Carter, Southern Baptists Part Ways

The Southern Baptists, already suffering from defections because of the denomination's conservative positions, have lost one of their best-known members: former president Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Carter, whose evangelical Christian faith figured prominently in his 1976 White House campaign, said in a letter mailed to fellow Baptists that he is cutting ties to the Southern Baptist Convention after struggling with the "increasingly rigid" creed of the nation's largest Protestant denomination.

CBS News Correspondent Jacqueline Adams reports that Mr. and Mrs. Carter are unhappy with the group's recent decisions barring women pastors and declaring that wives should "submit graciously" to their husbands. These principles "violate the basic premises of my Christian faith," Mr. Carter wrote.

"I've made this decision with a great deal of pain and reluctance," the 76-year-old Mr. Carter said on Friday.

"For me, being a Southern Baptist has always been like being an American. I just have never thought of making a change. My father and his father were deacons and Sunday school teachers. It's something that's just like breathing for us."

But he added: "I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Christ in the church."

The former president's wife, Rosalynn believes the Southern Baptists are out of step on these key issues. "What the Southern Baptists had to say didn't have any reflection on how I felt or believe."

The president of the 15.8 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the Rev. James Merritt of Snellville, Ga., defended the denomination's positions Friday and said of Mr. Carter's departure: "With all due respect to the president, he is a theological moderate. We are not a theological moderate convention."

Mr. Carter will remain a deacon at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, where he has served as a Sunday school teacher since he was 18. Last month, at Carter's urging, Maranatha voted to divert half its mission contributions from the SBC to a less conservative group of congregations.

Mr. Carter said in his letter that he and his wife, Rosalynn, will associate with Baptist groups "who share such beliefs as separation of church and state ... a free religious press, and equality of women."

In recent years, the Southern Baptist Convention has boycotted Disney and issued resolutions opposing homosexuality. Merritt said his group isn't getting more conservative; American society is getting more liberal.

"A lot of people say it's society that's too loose. We're willing to take a stand even if it's not very popular," he said. He said he has not seen any "mass exodus" from the faith.

However, more moderate Baptist organizations have grown as congregations leave the Southern Baptists. The Atlanta-based Cooperative Baptist Fellowship no has 1,800 churches after only a decade in existence.

On Wednesday, the Seventh & James Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, voted to sever ties to the Southern Baptists. "As the resolutions have been more and more exclusionary, we've been embarrassed to be associated with the convention," said the Rev. Raymond Bailey.

Bailey said Carter's decision to leave may encourage some moderate Southern Baptists to follow.

"He's a wonderful model of Christian servanthood on an international level, and certainly his positions have an effect," he said. "There are some who will re-examine their positions, but I'm afraid it won't have as much effect as I'd hope."

Carter's very public avowal of faith was a major factor in his presidential victory, said Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

"The fact that he was a born-again Christian appealed to the white Southern Democrats, who had been leaving the party in national elections," Layman said. "He may have helped bring them back into the fold."

Carter's campaign also laid the foundation for the rise of the religious right in the early 1980s, Layman said.

"A lot of people would credit Carter's race with energizing evangelicals," he said. "He mobilized them back into politics, the first time they got excited about politics in quite some time."