In an editorial now available on Washingtonpost.com, Robert Parham, Director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, points out that Al Gore is the third Baptist from the American South to win the Nobel Peace Prize in its 107-year history.
That's three of the ninety-five individuals awarded the prize.
The other two, of course are:
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964)
and
Jimmy Carter (2002)
How is it that three sons of the Bible Belt have each won the world's most prestigious award for their advancement of human rights, peacemaking and now earth care?
The Bible is surely part of the answer, the role Scripture has played in shaping their moral vision and values.
In a June 2006 interview before the Nashville premier of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore told me that his Christian faith shaped his moral convictions about the environment.
"How can you glorify God while heaping contempt and destruction on God's creation?" he asked. "The answer is that you cannot, you cannot."
"If you believe in the teaching 'whatever you do to the least of these you do unto me,' the least of these include those who are powerless to defend themselves against harmful actions at our hands motivated by careless greed," he said.
Unfortunately:
While a few Southern Baptist fundamentalists will now quote King respectfully, when it counted their spiritual ancestors damned him as a troublemaker, a race mixer, a liberal. Most white Baptist leaders refused to honor him for his prestigious award and offered little lament at his assassination.
and
Ironically, the Southern Baptist Convention's news service, Baptist Press, did not even carry a news article about Carter winning the Nobel Prize. That failure was accompanied by a thundering silence across the editorial pages of Baptist state newspapers. Since then, SBC leaders and their news service never pass up an opportunity to criticize Carter.
Parham concludes:
As the Good Book says, "No prophet is accepted in his own country." Indeed, three Baptists of the South have received greater honor in their time from others than their own.
Incidentally, I expect we're going to pick up a fourth sometime in the next decade, as a certain Baptist ex-President from Arkansas does the kind of work that often gets rewarded with this prize.