Carter endorses BJC effort to establish Center for Religious Liberty

January 2007

By Phallan Davis

Former U.S. President and 2002 Nobel Prize laureate Jimmy Carter has announced his support for the Baptist Joint Committee’s effort to secure funding for its Center for Religious Liberty. Since leaving office, Carter has worked with Habitat for Humanity and has tirelessly promoted national and international humanitarian causes. Carter’s endorsement and influence brings the BJC an important ally in its effort to create the Center that will serve as a visible monument to the principle of religious liberty for generations to come.

Carter said, “The Baptist Joint Committee does important work under trying conditions. A Center for Religious Liberty, and a capital campaign to make it possible, is essential to allow the BJC to do its work effectively.”

For seven decades, the BJC has worked to quell attacks on religious liberty and to maintain the separation of church and state. According to Reggie McDonough, capital campaign chair, Carter’s personal identity extols the value of religious liberty and recognizes the importance of the BJC in maintaining such an essential cause.

McDonough said “President Carter is a champion of religious liberty in the United States and around the world. He understands first hand the current struggle to maintain religious liberty. He also understands the crucial role of the Baptist Joint Committee in this struggle. His endorsement of the Capital Campaign to expand and enhance our facilities and capacity is a very significant expression of support.”

The Center for Religious Liberty will be a state-of-the-art education and training center and the nerve center for the BJC’s activities in Washington.

BJC Executive Director J. Brent Walker said, “We are delighted and honored to have President Carter endorse the BJC’s capital campaign. He cares passionately about human rights and religious liberty. He understands the importance of a continuing presence of free and faithful Baptists in the nation’s capital. He also appreciates the value of a full-blown center dedicated to these purposes.”

Mark Wiggs, BJC board chair, points to Carter’s work, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, which echoes the mission of the BJC. In the book, Carter asserts that not upholding church and state separation puts Americans’ civil liberties in peril. According to Wiggs, “In his recent book, President Carter, writing with prophetic urgency about reckless movements to entwine church and state, identifies religious liberty as one of ‘our endangered values’ in this country.

Wiggs continues, “His timely warning, coupled with his words of affirmation and encouragement for BJC’s work of protecting this fragile freedom, should inspire religious liberty supporters to give generously to BJC’s Capital Campaign.”

A champion of Baptist distinctives, Carter has taken an active role in another cause important to the BJC. Carter hosted former President Bill Clinton, Walker and others at the Carter Center in Atlanta Jan. 9 to announce plans for a Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, tentatively scheduled for Jan. 30 – Feb. 1, 2008, at the Georgia World Congress Center. The goal of the covenant is to create an authentic and cooperative prophetic Baptist voice in North America.