Carter Leaves the SBC

In October 2000, Jimmy Carter announced he was severing his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after six decades of membership. He had been a Sunday school teacher and deacon his entire adult life. His resignation was not a drift away from faith — it was a documented act of conscience with a specific stated reason. Carter identified the 1998 Baptist Faith and Message amendment — the statement that a wife 'is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband' — and the 2000 statement limiting the office of pastor to men as the direct causes. He wrote: 'My decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and ignoring others, established that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.' Carter continued to be an active Sunday school teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia — an independent Baptist church — until well into his nineties. He continued to write about the intersection of Christianity and human rights, and in 2009 published a broader essay explaining his decision to also leave the broader global Council of Baptist Men's Federation, citing worldwide patterns of religious justification for the oppression of women. The resignation received considerable press coverage in 2000 and again when Carter expanded on his reasoning in 2009. Its significance in the context of this graph is not primarily about Carter — he was already long out of political power. It is about what the SBC's 2000 doctrine cost: a former president of the United States, a lifelong Baptist, a man who had taught the denomination's Sunday school curriculum for sixty years, concluded that he could not remain. The resurgence's leaders accepted that cost.

Themes this entry appears in

• Opposition / Resistance
• Patriarchy
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections to Carter Leaves the SBC

• Baptist Faith & Message 2000 influenced (2000) — Carter cited the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 — and specifically its statement that a wife 'is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband' and its limiting of the office of pastor to men — as the direct cause of his resignation from the SBC. The BFM2000 was the formal doctrinal codification of what the conservative resurgence had been building toward for two decades. Carter framed it as a matter of human rights and women's equality, not merely biblical interpretation. He left.
• SBC Conservative Resurgence influenced (2000) — The conservative resurgence that Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, and Adrian Rogers engineered across the Southern Baptist Convention from 1979 onward transformed the denomination's position on women in ministry from a contested question to settled doctrine. The resurgence culminated in the 1998 Baptist Faith and Message amendment on wifely submission and the 2000 statement limiting the pastorate to men. Jimmy Carter, who had been a Sunday school teacher and deacon in the SBC for sixty years, found the trajectory increasingly irreconcilable with his reading of Scripture and his commitment to human rights. The resurgence did not target Carter directly — it simply built a denomination that a person with Carter's convictions could not remain in.

Sources

• Losing My Religion for Equality (essay) — Jimmy Carter (2009), pp. The Age / The Observer, July 15, 2009
• Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (SBC statement) — Southern Baptist Convention (2000)