PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Before reaching the 1978 peace agreement between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter endured months of intense preparation, high-stakes negotiations at Camp David and a field trip to the Gettysburg battlefield to demonstrate the consequences of the war war.
But looking back on his greatest foreign policy achievement, the 39th president said complicated diplomacy was ultimately not the deciding factor.
“We eventually came to an agreement because we all believed in the same God,” Carter told biographer Jonathan Alter as he traced his Christianity, Begin’s Judaism and Sadat’s Islam to their common ancestor in the sacred texts of both religions. “We all considered ourselves sons of Abraham.”
Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, was widely known as a man of faith, especially after his long post-presidency was marked by images of the Baptist Sunday school teacher building homes for low-income people and fighting disease in developing countries.
But beyond his piety and service, the Georgia Democrat distinguished himself even in his earliest days on the national stage with unusually productive, nuanced statements of his beliefs. Citing Jesus and celebrated theologians, Carter tied it all to his political aspirations, living out his own definition of what it means to be a professing Christian in American politics.
“Most people go to Washington looking for their own power,” said David Gergen, a White House adviser to four presidents. “Carter traveled to Washington in search of our national soul. That doesn’t mean the others didn’t have good intentions, but for Jimmy Carter it just seemed like a different goal.”
What happened when Carter described his faith to Playboy magazine?
When he became a candidate in 1976, Carter described himself as a “born-again Christian.” Based on the New Testament, the reference is routine for many Protestants in the South, who believe that following Jesus means embracing a novel version of oneself. For national media and voters unfamiliar with the evangelical lexicon, it made Carter a curiosity.
“We saw ourselves as cultural pariahs as evangelicals in the mid-1970s,” said Randall Balmer, a professor at Dartmouth College who has written extensively about Carter’s faith. The evangelical movement had not yet become a political force largely allied with Republicans, and “it was truly astounding that someone would use our language to describe themselves and still be taken seriously as a presidential candidate,” he said.
Carter used the presidency to strengthen human rights in U.S. foreign policy, advocate for environmental protection, and oppose military conflict. He criticized American greed and consumerism. He proselytized other world leaders.
Carter continued this approach for decades through the Carter Center and his global peace, democracy and public health efforts. In his 90s, Carter criticized American militarism and mentioned one of Jesus’ biblical nicknames: “Prince of Peace.”
“He carried his faith with him every minute of every day and he used it every single minute of every single day,” said Jill Stuckey, a Plains resident and longtime friend of Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, who died in November, 96.
Carter’s faith insisted that public service was above politics
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg attended some of Carter’s church sessions in Plains, Georgia, and sought the former president’s advice during his own 2020 campaign. He said Carter strengthened faith beyond partisan divisions.
“There are a lot of conservatives who seem to use the Bible almost like a weapon or a club, and there are a lot of liberals who seem to use faith primarily to desperately signal that they are not bad people,” Buttigieg told The Associated Press. “President Carter demonstrated a third thing: the faith that calls us to be useful to others.”
Carter’s outspoken evangelism was an outlier in a Democratic Party that became increasingly secular and pluralistic during his public life. Nevertheless, Carter advocated “absolute and total separation of church and state” and opposed public funding for religious schools. He personally admired the Rev. Billy Graham but called it “inappropriate” to invite the nation’s leading evangelicals to lead prayer services at the White House, as Graham had done for previous administrations.
Carter also distinguished himself from many evangelicals in criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and taking a liberal stance on race relations, women’s rights and, as he grew older, LGBTQ rights. He once described how he was shocked when a “senior official” of the Southern Baptist Convention told him in the Oval Office: “We pray, Mr. President, that you give up secular humanism as your religion.”
In his later years, Carter “was comfortable with the label ‘progressive evangelical,'” Balmer said.
How did Carter come to define his faith?
Carter grew up the son of a deacon in the Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination founded before the Civil War as a regional splinter group that supported slavery. He did not openly challenge his father’s segregationist views or his denomination’s white supremacist origins, and as a juvenile man he did not yet consider himself an evangelical. But he became exposed to black evangelical traditions by occasionally attending St. Mark AME Church, the congregation of sharecropper families who worked his father’s land.
