins, that was their job. Francis Collins, from his perch at NIH, was often called upon by different evangelical outlets to talk with them or to was prominently featured, including Russell Moore who Russell Moore really liked Francis Collins. And this is Russell Moore when he was the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, he was really big on Francis Collins. Lots of Republicans in Washington,

especially evangelicals, really liked Francis Collins. Why well, because he was a born again Christian, a professing born again Christian who would occasionally do stuff where he'd play guitar and sing songs about Jesus. This in spite of the fact that he was like the federal bureaucrat overseeing research grants, and also in spite of the fact that why was

Francis Collins picked to head NIH. He was picked because he was aggressively in favor of federal funding for embryo destructive stem cell research, research that required the destruction of embryos to get their stem cells for different kinds of medical research. Now that proved to be a complete flop and a complete dead end. There were no cures that resulted from embryonic stem cells, the kinds of stem cells that you acquire by destroying embryos. But he pursued it

enormously aggressively. It's why Barack Obama picked him for the job. Barack Obama comes in in two thousand and nine, one of the first things he does is he reverses George W. Bush's policies about embryonic stem cell research and federal funding for it. He says, Nope, we're gonna fully federally fund this. We don't care about destroying embryos, we don't care about creating human beings new embryos solely to use their body parts for research. Francis Collins supported that he supported fetal

tissue research using the bodies of aborted children. All the stuff that David de Lighten uncovered about Planned parenthood selling the body parts of children they aborted. The market for those body parts was created by the NIH and people like Francis Collins, who had federal funding for research using fetal tissue from and they needed the fetal tissue to come from somewhere, and they derived it from aborted babies.

Francis Collins was hugely supportive of this, resisted Trump when during the Trump administration, when he was still in charge, resisted the Trump administration's efforts to stop funding fetal tissue research. Trump was able to enact that policy over Collins's objections, which were reported in major media outlets. So there's this whole sort of liberalizing trend. He's not the only one,

by the way. I bring him up as an example, but there's this whole sort of liberalizing trend among kind of people in leadership positions within the Southern Baptist Convention sort of being very okay with extremely liberal people doing extremely bad things that are opposed to Christianity as long as they are kinda sort of professing Christians, as if the celebrity magnetism of oh my gosh, Francis Collins, the head of the NIH and an Obama appoint is a

born again Christian. Oh wow, aren't we cool for interacting with him? And it seems that this kind of slobbering desire to be near power applied to Jimmy Carter two and this whole piece it Again, I understand concerning the dead, don't say anything except a good thing. But the idea of Jimmy Carter as an exemplary Christian from the perspective of evangelical Christianity seems very hard to sustain to me in a number of ways, which we will detail after

the break. This is the John Girardi Show on Power Talk. We're talking about a piece from Christianity today about the passing of Jimmy Carter. And my again, I understand, someone dies, you don't just talk about what a piece of crap they are. But you also if the person was a piece of crap, you don't talk about what a saint

they were. And I think that's what's happening, and it's tracking with this trend that other evangelicals like Meg Basham and others have pointed out much better than I have, about liberalizing trends within leadership of the big time leadership, especially within Southern Baptist Christianity or sort of big institutions within the evangelical Christian world. Now, I am not an expert to speak about these things. If you want me to talk about problems like this on my Catholic side

of the street, more than happy to do so. But here's sort of the main things that were wrong and really wrong about this sort of obituary that was published by Christianity Today, which is one of the leading publications of evangelical Christianity founded by Billy Graham. It's editor in

chief is Russell Moore. Some of the main problems with this piece, and this was identified by again by John G. West, the vice president of the Discovery Institute, who writes, here's some of the things that were in this piece that maybe give pause. First, there was this desire to sort of compare and within this obituary piece, there was this compare and contrast attitude between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to make it look like Carter was a good Christian

and Reagan was a crappy Christian. So it brings up this idea that Reagan was divorced twice, which is not true. Reagan was divorced once. So just this basic factual error, And what John G. West writes is he writes the point of drawing attention to Reagan's divorce was to slam evangelical voters for trading in the saintly Carter for the supposedly far less devout and loose living Reagan. This is a common trope voiced by left wing evangelicals, but it

