Mother Jones has an interview with Jimmy Carter in which Carter talks about the intersection of religious and political fundamentalism that has corrupted the country.
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2006/06/jimmy_carter.html
They are talking about Carter’s newest book Our Endangered Values. The interview is worth the read, as is the book. In the interview Carter identifies 1979 as the time of origin of this Faustian bargain on the Right.
I think it was in 1979, when future fundamentalists took control of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is a very important religious and political factor in this country. After that, the Southern Baptist Convention had almost diametrically opposite basic principles than it had previously followed, and there’s been an evolution within the Convention toward a more and more rigid and strict creed that embodies the fundamentalist principles that I mention in the book.
Now, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the elementary principle of fundamentalism has existed for ages, and it obviously permeates other religions as well, such as Islam and Hinduism and others. But this trend continued and, parallel to it, there was in effect a merger of the fundamentalist Christian leaders and the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And for the last 25 years or so, that merger has become more pronounced and more evident.
MJ.com: Which of the two strains of fundamentalism do you see as leading the other?
JC: I wouldn’t say leading, but both are influencing each other. In the past, there have been two parallel premises for the separation of church and state. One obviously is what Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, when he said we should build a wall between the church and state. And in the Christian faith, we all remember that Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” This also indicates that there should be a clear separation.
But those premises have been publicly disavowed or challenged by Pat Robertson on the religious side, and even by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court [William Rehnquist]. But nowadays, with the allocation of billions of dollars through what President Bush calls a faith-based initiative, taxpayers’ money is distributed to churches and other religious institutions that will comply with the basic principles of the present political administration. And there’s no doubt that in public conventions and in individual church speeches and sermons, there’s been a prevalent inclination to endorse candidates, primarily Republican candidates.
I don’t share Carter’s opinion of the pre-1979 Southern Baptist Convention. I think it’s been misguided, mistaken, ignorant and arrogant for its entire history, going all the way back to its roots in Puritanism. Be that as it may, what interested me in this interview was that Carter comes close to saying what I think any and every self-respecting Christian should be saying. Fundamentalists are an existential prevarication that turns the teaching of Jesus on their head. Fundamentalists are those who have said yes to Satan in the temptation in the wilderness.
