PLAINS, GA. — Jimmy Carter still spends much of his time injecting himself into the nastiest spats on the planet. But most Sundays, the 83-year-old former president manages to be back here in the tiny city where he was raised. He does not like to skip Sunday school.
He gives his Bible lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church, an unassuming red-brick chapel on the outskirts of town. Carter estimates that he has given more than 450 of them since leaving the White House in 1981.
On a recent bitter-cold morning, the chapel crowd was a typical one -- mostly out-of-towners, with a sprinkling of locals and stone-faced Secret Service agents. Carter appeared at 10 a.m. in a gray blazer and bolo tie. His hair was thinning and white, his face withered and creased. But that plush, toothy smile flashed like old times, and his voice was clear and firm.
He spoke about Christ's insistence that people love their enemies.
"It is one of the most difficult things for human beings to do," Carter said. "But Jesus said this because he meant it."
That directive has driven Carter to try his hand at healing the rifts between the great antagonists of the last half-century: Arab and Jew, Cuban and American, Hutu and Tutsi. For his efforts, he has been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize and derided as a quixotic fool.
But there is one divisive row that is perhaps the most personal for Carter, and his failure to heal it has haunted him for years. It is the rift between liberals and conservatives within his own religion -- a battle that has left him estranged from the Southern Baptist Convention, the Protestant entity that once nurtured and defined him.
"It really grieved me to see my own depository of religious faith . . . being ripped apart," Carter said. "It was very deeply troubling. And I have felt, maybe unjustifiably, a personal obligation to try to do something about it."
With more than 16 million members in 50 states, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant group in the United States. But for many white Southerners of Carter's generation, it was more than a denomination.
Southern Baptist churches inspired young Christians like Carter to harvest unsaved souls on far-flung missions. The convention's bureaucracy offered ambitious Baptists like Carter a venue outside of government where they could slake their desire to lead.
