Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States who died Sunday at age 100, may well be remembered as much for his faith as for his politics.
During his single four-year term in the White House followed by more than four decades out of office, Mr. Carter’s evangelical bent was always a prominent, unmistakable feature of his public persona.
After leaving Washington and returning home to Plains, Georgia, Mr. Carter regularly taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church.
Jody Morgan, an independent wellness consultant from Panama City Beach, Florida, said she attended one of Mr. Carter’s last classes — which she said ended in 2019 after the former president sustained a concussion.
She said the trip to Georgia and parking overnight at the church to secure a place in the class was worth it. It was, Ms. Morgan recalled in an interview, “Just an incredible experience all around. … He was so funny and so kind, and the love of Jesus just exuded from him.”
Mr. Carter was elected as a born-again Christian who famously promised “never to knowingly lie” to voters while also confessing to a Playboy magazine interviewer he’d “committed adultery in my heart many times.” During his time in office and afterward, his theology moved increasingly into the progressive camp.
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Religion historian and Carter biographer Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College said via email that part of the former Georgia governor’s appeal to voters in the 1970s was the respite that his approach to public service offered from the scandal-tinged end of the Nixon administration.
“Nixon’s prevarications triggered a constitutional crisis,” Mr. Balmer said, while “Carter stands out for his integrity,” something he said Mr. Carter “contributed to the presidency more than anything else.”
There was also the novelty of a presidential contender discussing his faith. Apart from the controversies surrounding the nomination of New York Gov. Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, for president in 1928 (he lost to Herbert Hoover) and the election 32 years later of John F. Kennedy, also Catholic, to the presidency, religion was largely absent from campaign discussions.
Anti-Catholic sentiment helped torpedo Smith’s campaign, while Kennedy disarmed critics with a Houston address in which he said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act.”
Some 16 years after Kennedy’s address, Mr. Carter’s faith was something of a novelty: NBC’s John Chancellor reportedly said born-again Christianity “was a new thing,” when nearly 2,000 years earlier Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again” in John 3:6.
But outside of religious circles, many didn’t know or understand what being a born-again Christian meant. Until a decade before that presidential run, Jimmy Carter might not have been sure of his own religious standing, Mr. Balmer said.
“Following his bitterly disappointing loss to segregationist Lester Maddox in his 1966 campaign for governor, Carter was despondent,” he said. “Friends in Plains saw him walking around town for hours and hours.”
Mr. Balmer, whose 2014 Carter biography is titled “Redeemer,” said Mr. Carter, a Navy veteran, turned to a family member for spiritual guidance.
He said, “A conversation with his sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, a Pentecostal evangelist, prompted him to renew his commitment to the faith. Almost immediately thereafter, he embarked on a mission trip to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and another to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he and another Southern Baptist literally visited neighborhoods knocking on doors to tell people about Jesus.
While Mr. Carter initially advertised himself as a Southern Baptist, Mr. Balmer said the president’s relationship with the denomination could best be described as “a troubled marriage, with more than its share of trial separations and attempted reconciliations.”
A “turning point” came as a theologically conservative movement within the Southern Baptist Convention gained power and “cracked down on women’s ordination,” Mr. Balmer said.
“In terms of categorizing Carter’s faith, I refer to him as a progressive evangelical — a term Carter told me was acceptable to him,” Mr. Balmer told The Washington Times.
He said “progressive evangelicalism” is marked by issues such as “prison reform, public education, peace crusades, women’s equality, human rights and (among Northern evangelicals) the abolition of slavery” and that Mr. Carter’s presidential policies “were very much in keeping” with those traditions.
Matters came to a head in October 2000, when Mr. Carter sent a letter to 75,000 Southern Baptists announcing his “painful decision” to sever his personal connections with the Southern Baptist Convention, which four months earlier included a provision opposing women serving as pastors in its doctrinal statement.
In an opinion essay published in 2009 in the Australian newspaper The Age and other outlets around the world, Mr. Carter blasted the SBC’s executives and voting delegates who, “quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ‘subservient’ to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.”
Despite his break with the Southern Baptists, the church in Plains which he helped start, Maranatha Baptist, remained affiliated with the SBC, its website noted.
Mr. Carter went on to write several books referencing his faith and offering his views on religion. Dartmouth’s Mr. Balmer said he was unaware of any other president who’d written on faith topics as Mr. Carter did.
Robert J. Morgan, an evangelical pastor and author of 35 Christian books, said in an interview that Mr. Carter’s “fidelity to his wife, to his family, to his work, to teaching the Bible, to evangelism and the integrity of his life demonstrates the authenticity, not only of his Christian faith, but of the power of the cross and the power of Christ.”
He said that while other presidents were “more committed to Christ than we know, because of the revisionism that’s taken place over the past 100 years,” Mr. Carter “was more open about it, I think, than most presidents. … He wasn’t a bit shy about putting his faith out there as part of his credentials. And I think the vitality of a person’s spiritual life does provide credentials for the kind of character that we want in office.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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