Rice urges SBC to support U.S. efforts to spread freedom

Posted: 6/23/06

Rice urges SBC to support
U.S. efforts to spread freedom

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

GREENSBORO, N.C. (ABP)—In an address received like a campaign stump speech, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, exhorting her listeners to support the United States in spreading freedom around the globe.

After a standing ovation upon being introduced—during which one man on the convention floor yelled, “You’ve got my vote!”—Rice touched briefly on her faith background as the daughter and granddaughter of Presbyterian ministers.

She then thanked Southern Baptists for their faith-motivated social work and disaster relief, saying, “Whenever tragedy brings people to their knees, Southern Baptists have been there to help people get back on their feet.”

Rice spent most of the remainder of her remarks casting a missionary-like vision of the United States’ role on the world stage—as a liberator and spreader of freedom and justice.

“President Bush and I share your conviction that America can, and must, be a force for good in the world,” she said. “Human dignity is not the grant of governments. … It is God’s endowment to all humanity.”

Some people throughout the world are denied that dignity regularly by poverty, by the lack of political and religious freedom, and by human trafficking and other forms of subjugation—and those situations are ultimately in America’s best interest to ameliorate, she said.

“These are tragedies, but they are also threats in the making,” Rice said.

The United States has a keen interest in promoting religious freedom abroad, stopping oppression in places like Darfur, fighting AIDS and poverty and ending human trafficking worldwide, be-cause oppression, poverty, and suffering produce instability, she asserted.

“If America does not serve great purposes—if we do not rally other nations to fight intolerance and to support peace and to defend freedom … then our world will drift towards tragedy,” she said.

“The strong will do what they please, the weak will suffer most of all. And inevitably—inevitably—sooner or later, the threats of the world” will come to U.S. shores as they did on Sept. 11, 2001, she said.

America has both the moral authority and the ability to lead the world, Rice insisted.

“Let us resolve to deal with the world as it is, but never to accept that we are powerless to make it better than it is—not perfect, but better,” she said.

“America will lead the cause of freedom in our world not because we think ourselves perfect. To the contrary, we cherish democracy and champion its ideals because we know we are not perfect.”

Rice acknowledged the United States has a history of not living up to its own ideals of freedom.

“After all, when our Founding Fathers said, ‘We the people,’ they didn’t mean me,” she said. “My ancestors in Mr. Jefferson’s Con-stitution were only 3/5 of a man.”

But times have changed, said Rice, whose predecessors in office were an African-Ame-rican man and a white woman.

“If I serve to the end of my term as secretary, it will be 12 years since a white man was secretary of state,” she quip-ped to loud applause.

The Southern Baptists saved their most enthusiastic ovation for a section of the speech where Rice discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The SBC was one of the few denominations whose leaders publicly supported the Iraq war. The day before Rice spoke, the denomination’s resolutions committee quashed a South Carolina messenger’s proposed resolution “on the Southern Baptist Convention’s support for the unjust war in Iraq.”

Rice acknowledged the war has ended up being “far more difficult than many of us expected it would be.” But she said the price was worth it—to fight terrorism and to give Iraqis and Afghans “a chance—not a guarantee” of freedom with security.

“When possible, we are bringing terrorists to justice, and when necessary, we are bringing justice to the terrorists,” she said, to an enthusiastic standing ovation.

After her speech, SBC President Bobby Welch led the messengers in prayer for Rice.

“We thank you now for this sweet lady whom you have protected and guided and blessed,” Welch prayed. “You know how we have longed and yearned for such leadership as this, and we are grateful, Lord.”

At the end of a final standing ovation, a group of messengers broke into a spontaneous chorus of “God Bless America,” which quickly spread around the Greensboro Coliseum. As Rice exited the building, Welch led attendees in repeating the song’s first verse.