Jimmy's Jeremiad.(Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis)(Book Review)

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis By Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $25

According to Jimmy Carter, America is under siege. The primary aggressors are "fundamentalists"--which in his learned view includes not only people who believe the Earth was created in six days but also "neoconservatives" and other extremists who believe anyone rejecting their views will burn in a fiery lake while angels stomp and cheer.

These miscreants, Carter insists, are not only morally deficient but very crafty, and they have plunged our entire country into a "moral crisis." The former President, by his own estimation, is one of the rare people who sees what the fundamentalists are really up to. Many readers "will find some of my opinions to be different from their own," he notes early in his latest book, Our Endangered Values. "Quite likely, many of them do not realize what is happening in America, and it may be beneficial to raise the issues to the level of increased debate"

Who are these dread fundamental ists? Carter sums up a long-winded definition by labeling them with three words: "rigidity, domination, and exclusion." Many are religious, but not in the way Carter is. As he reminds us many times, Jimmy is a righteous man, while fundamentalists like to boss people around and, in some cases, fly jetliners into office buildings.

The fundamentalists actually occupy a very large tent. "I have chosen to use 'fundamentalist' to describe a conglomeration of characteristics, some of them attributable to 'neocons' or the extreme right wing, recognizing that there are no commonly accepted definitions of these descriptive words," he explains. As befitting a man writing a jeremiad, Carter warns that the fundamentalists are everywhere. They have taken over the helm of the Southern Baptist Convention, forcing his excellency's own departure from that body. The neocons have also taken over U.S. foreign policy, chiefly to protect Israel. They are joined in that endeavor by crazies who hope war in the Middle East will jump-start the Rapture.

Certitude in book writing is no sin, and ravers from left and right often command the best-seller lists. The irony is that Carter fits his own self-proclaimed definition of a fundamentalist all too well. In his mind only he wears the white hat, rides the white horse, and attacks the right people. He comes across as precisely the self-righteous, slightly paranoid crank that he claims to be exposing.

He writes of the contemporary Southern Baptist leadership as if it were composed of backwoods Stalinists. They engineered a coup d'etat of sorts, not with pistols but by winning elections and installing traditionalists in their boards and seminaries. Much to the horror of the defeated parties (like Carter), the upstarts achieved significant marketplace success. While liberal denominations continue their slide toward oblivion, the Southern Baptist Convention, with some 16 million members, is the largest non-Catholic religious body in the United States.