happens to be false. We now know, thanks to the work of scholars like Paul Kenger, that Reagan was a pretty serious evangelical Christian in his personal life. Next problem, and again, I think also from just a public policy perspective, I'd much rather have the Reagans, at least President Reagan set of policies when it comes to abortion, etc. Than I would the Carter policies. Number two, the article suggests that Carter's disastrous presidency was foisted on him by outside

events over which he could do nothing. Again, this is a standard talking point by the left, but it's highly debatable. Number three. Although the article glancingly mentions the White House Conference on Families, it doesn't do much at all to help people understand why evangelicals were so upset about this event. Among other things, the conference offered a redefinition of family

that is incompatible with Christian teaching. I might also mention He writes that Carter appointed some extreme cultural progressives to the courts, and Jimmy Carter never had a Jimmy Carter didn't have a Supreme Court vacancy during his one term in office, but he did appoint a lot of very liberal Circuit Court judges. That was another reason West writes why theologically conservative evangelicals were upset it with him. Number four.

The article talks early on about Carter's conservative theology, yet not one word is spent discussing his promotion of gay marriage much more recently. Why by the end of his life Carter definitely did not embrace a conservative theology. But I guess delving into that wouldn't fit the narrative CT

wants to offer, so it was suppressed. It's appropriate to laud Carter for the good things he did, especially at the time of his passing, but a serious Christian publication would have offered something more serious than this worshipful piece. And then he concludes by saying this, which I think is really instructive. One reason it's important to talk about Carter's real record is because his rise to fame and power is symptomatic of an unhealthy strand in Evangelical Christianity.

Even today, many evangelicals embrace public figures who wear their faith on their sleeve, paying almost no attention to their actual policy views and actions. When Christians do that, they get politicians in public officials like Jimmy Carter or more recently Francis Collins out of the NIH. I would add that, and that's the main point of this. I think some Evangelicals are starting to see this and realize this a

little bit later than Catholics did. Catholics, for a long time figured out that we had plenty of, you know, professingly Catholic politicians who were terrible Catholics and whose public policy positions were completely contrary to what they profess to believe on Sunday, starting with the Kennedys and going on from there, you know, from Kennedy to Carrie to Joe Biden, you know, the professing baptized Catholics who all their public

policy beliefs were totally contrary to Catholicism. And yet there was some sense among Catholic liberals to sort of like give sort of some kind of hagiography or act like these people were wonderful just because they happened to be Roman Catholics because a priest happened to pour water over their heads when they were baptized. I think baptism is important, but you gotta do some more stuff after that. You have to keep living out your Catholic faith. You can't

just leave it there. So anyway, I just thought this was fascinating how it seems as though Evangelical Christianity is right now wrestling with a lot of these things that Roman Catholicism was wrestling with, you know, twenty thirty years ago. When we return more stuff about Gosh, I'm doing all kinds of stuff about Christianity. What do men want to follow in Christianity? And do they actually want to follow

Jesus or something else? Next on the John Girardi Show, doing a lot of Christianity stuff today and wading into Evangelical Christianity. Now I'm going to comment on this, and I'm commenting I want to establish some humility and some acknowledgment of my lack of understanding. I see this clip circulating around online. My pastor named Mark Driscoll, who seems from a large non denominational church. Now, I don't know

how prominent this guy is. All I know is he is the pastor of a big megachurch, seems to be

some kind of evangelical of some sort. I'm not going to say all of you who are evangelical Christians who define yourselves as evangelical Christians, I'm not pinning his beliefs on all of you, okay, or on any of you necessarily, But I do think that some of the things he talks about in this are reflective of a lot of strains that we're seeing in culture, especially sort of male oriented media and social media ideas from influencers at the

extreme end to influencers like Andrew Tate and others talking about what it means to be a man and be a masculine and what men need to do to have success and blah blah blah blah blah working out and crushing it in business and da da da da dad, all these sort of ideas from people who range from like motivational speakers to social media defaces to apparently to some extent, Christian pastors. So just to see some of

these things infecting Christianity, I just want to discuss. Okay, So this is and in fairness, I'm also commenting on this because this is Mark Driscoll commenting on Catholicism. So I'm going to stand up a little bit for my guys from my side of the street here. So this is Mark Driscoll. This is what he has to say about Catholic priests and why it's hard for men to follow what Catholic priests say to follow Catholic priests as leaders.