“I could see in their services a spirit, sincerity and fervor that we lacked in our church in Plains,” Carter once wrote.
Decades later, during the civil rights movement, Carter urged his Plains congregation to allow integrated worship, but he and Rosalynn found themselves virtually alone. Carter was a senator at the time and, in particular, was not as explicitly committed to integration outside the church walls.
After his failed run for governor in 1966, Carter “became disillusioned with politics and life in general,” he wrote. His sister Ruth, a well-known evangelist and faith healer, persuaded him to go on “pioneer missions.” The future president knocked on doors to share the gospel in Pennsylvania and Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in Massachusetts. He viewed these sojourns as a catalyst to “apply my Christian faith to my secular life much more regularly.”
Carter spread his gospel among folk singers and communist leaders
Carter even had the opportunity to share his Christianity with Bob Dylan in a one-on-one session the legendary folk singer sought with the governor of Georgia in 1971.
In 1977, during his first foreign trip as president, Carter was invited by Edward Gierek, Poland’s supreme leader under Moscow’s Soviet control, to speak without her advisers, Carter later recalled. Gierek felt “a little uncomfortable” when he explained that he was a Kremlin-compliant atheist but wanted to learn about Christianity. So Carter shared some Christian principles and “asked him if he would consider accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Savior.”
Gierek responded that he could not make a public statement and “I never knew what his decision was,” Carter later wrote. But in 1979, Gierek rejected Moscow’s orders by allowing the newly elected Pope John Paul II to visit his native Poland. The Kremlin deposed Gierek in 1980, but that visit became a pivotal moment in John Paul’s papacy and his efforts to break the Soviet Union.
At a White House dinner, Carter urged Chinese leader Deng Xioaping to allow religious freedom and ownership of the Bible and to accept American missionaries. Xiaping allowed the first two, but not the latter. In 2018, Carter pointed to predictions that by 2025 there would be more Protestants in China than in America.
And at Camp David, Carter often prayed and spoke openly about faith with Begin and Sadat, bringing to airy venerable hostilities between their religions.
Carter campaigned for equal rights and gay marriage
When the Carters left the White House in 1981, having had enough of ongoing racial tensions at Plains Baptist Church, they transferred to nearby Maranatha Baptist Church, Balmer said. Carter’s funeral in his hometown will take place there after his state service at the National Cathedral in Washington.
Carter separated from the Southern Baptists two decades later, at age 76, because, he said, the denomination’s leadership degraded women as submissive to men at home, in church and in society. Carter remained in Maranatha and found that the congregation’s deacons were roughly evenly split between genders.
“There is an undeniable fact regarding the relationship between Jesus Christ and women,” Carter explained in his latest book, “Faith,” published in 2018. “He treated them as equals to men, which differed dramatically from prevailing custom.”
Carter has had a slower pace of change on LGBTQ issues. In a campaign interview with Playboy magazine in 1976, he said that he viewed sexual relations outside of marriage as a sin and therefore could not easily accept homosexuality. The response did not consider same-sex marriage as a legitimate civil or religious institution.
Carter asked, “What would Jesus do?”
However, as his 75th wedding anniversary approached in 2021, Carter had a different opinion on state- and church-sanctioned marriage for same-sex couples. “I have nothing against it,” he told the AP, describing himself as “very liberal” on all issues “that have to do with human rights.” He predicted that sexuality would “continue to be divisive” within Christianity, “but the church is evolving.”
Buttigieg, an Episcopalian whose same-sex marriage is recognized by his church, said Carter’s willingness to speak openly about his faith in all its complexity was a “tremendous example” to “a generation of Christians who don’t believe God is part of it.” .” to any political party.”
The Rev. Bernice King, the daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., praised Carter as a “man of peace and compassion” and argued that for all his books, exhibitions and Sunday school lessons, the Plains Baptist had a uncomplicated faith.
“He was concerned with the life of Jesus Christ and how Christ interacted and interacted with people,” King said. “He wrestled with it as a leader. I think he was earnest: ‘What would Jesus do?’…What would someone focused on love do?'”
