I don’t have two hours and forty minutes to listen to Sean DeMars’s interview with Albert Mohler, so I am glad that Mark Wingfield did. Here are a few snippets of his piece at Baptist News Global:
Toward the end of the nearly three-hour interview with Sean DeMars, lead pastor at Sixth Ave Church in Decatur, Ala., Mohler responded to a listener question: “Do you think that Jimmy Carter is a born-again Christian?”
Carter, a former Southern Baptist, is by all measures the most devout and churchgoing president in modern history. But Mohler couldn’t say for sure whether the 100-year-old is “born again.”
“I have to hope and pray,” he replied. “So I’ve had some personal engagements with the former president. He has mentioned me in four books. Negatively. … He’s not a fan of the conservative resurgence in the SBC. And remember, I got into the thickest controversy early in my life in Georgia where I was editor of the paper, which guess what? Jimmy Carter’s in Georgia and cares a lot about Georgia.”
Mohler described Carter as “like your typical SBC deacon in a more liberal church.”
Interesting. One might argue that Mohler is saying, as a Calvinist, that on this side of eternity no one can be truly sure who is saved and who is not saved. That’s a fair position. But I am not sure this is what Mohler meant when he was referring to Carter. I wonder if he would question the salvation of people in his own circle in the same way that he questions the faith commitment of the former president.
In Matthew 7, Jesus told his disciples how to identity a false prophet: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall known them.” Anyone who has followed Jimmy Carter’s life and career knows that he has: 1. Said that he was “born again.” 2. Displayed the “fruits” of a follower of Jesus. That’s good enough for me.
Of course if one defined a true “born-again Christian” by whether or not a person conforms to Mohler’s views about the inerrancy of scripture, complementarianism, Calvinism, and Christian nationalism, Carter might fall short.
And this:
He didn’t technically “endorse” Trump, he said. “I did say who I was going to vote for in a public statement.”
And he has no regret in voting for Trump twice, he explained.
“I don’t regret either one of these. I regret actions taken by Donald Trump, but I don’t regret this in that. I’ve been at this a long time. I think honesty is paramount. I think I’ve been about as clear as I could be. I’m editor also at World Opinions and I’ve been saying consistently ever since 2020, we need a nominee other than Donald Trump for the Republican Party. I did not get that.
“And so if I’m looking at the race, and as I say, I’ve tried to help people to understand it’s not just electing a president, you’re electing a government. We’re increasingly like a parliamentary system and you’re electing policies. And it’s not a situation in which I have felt like we have had a situation in which you’ve had a stellar character and a horrible character. I think we’ve had two horrible characters, and I don’t want to minimize in any way Donald Trump’s inadequacies, his moral faults, his sin. I’ll just tell you, I am close enough to the situation where I’m not going to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are less complicated morally, I would say they’re less complicated in terms of how they play the political game.”
And this:
When he first spoke in favor of Trump as president, Mohler received harsh criticism for the perceived inconsistency of his 1998 stance that Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., should kick out President Bill Clinton as a member because of his sexual liaison with a White House intern.
In his own mind, Mohler has been consistent across the years.
“I think my priorities stay pretty much the same. If there’s an incongruity, it’s what I would do with Bill Clinton in the 1990s when I went on Larry King Live so many times and CNN and all these things and called for Bill Clinton to resign. I don’t think that was the wrong thing to do. I do think the political landscape has changed. I want to be honest. I think I would have to say that if you had a situation in which you had genuinely distinct characters and character is just say sexual morality, that I think as a Christian that’s going to be an excruciating position to be in. I just don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here. I didn’t think in 2016 that Donald Trump would do what he said he would do in terms of Supreme Court appointments and other things. Well, he did it.”
Thus, despite Trump’s well-documented sexual abuse and extra-marital affairs, at least Trump doesn’t support abortion, Mohler reasoned.
Read the entire piece here.
Watch the Mohler interview: