Brother Jimmy Protests.

Jimmy Carter

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis

Simon & Schuster, 2005. 212pp. $25

It's hard to think, on the spur of the moment anyway, of a more notable American Christian than Jimmy Carter. Since leaving the White House, he's launched Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center; he's written more than a dozen books (including the fine memoir An Hour Before Daylight) and won the Nobel Peace Prize; he's led important diplomatic missions and addressed practically every crucial social problem in every conceivable venue. So much for the cliche of there being no second acts in American lives. Now he's delivering an angry prophetic blast against fundamentalist-neocon-Bushian policies and actions as un-Christian and anti-democratic. This might be dismissed as just another long op-ed piece, and preaching to the choir of his likely readers; except that the author is, after all, a distinguished statesman, and he makes forceful use of blunt statistics and telling quotations.

Carter handily defines fundamentalism, American and otherwise, by its rigidity, drive for domination, and exclusiveness--and few could speak with more authority on this than the world's most famous Baptist, who got a rude awakening when the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist convention, closing out a ceremonial visit to the Oval office, told him, "We are praying, Mr. President, that you will abandon secular humanism as your religion." Yipes! (This same luminary--the Rev. Bailey Smith, although Carter is too polite to name him--later declared that, "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew"). Carter broke with the S.B.C. (as did his Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga.) because of what he saw as its repressive authoritarianism, sexism, and attempts to fuse church and state.

In assailing (mostly) Republicans and right-wing Christians for betraying both their country and their faith, Carter applies the skills that he's honed all his life in all sorts of pulpits. He nails the case against capital punishment with the gripping story of Lena Baker, a black woman who shot the white man who attacked her and threatened her life, but then got a full pardon--65 years after she'd been electrocuted for the "crime." He points out the catastrophic results of the pseudo-pious crusade against sex education: "American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands ... Also the incidence of HIV/AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany." Here and elsewhere Carter isn't abandoning his belief in old-fashioned Baptist morality, just noting what happens when hypocritical ideology replaces honest recognition of the facts.

In a similar vein he attacks the bloated US military budget ($400 billion a year, matching the rest of the planet combined), Star Wars ($80 billion so far), nuclear proliferation (the US joined Iran in opposing an IAEA moratorium on uranium enrichment and reprocessing of plutonium), the new preemptive war doctrine, "extraordinary renditions," torture of "enemy combatants," the phenomenal stinginess of American foreign aid for the wretched of the earth, unfair, agricultural subsidies that punish Third World farmers, the growing income gap between the top and bottom fifth of the population (4-1 in Japan, 7-1 in France, 11-1 in the US), tax breaks for millionaires, ballooning CEO salaries (once 40 times, now 400 times higher than workers' base pay), wholesale assaults on the environment (bailing out of the Kyoto Protocol, etc.), government coddling of the tobacco industry, the world's highest incarceration rates, next to no gun control--you name it.

It reads like a familiar liberal version of the 95 Theses; but Carter is hardly a garden-variety liberal; and that gives his sermons some real credibility. Anybody on The New York Times' editorial staff could have cited--and condemned--the Rev. Jerry Falwell's mind-boggling pronouncement after 9/11: "I really believe that the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle ... I point the finger in their face and say, 'you helped this happen.'" But Carter, an octogenarian pillar of the church who still teaches Bible classes almost once a week, hardly qualifies as a pagan. He's opposed to abortion; and he won't say more about homosexuality than that Christian heterosexuals should fix their sky-high divorce rates (the Red States lead the nation) before casting any more homophobic stones. As for feminism, Carter vehemently promotes the empowering of women, but the arch-libber in his camp is ... Jesus himself.

This vintage performance by the man who was a policy wonk even before the term existed inevitably has few drawbacks. Ex-presidential gravitas and Carter's earnest nature ban the faintest trace of humor from these pages. And, although he scolds Democrats (e.g., Bill Clinton--for not resisting the spread of West Bank settlements) as well as Republicans, he occasionally succumbs to partisan self-congratulation as he lists the many world-improving efforts of the Carter Center (as opposed to the endless misery and mayhem purveyed by the Bush administration). But then he never pretended to be Jon Stewart; and an indefatigable veteran like Carter can probably be forgiven for having a little stiffness in his joints. If nothing else, on his lips the increasingly phony buzz-word "values" rings true; and the dangers he documents unfortunately amount to a lot more than mere political slogan-mongering.