Jimmy Carter, Liberation Theologian
Religion & Liberty Online

Jimmy Carter, Liberation Theologian

I came across this news story via Catholic World News. And this intriguing passage about President Carter’s disagreements with Pope John Paul II:

Carter wrote that he exchanged harsh words with the late Pope John Paul II during a state visit over what Carter classified as the Pope’s “perpetuation of the subservience of women.” He added, “there was more harshness when we turned to the subject of ‘liberation theology’.”

I haven’t read the book, so I’m awfully curious to know just how the former President of the United States of America, who was at the time in the middle of fighting the Cold War, defended liberation theology to the Polish Pontiff, who knew the evils of Marxism first-hand. I have little doubt who won the argument, however.

It’s also striking to read that Carter, widely considered the most religious President we’ve had in recent American history and a decent man of good works like Habitat for Humanity, supports same-sex “marriage,” artificial contraception, taxpayer funding of international “family planning” services and embryonic stem cell research, which involves the taking of innocent human life. In other words, he takes the same side on these debates as the most hardened, radical atheist imaginable. Just what kind of Christianity does Carter believe in?

You won’t easily find this kind of muddled thinking and sheer inconsistency matched with moral self-righteousness anywhere else. And if that’s the kind of “Christian” president who can get elected, I’d prefer to vote for a politician who’s quiet about his faith but who’s on the right side of these extremely important non-negotiable issues. Oh, and we know how Carter’s foreign policy and economics worked out, don’t we? What a sham.

Kishore Jayabalan

Kishore Jayabalan is director of Istituto Acton, the Acton Institute's Rome office. Formerly, he worked for the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as the lead policy analyst on sustainable development and arms control. Kishore Jayabalan earned a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In college, he was executive editor of The Michigan Review and an economic policy intern for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He worked as an international economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. and then graduated with an M.A. in political science from the University of Toronto. While in Toronto, Kishore interned in the university's Newman Centre, which led to his appointment to the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York. Two years later, he returned to Rome to work for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as the Holy See's lead policy analyst on sustainable development and arms control. As director of Istituto Acton, Kishore organizes the institute's educational and outreach efforts in Rome and throughout Europe.