healthiest men, and it doesn't encourage and inspire men. Because if the leader is well, he doesn't have a wife, he doesn't have kids, he doesn't own anything, he's not building anything, and he's not responsible for anyone. It's really hard to admire that guy.

a manager. He's responsible for his staff, he's responsible for volunteers, he's responsible for this church, for the financial assets of the church, and and you know, overseeing that. Like there's actually quite a few things I'm on my you know, my Catholic parish has a finance council, So I mean I see the books of my parish, and my pastor is responsible for quite a few things which I see in my just day to day going to church interacting

with him. So just on a factual level that this seems silly, but I he's also got a couple of other things wrong. So not all Catholic priests are exactly the same. Some Catholic priests take what's called a vow of poverty. They're usually part of some religious community like the Franciscans or the Dominicans or the Benedictines or something like that, or the Jesuits, where they know individual member

of the community owns anything. Property is owned by the community, So you take a vow of poverty, meaning I'm never going to own anything i myself. Most priests, though, who are normal parish priests, priests running your parish, don't take that vow. So they do actually have a salary. They can own things, they can inherit their families money, they

can you know, they can own things. But at the same time that the yeah, they're not building massive investment portfolios, their salary is not much, and they work really hard running their parish. The point of their ministry is not to make a lot of money. Their point that you know, there's no you know, big worldly power or fame that they're trying to aim for here, all right, So he's

getting a lot of factual stuff mixed up. Now, it's hard for men to follow a priest because they're not married, they don't have kids, and they're not they don't own stuff. Can we think of a very prominent and successful Christian leader who was not married, didn't have kids, was very poor, didn't own stuff, and yet still inspired a lot of men. Hmmm, let's think about historic christ Shean leaders, followers of Jesus who didn't own things, didn't have a lot of money,

didn't get married, didn't have kids. Oh wait, you mean this guy named Jesus Christ himself? Like, was there no self self awareness from this dude before he opened his mouth? No self awareness that Jesus Christ died, as he puts it, a poor virgin at the church. I don't I guess, I don't know. But you know, we just read at the Gospel yesterday at Mass, so we talked about Joseph and Mary losing the child Jesus and finding him in the temple. Did you not know that? I must be

in my father's house. So there's no self awareness from this guy from this markdiscal character that Jesus died a bro virgin. And let's look at the other Let's look at the twelve apostles. All right, we don't have perfect historical records for them, necessarily, but there's good historical evidence that, for example, the apostle John died a broke virgin. That actually most of the apostles died as broke virgins, or

at least as broke celibates at the time. You know, it's a little unclear how many of the apostles were married. There's some there's evidence, some thought or some writings about Saint Peter in what his life was like, that maybe he was a widower and died as you know, again, a broke celibate. But there are plenty of Christians who died as broke celibates or broke virgins. In fact, there were tons of the early Christian martyrs are remembered as

being broke virgins. Like this happened a lot. The martyrs are the greatest single examples of Christianity. I actually talked on the show. I think it was about a week

before Christmas. Pope Francis announced the canonization, meaning declaring someone to be a saint of a community of nuns from Paris who died during the French who were martyred during the French Revolution in the year seventeen ninety four, the French revolutionaries arrested the nuns of the Convent of Compagnie in Paris, and this was a group of Carmelite nuns. So the Carmelites is a spiritual tradition within the Catholic Church inspired by the prophet Elijah, named after Mount Carmel,

which is in the Holy Land. And these nuns led lives of exclusive prayer and penance. All of them broke virgins. All of them he took vows of poverty. None of them owned a damn thing, a blessed thing, a damn thing, blessed thing, whatever. None of them owned a thing. And they were virgins. They were nuns, and they marched to the guillotine. They were charged by the wicked, evil, atheist

