Land Of Hypocrisy: Partisan SBC Official Chides Carter For Religious Politicking
Being called Darth Vader by Richard Land is a little like being called a strumpet by Paris Hilton.
Recently President Jimmy Carter announced a new initiative to pull together moderate Baptist bodies under an informal umbrella group. President Bill Clinton endorsed the effort. Both men are Southern Baptists who are unhappy with the right-wing tilt of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
Asked to comment on the Carter project, Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told The Washington Post, “I’m not going to question their motives. I just know that if I were them, I would be concerned about how it might appear to many people, the timing. Purportedly they’re going to hold a convention of several thousand people in Atlanta in early 2008, hosted by two former Democratic presidents, one of whom has a wife seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Some would see that as an overtly political activity.”
Land’s hypocrisy is so audacious as to be breath-taking. Under Land and his fundamentalist cronies, the SBC has more or less become a Religious Right organization and an arm of the Republican Party. Land is so intertwined with the GOP that he is openly quoted in the media on internal Republican Party politics and handicaps candidates as if he were a ward boss.
Consider this example from today’s Washington Post: The newspaper ran a front-page story about presidential aspirants U.S. Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney fighting for the social conservative vote.
Land’s opinion was solicited, and he said, “Winability is a bigger issue in this campaign because of the Darth Vader-like specter of a Hillary Clinton presidency.” He went on to add that Christian conservatives “want the most socially conservative candidate they can find, who can win.”
Let’s set aside the fact that being called Darth Vader by Richard Land is a little like being called a strumpet by Paris Hilton. The more compelling issue is that Land is so neck-deep in GOP politics that he does not hesitate to slime a leading Democratic candidate by comparing her to a fictional character who personifies evil. He doesn’t think this is unusual. He’s positively blasé about it.
It’s as if Land does not even bother to recognize that there are Democrats in the SBC. The denomination – the nation’s largest Protestant faith group – has 16 million members, so we can safely conclude there are some.
But alas, this sort of thing is nothing new for Land. In 2000, Land worked hard to help George W. Bush win the Republican nomination and then gain the White House in November. In 2004, he and SBC officials pulled out all the stops to help Bush get re-elected. Bush was invited to address an SBC meeting via satellite hookup, and Bush sent Ralph Reed, who was then working on his campaign, to the meeting as his personal emissary.
At the event, Reed, according to a report in The New York Times, urged “pastors to do everything short of risking their churches’ tax-exempt status to support the president’s re-election.” He was joined by Jack Graham, then departing president of the SBC, who praised Bush as another Ronald Reagan.
Reed asked the SBC clergy to conduct voter registration and sponsor a “Party for the President” just before the election. After Bush’s reelection, Land, gushing like a schoolgirl at the sight of the star quarterback, told the National Journal that he regards Bush as “the greatest president of my lifetime.”
So please, Dr. Land, spare us the lamentations over possible political work by Jimmy Carter’s new group. There isn’t any evidence that Carter plans such activity, but even if there were, you’d be in no position to call him on it. We advise you to take some advice from the holy book you claim so much to treasure, specifically Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
Stop obsessing over the political mote in Carter’s eye and work on getting the log out of your own.