Jimmy Carter – His life, his dreams and his legacy: What does he tell us about his past, what he did, and how he became president of the United States
Carter’s post-presidency road was more celebrated than his time in office. He has been called the most successful former US president, someone who built houses for the poor and traveled the world brokering peace.
He was in his early 90s when I spoke to him a few years ago, yet he was still rising early and getting to work. He held a meeting at the Carter Center where he spent 40 minutes pacing back and forth in front of the group explaining his program to eradicate Guinea worm disease. He was always going after it. I was given 50 minutes by his biographer to discuss his White House years. Those bright blue eyes bore into me with an alarming intensity. He was more interested in the worms than he was in anything else.
Carter represents a religious tradition where a White evangelical could credibly claim to be a Bible-believing, “I’ve been saved by the blood of Jesus” Christian — and still be politically progressive, says Randall Balmer, author of “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.”
Long before he was called a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a humanitarian and the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was known as something else: a “Goddamn n***er lover.”
That’s the racial slur a White classmate of Carter’s at the US Naval Academy assigned to him right after World War II when the future president befriended the academy’s only Black midshipman.
Many people are sharing similar stories about Carter since the 98-year-old former president recently entered hospice care. Carter’s Christian faith, his childhood friendships with African Americans that shaped his views on race and the founding of his Carter Center have emerged as some of the themes that people around the globe think of when they think of Carter.
Part of what Carter will leave behind is the White evangelical subculture that nurtured him – and a looming battle over its direction. White Southern evangelicals leave their churches in droves.
White evangelical Christians are associated with conservative theological and political stances. Those include opposition to abortion, being the most enthusiastic supporters of a brand of Christian nationalism that seeks to turn the US into a White Christian nation, and championing a former president who boasted about sexually assaulting women.
“He had no problem being identified as a progressive evangelical,” says Balmer, who in his book recounts the story about Carter’s defense of a Black Naval Academy classmate and his refusal to join a White supremacist group.
Those strands of progressive evangelicals lived through the 20th century. Southern Baptists ordained women, passed resolutions supporting pro-choice views and participated in the civil rights movement during the 1960’s and 70’s according to Ammerman.
According to Balmer, evangelicals who often share a dramatic personal conversion, believe they are supposed to spread their faith to others, and either take the Bible seriously or literally, are defined as Christians who often share a dramatic personal conversion.
Carter cut his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 after they barred women clergy and publicly declared that a woman should graciously submit herself to her husband.
To critics, the group’s decision offered further evidence that many White evangelicals do not believe in women’s equality. The convention has over 13 million members. It is seen to be a bellwether for conservative Christianity.
Carter, who spent decades as a Sunday school teacher, has said that the Bible permits women pastors and deacons. He also says Jesus treated women as equals and that women played a central role in the church’s early formation, including being the first to spread the news of the resurrection.
JIMmy Carter Evangelicals: From Biographers to His Family and Close Relation to Rosalynn Carter, President of the Atlanta Journal Constitution
His views on abortion have been more nuanced. He was opposed to the proposed Constitutional amendment, but did not want to overturn the Supreme Court decision on abortion.
Carter’s respect for women’s equality also could be seen in his relationship with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, some of his biographers say. She sat in on his cabinet meetings when he was president. She was his most trusted political adviser.
Carter valued his wife’s opinion when he traveled the world for humanitarian missions after he left the presidency, according to Elizabeth Kurylo, who covered him extensively.
“He views her as his partner – period. That is true, says a former reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She was his partner on all the trips and in the room when he was there. She doesn’t always agree with him – even though I never saw a disagreement, I know she would tell him what she thought.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/us/jimmy-carter-evangelicals-blake-cec/index.html
A Conversation with Jimmy Carter: “What is best for the Indian people and what is good for the American people,” Jayce Carter, 77, told Balmer
She was a blunt, outspoken woman who stood up for Black people so much during the Jim Crow era in South Georgia that she was also called a n***er lover and her car was covered with racial slurs. She went to India to work for the Poor after joining the Peace Corps.
In a 2008 interview, Carter said that his mother exemplified what is best about this country. “My mother was a registered nurse and … she treated African Americans exactly the same as she did White people and she was unique, perhaps among the 30,000 people that lived in our county, in doing that. I was filled with admiration for my mother.”
He confessed in a magazine interview that he had committed adultery in his heart many times, and promised that he would never lie to the American people.
Carter won the presidency due to support from White evangelicals who were excited to see someone who looked and talked like them in the Oval Office. Carter was elected in 1976 after Pat Robertson claimed to have done “everything this side of breaking FCC regulations”, according to Balmer.
During Carter’s presidency, the Internal Revenue Service sought to enforce anti-discrimination laws at all-White Christian schools that many evangelicals had built to defy the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Balmer says.
White evangelical opposition to racial integration drove many evangelicals in the 70s to get involved in politics.
Mondale recalled in an interview that he refused to temper Carter’s policies when advisers told him to do so.
When he would say that this is good for you politically, Mondale said, would ruin a person’s case. He didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want to think that way and he didn’t want his staff to think that way. He wanted to know what was right.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/us/jimmy-carter-evangelicals-blake-cec/index.html
Carter and the Road Not Taken by the Confession. A tribute to Carter, whose life has been spent with the United Methodist Church for 10 years
The road not taken by the denomination is represented by Carter. The Southern Baptists were moving in a more progressive direction during the 60s and 70s.
She says that she chose to celebrate the impact that his remarkable life has had on the people who will never know him. I got to watch a remarkable life he’s had for 10 years.