French Revolutionary government with fanaticism, which you know God helped me. Someday, I hope I can receive a charge of being a fanatic for Jesus Christ marched to the guillotine, chanting a hymn in honor of the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful and enkindling them the fire of Thy love. All the nuns sang this hymn as one by one their heads were chopped off, until the last nun was the one voice singing it and

got our head chopped off. These nineteen women, who ranged in ages from nineteen to seventy nine, all of them broke virgins. That is way more inspiring to me as a man. By the way, these broke virgin women are far more inspiring to me as a man than this dude. I don't need you know. Look, there are plenty of motivational speakers, business motivational speakers, fitness motivational speakers out there, all right, there's plenty, and god knows what social media

they seem to be multiplying like flies. I don't need that from a pastor. I don't need that from a religious figure. And you know, if anything this is you know one of the reasons why there are groups of Catholic religious and clergy nuns and priests and brothers, so guys who are kind of like the male equivalent of

nuns who aren't ordained priests. The reason why we have a lot of people like that is because there are various specific instances in the Gospels where Christ or in the New Testament epistles, where either remaining celibate for the sake of the Kingdom of God, giving up all that you have, selling it to the poor, and following Jesus where these things are recommended, living in community, communal sharing of goods. That was the acts of the Apostles Church.

They're not doing it for no reason. It's not like they cooked up the eyes. It's not like we Catholics cooked up the ideas in our heads. It's in the Bible. As some of these things that aren't explicitly recommended, as like very high lofty ideals in states of life that either can be radically lived out or at the very least should be an inspiring example. I mean, the rich young man went away sad because he had many possessions. I mean, I hear that, and that's like a haunting thing.

It should be a haunting thing to say, think like, well, am I giving enough? Am I too concerned about material possessions? Like that? That should be a real examination of conscience moment for every Christian. I think so again again, just because he decided to wade into the Catholic side of the street, I thought it was an appropriate thing to respond to. When we return, a quick little mental check in with our buddy Keith Olberman. Very upset about Jimmy

Carter's passing. That's next on the John Girardi Show. I've been very tickled lately by the online presence of Keith Olberman. Some of you may recall him. Keith was thought to

be the best. He was like the called the best sports center duo ever was him and Dan Patrick, which I think is kind of like saying, you know, the best wide receiver duo ever was Jerry Rice, and uh, you know, so and so any other wide receiver Jerry Rice was playing with was the best wide receiver duo ever because Jerry Rice was carrying everything, like like, you know, Jerry Rice could have been playing with you know, Joe Dirt the Ragman, and it would have been the best

wide receiver combo ever because Jerry Rice was the best wide receiver. So uh yeah, Dan Patrick was amazing. I don't know that Keith Olberman was that great. Olberman took he parlayed that success into being a political commentator of sorts and burn bridges everywhere he went, lost his jobs everywhere because he's impossible to deal with and seems to be a crazy person. He has taken that craziness to the completely unedited, unfiltered world of Twitter, where he's constantly

calling on people to be fire. He thinks everything, all of the most aggressive versions of every left wing policy possible. He talks to me. So after Carter the President Carter passed away. Olberman tweets, the best president since RFK is dead, my friend Jimmy Carter would probably argue against my conclusion. I say he rebuilt a generation's belief in government. Problem there is that RFK Robert Kennedy was never president. Olberman then tries to correct his tweet. He says, the best

president since FDR is dead. He then says, my apologies for the earlier typo. It underscores the degree of sadness that, despite its inevitability and the long dread, this loss of an honored friend has left me bereft rip Okay. Then he says the best President. Then he did it again. He just tweeted it the same thing again, US President. Since RFK is dead, my friend Jimmy Carter would probably

argue against my conclusion. So there you go. RFK and Benjamin Franklin are two greatest American presidents who were not actually presidents. That'll do it for Jones. We already show see you next time on Power Talk