Jimmy Carter, a man of implacable faith, lived his values
ATLANTA – On Jan. 20, 1981, after suffering a landslide defeat, former President Jimmy Carter returned home to rural Plains, Georgia, to what he called “an altogether new, unwanted, and potentially empty life.”
By 1982, he had such a low profile that Time magazine called him “virtually a non-person, a president who never was.”
But Carter would rewrite his legacy by turning to his implacable faith. It was, to him, an enduring source of comfort and inspiration, continuously helping guide him even through the most stunning setbacks – from losing elections to marital woes, an interminable hostage crisis in Iran and health crises in later life. His hometown of Plains wasn’t just Carter’s childhood home – it was his spiritual center.
Upon his return after his presidential defeat, Carter, a third-generation Baptist, maintained his lifetime habit – teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church. He made a cross that stood for years above the altar in his wood shop. As an active member, he took his turn cutting the church’s grass. And he applied his love-your-neighbor ethic to his work at the Carter Center.
“He is not some pie-in-the-sky Christian. He is a down-to-earth Christian who sees the everyday challenges and applies his faith to practical problems,” said civil rights hero the Rev. Joseph Lowery in an October 2010 interview. “There is no question his commitment to peace is based on faith. His commitment to help the poor, his commitment to housing, you can attribute that to his faith. It was Christ’s challenge to serve the poor and he’s done that. I admire him for that.”
In his 1996 book “Living Faith,” Carter wrote openly about problems in his marriage. Getting involved in the church in Plains helped him and his wife work though communication woes.
“We found we could communicate through discussions of our religious faith better than we could without it,” he said.
When they had problems in their marriage, they would kneel together, pray to God and both would tell their sides of the story. It was as if they used God as the ultimate marriage counselor, according to E. Stanly Godbold, a Carter historian and author of the book, “Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924 to 1974.”
Faith played a role in 1978 when Carter held peace meetings between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Carter believed the common thread of religion helped bring the two sides together.
“At Camp David, for instance, this is one of the main themes of Anwar Sadat, we had so much in common worshipping the same God that we could form a common foundation for peace,” Carter told the AJC in a 1996 interview.
Break with Southern Baptists
When Carter was running for president, he was an appealing candidate to Southern Baptists and other evangelicals – a small-town guy in the Bible belt, still married to the same woman and the first U.S. presidential candidate who self-identified as a born-again Christian. That terminology was new for swaths of America and resulted in news articles across the nation examining and explaining, often poorly, conservative Christian beliefs. It was also an early sign of the development of the political-religious organizations such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority that followed. The evangelical Christian vote helped elect Carter.
But in just four years, the most famous face of the Baptist religion was at odds with the increasingly conservative-leaning Southern Baptist Convention. The nation’s largest Protestant denomination also was undergoing its own cultural changes. Through the 1980s, theologically and politically conservative leaders rallied voting members of the convention to sweep out moderates from leadership roles in churches, seminaries and colleges over their theological “liberalism.”
Carter’s views on hot-button issues such as supporting women as leaders in the church made him increasingly unpopular among many Southern Baptists and other evangelicals. He later showed support for civil unions, and by 2018 for marriage of same sex couples.
But in 1979, many of the conservatives who voted for him the first time deserted him for Ronald Reagan.
In 2000, Carter severed ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, saying parts of its “increasingly rigid” doctrines violated the “basic premises of my Christian faith.”
Carter went on to play a role in helping start an alternate association for progressive evangelical Black and white churches whose memberships and leaders were more moderate in their thinking and actions, such as installing women into pulpits and key church roles, and focusing on goals such as fighting poverty, and advocating for the environment and social causes.
Carter used his weight to get the New Baptist Covenant and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship off the ground. In 2008, he helped bring together 20,000 Baptists representing more than 20 million church members for an Atlanta event designed to bury differences and work together.
The tension was deep. The Southern Baptist Convention’s news service, Baptist Press, did not carry a news article about Carter winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Carter didn’t change,” said Nancy T. Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Boston University and author of “Baptist Battles.” “The definition of what it meant to be Southern and Baptist changed.”
“One of the characteristics of being Baptist is this that you have to make decisions about how your life is going to go,” said Ammerman. “No priest can do it for you. There’s this deep-seated notion of individual freedom and individual accountability, and (that) gave him this fierce ability to be independent that has shaped his personality and career and has given him a strong commitment to democracy, various human rights issues and religious liberty.”
An abiding faith
Carter’s faith can be traced back to his childhood, a time when Sunday was devoted to church and biblical teachings. In his hometown of Plains, no stores were open on Sunday. Going to a movie theater or even playing cards on Sunday was out of the question. That devotion never faded.
Well into his 90s, he was behind the pulpit teaching multiple Sundays every year to classes filled with people from around the nation and world who would drop in to hear the former president. One Sunday, Carter counted 28 nations represented in the pews.
He would talk about God and loving your enemies, and then sprinkle stories of traveling around the globe, building houses and eradicating disease. He and Rosalynn would pose for pictures with visitors at the little church, a quintessential Jimmy Carter experience.
Even as he contemplated his demise, he looked to his faith for guidance.
In “Living Faith,” he wrote: “We can face death with fear, anguish, self-torment and unnecessary distress among those around us. Or, through faith and the promises of God, we can confront the inevitable with courage, equanimity, good humor and peace. Our last few days or months can be spent in a challenging and exhilarating way, seeking to repair relationships and to leave a good or even noble legacy, in an atmosphere of harmony and love.”