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(ANALYSIS) The young Jimmy Carter was a political nobody the first time he ran for governor of Georgia.
That long-shot 1966 effort failed, leaving him wrestling with doubts about his future and his faith. But Carter rallied, including years of work with Billy Graham’s 1973 Atlanta Crusade. He also joined a small circle of Southern Baptists who traveled to the central Pennsylvania hills to be a witness to the unchurched.
“We had a wonderful religious experience,” Carter told the Historical Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “We had 18 people who accepted Christ that week, and we organized a church … before we left.”
The experience, he said, left him “the closest to Christ” that he had ever felt in his life.
That turning point, featured in the Baptist Press report marking the death of the 100-year-old former president, was a perfect example of the “born again” faith that made Carter so mysterious to America’s political establishment when he reached the White House in 1976. Carter’s blend of Southern piety and stubborn political convictions would end up changing the role of American evangelicals in public life.
Truth is, Carter was part of two endangered groups — populist Southern Democrats and progressive Southern Baptists.
In 1976, he fared well with evangelical voters, for a Democrat, but exit polls basically showed a toss-up. In 1980, many evangelicals rejected him and helped create Ronald Reagan’s landslide win.
Carter’s attempts to state his personal convictions against abortion, while backing its legalization, confused and then angered many evangelicals. Meanwhile, Carter’s opposition to public funding for abortion helped create a revolt among Democrats, with Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts attempting to unseat him as the nominee.
Over time, Christian progressives stressed that Carter, as a Baptist, would clearly state his own beliefs while rejecting political actions that he thought would use government power to promote specific religious doctrines.
“The United States’ most religious president in recent memory was also the most committed to the separation of church and state,” noted Amanda Tyler, leader of the progressive Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
Eventually, Carter would cut his ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, openly rejecting its increasingly conservative stands on moral and cultural issues. For the Baptist left, his message was clear, wrote Tyler in a Time magazine essay.
“In a time of growing Christian nationalism reinforced and manipulated by officeholders and candidates,” she added, “I hope we can pause for a moment as we remember the life of Jimmy Carter to consider how different the relationship between religion and government would look in the United States if our political leaders would follow Carter’s example.”
As the years passed, the former president became more candid about the ways in which his evolving personal interpretations of scripture affected his beliefs about hot-button issues. He said his background in science — nuclear physics, specifically — led him to question many traditional views of scripture.
“I think all of the Bible is divinely inspired, but it was interpreted, God’s message was interpreted, by fallible human beings, who were constrained by their knowledge of facts about the universe, for instance, when they wrote,” said Carter during a 2012 “Thinking in Public” podcast interview.
In a 2015 HuffPost Live interview, Carter said: “I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage, but that’s just my own personal belief. I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else.”
The former president added, “I don’t have any verse in scripture” to back that stand.
This flexible approach to the Bible and faith made Carter increasingly popular with the “dominant liberal order” in mass media and the public square, noted ethicist Andrew T. Walker of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“To be fair, his faith motivated many good works for which I will not criticize him,” wrote Walker for The Daily Wire. “But Carter’s Christianity ultimately allowed him to serve as a chaplain to progressive America. It represents the convergence of religious sentimentality with progressive moral values. In effect, Carter’s faith symbolizes the one form of church-state establishment that liberalism will tolerate: a Christianity stripped of its harder truths, its calls to repentance, and its moral clarity.”
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