The brouhaha over whether Southern Methodist University (SMU) in
Dallas will host a George W. Bush presidential library continues. A
regional panel for the United Methodist Church, which technically
owns the school, voted by a margin of 10-4 on March 14 to support
the school’s desire to host the library.
Fifteen Methodist bishops and over 10,000 liberal Methodist
clergy and activists have signed a petition denouncing any
connection between SMU and Bush. Several bishops even demanded that
SMU board members who had been donors to Bush election campaigns
recuse themselves from the decision process. They even insisted
that the pastor of Bush’s home church in Dallas, Highland Park
United Methodist, likewise avoid voting as an SMU board member
because of the perceived conflict of interest. Neither the pastor
nor the others acquiesced to the protesters’ demands.
Apparently any association, however tangential, with the Texas
devil in the White House, is profoundly unacceptable to these
clergy, who are very distressed by the Bush Administration’s
policies on the wars, Global Warming, and same-sex nuptials. (The
United Methodist Church prohibits same-sex unions, but the same
clergy do not like that either.) Bush has been a Methodist ever
since he married Laura Bush at her Methodist church in Midland,
Texas.
Meanwhile, the longtime association between another United
Methodist school and Jimmy Carter has remained uncontroversial
within the denomination, though the ex-president certainly is
not.
Since 1982 Carter has been a professor at Emory University,
which is owned by The United Methodist Church. Carter has called
his decision to join Emory’s faculty was “one of the best decisions
I have made in my life.” The Jimmy Carter Center, from which 14
advisory board members have resigned over Carter’s anti-Israel
book, is affiliated with Emory University.
Hostile bishops and clergy who oppose the Bush library and an
affiliated Bush think tank have protested that Bush institutions
will propagate nefarious “neoconservative” causes about spreading
American power and democracy around the world.
But so far, no bishops and prominent clergy have questioned the
church’s ties to Jimmy Carter’s think tank, with its own unique
perspective on U.S. foreign policy. Not even the think tank’s
millions of dollars in donations from repressive Arab monarchies
have raised any public eyebrows within the church, though surely
those same dollars for a Bush library would be widely
condemned.
Carter himself defended his latest controversial comparison of
Israel with Apartheid South Africa while speaking at Glenn Memorial
United Methodist Church on the campus of Emory University in
Atlanta late last February. He received three standing
ovations.
“This is the first time I have ever been called a liar or a
plagiarist or an anti-Semite…or stupid,” he dryly told a laughing
audience of the furor surrounding his new book, Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid. Carter explained that he had only started
“primarily blaming Israel” after it fell under “conservative
leaders,” whose “covetousness or avarice was to take back from the
Palestinians the West Bank.”
Carter denied any bias against Israel, insisting that “our
nation’s overwhelming support of Jews comes from Christians, like
me, who have been taught since childhood to honor and protect God’s
chosen people, from among whom came our own Savior.” But in fact,
Carter’s sharp critiques of Israel, and uncritical eye towards Arab
human rights abuses, mirror the perspective of the Religious Left,
including United Methodist officials, rather than the Southern
Baptist Convention to which he belonged until recent years.
Having resigned from the Southern Baptists over its conservative
policies, which include strong support for Israel, perhaps Carter
should become a United Methodist, whose bishops and other elites
share Carter’s political biases. Carter has been a frequent speaker
to seminary students at Emory’s Candler School of Theology and to
religion-related conferences at the Carter Center. In 1985, he
received the World Methodist Peace Award in the Cannon Chapel at
Emory. No doubt, Carter would not be as comfortable hanging out in
most of today’s Southern Baptist schools, which are not attuned to
Carter’s brand of Social Gospel.
Retired United Methodist Bishop Kenneth Hicks, one of the
prelates who demanded that Bush campaign donors on the SMU recuse
themselves from the Bush Library decision, explained to
Conservative News Service that he has “no problem” with the Carter
Center, unlike the one he has with a Bush Library. “For one thing,
I think the premise and the values of the Carter administration
were of a higher order than this administration,” he opined.
Social Gospel clergy, who emphasize left-wing political action
over Christian doctrine, frequently admire the administration of
Jimmy Carter, especially its infamous foreign policy. Often like
the former president, they imagine that America (and Israel) has no
enemies, only provoked victims, whose good will can be aroused by
appeasement and apologies.
How appropriate for this sort of unreal foreign policy to
receive approbation and praise on a church school campus, where
abstract theories and good intentions are frequently prized more
than reality. And how predictable that United Methodist bishops and
clergy should object to any association with George W. Bush,
despite his own 25 year membership in the denomination.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at
the Institute on
Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.
