SBC President Patterson calls for Clinton to resign

by Tom Strode                                                                                             Vol. XI, No. 9, October 1998

Southern Baptist Convention President Paige Patterson has called for President Clinton to resign for his own good and that of the country. In asking Clinton to remove himself from office, Patterson has joined a list of Southern Baptists, public officials and newspapers favoring resignation for the scandal-ridden president. Patterson's call for resignation is noteworthy because Clinton is a member of a Southern Baptist church in Little Rock, Ark.

The calls for Clinton to resign have increased as the weeks have passed since the president admitted Aug. 17 he had an improper relationship, interpreted as a sexual one, with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and had been misleading about it. Many religious and political leaders, including members of Clinton's party, called his admission inadequate and harmful.

Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, told Baptist Press in a telephone interview Sept. 8 he is calling for Clinton to resign first "out of concern for him, because here's a man whose personal life and home and spiritual life (are) in disarray. And no man walking through those kinds of things is in a position to lead anything." Clinton should be "devoting himself to rectifying his relationship with God and his family," Patterson said.

"Second, we cannot continue forever to present our young people with the travesty of preachers and political leaders failing to live by the mandates of God. And the very fact that the nation seems not to be that concerned about the president's morality is a sure indication that too steady a diet of this has already had a catastrophic effect."

"And finally, I ask him to resign so that he will not put our nation through the further financial difficulties and public embarrassment of extensive revelations of his own conduct," Patterson said. The government already has spent enough money on the investigation of the president, and an "impeachment hearing would be quite expensive," he said.

Patterson said he would like to tell the president, "however it looks to the contrary, that we love him and we have redoubled our efforts to pray for him at this particular time that God would give him both forgiveness and discernment."

Patterson, one of the architects of the SBC's conservative resurgence initiated in the late 1970s, was elected without opposition at this year's SBC annual meeting in Salt Lake City. The call by the SBC's president for a Clinton resignation follows such requests by Richard Land, president of the SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; David Gushee, ethics professor at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.; and Wayne Ward, retired theology professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky., and a personal friend of the Clintons.

The calls for Clinton to resign have mounted recently. Republicans such as Sens. John Ashcroft of Missouri and Dan Coats of Indiana, as well as House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, both of Texas, have called for resignation. While Rep. Paul McHale of Pennsylvania is the only Democratic member of Congress to request Clinton's resignation, a growing number of the president's fellow party members have criticized his behavior.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a longtime friend of Clinton and a moderate voice among Senate Democrats, called for a "public rebuke" of the president in a highly critical speech on the Senate floor Sept. 3. Lieberman called Clinton's behavior "immoral" and said it has had a negative effect "on our culture, on our character and on our children." Other Democrats endorsed Lieberman's comments. One, Sen. Daniel Moynihan of New York, said he believes Congress should stay in session until it settles the matter of impeachment of the president. Moynihan called the situation a "crisis in the regime" on ABC's "This Week" Sept. 6, according to The New York Times.

The House will determine whether to impeach the president. If a majority votes for impeachment, the Senate would determine Clinton's fate. A two-thirds majority would be required in the Senate to remove him from office.

Newspapers calling in editorials for Clinton's resignation, according to a report in The Washington Times, include the Atlanta Constitution, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Daily Oklahoman, Denver Post, The Orlando Sentinel, San Antonio Express-News, and The Washington Post. [BP]