The secret of Jimmy Carter’s political Christianity
There’s a source of inspiration for Jimmy Carter most of the tributes pouring in have overlooked. He was a white evangelical political progressive. Today white evangelical Christianity includes opposition to abortion, supporting 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.
Not Carter’s form of Christianity. For example, he’s split with many evangelicals by speaking up for women’s equality. In 2000, he cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after it barred women pastors and publicly declared that a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership.
“I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God,” he said at the time. “I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Christ in the church.”
His views on abortion have been more nuanced. He has said he’s personally opposed to abortion, but did not campaign to overturn Roe vs. Wade and opposed a proposed Constitutional amendment to invalidate the Roe decision.
He supported the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed change to the Constitution that would have guaranteed legal equality to women.
Carter’s respect for women’s equality also could be seen in his relationship with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, some of his biographers say. When he was president, she sat in on his cabinet meetings and major briefings. By many accounts, she was his most trusted political adviser.
Yet the most profound source for his belief in women’s equality was his mother, Lillian Carter. “I think more than any other person that I’ve ever known, my mother exemplified what is best about this country,” he said in a 2008 interview. “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 embodies a brand of faith that once led the way on social justice. During the 19th century, white evangelicals led the way on social justice issues. Evangelical leaders like Charles Finney fought against slavery, were active in prison reform, led peace crusades and were crucial in forming public schools to help less affluent children gain social mobility. “They were also active in women’s equality, including voting rights, which was a radical idea in the 19th century,” historian Randall Balmer says.
But for much of the 20th century, white evangelicals zealously refrained from getting involved in politics by quoting scriptures such as Jesus saying his kingdom was “not of this world.” Carter is arguably more responsible than any modern politician for rousing white evangelicals from their political hibernation. When he successfully ran for president in 1976, he introduced evangelical terms like “born again” into political discourse and talked openly about his faith in a way that no modern politician had before.
Carter won the presidency in part because of support from white evangelicals, who were delighted to see someone who looked and talked like them enter the Oval Office. Televangelist Pat Robertson claimed to have “done everything this side of breaking FCC regulations” to elect Carter in 1976, Balmer recounts in his biography of Carter, “Redeemer.”
Yet Carter quickly fell out with many of them over issues that define evangelical culture today: public stances on racism, homosexuality, abortion and the separation of church and state. “As other evangelicals drifted to the religious right, Carter advocated universal health care, proposed cuts in military spending and denounced the tax code as ‘a welfare program for the rich,’” wrote Betsy Shirley, an editor of Sojourners magazine, in a review of Carter’s book, “Faith.”
Walter Mondale, who served as vice president under Carter, recalled in an interview that when advisers told Carter to temper his policies to preserve his popularity, he refused. “Many times the one argument that I would find would ruin a person’s case is when he’d say, ‘This is good for you politically,’” Mondale said. “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’s right.”
Carter would pay a political price for his idealism. White conservative evangelicals voted decisively for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
Part of what Jimmy Carter will leave behind is the white evangelical subculture that nurtured him — and a looming battle over its direction. White Southern evangelicals, like other denominations, are leaving their churches in droves. Some religious leaders now say that they gained political power but lost their souls by aligning themselves too closely to a political party.
But Carter’s life may offer one final lesson. He may have lost political power when he refused to curry favor with white conservative evangelicals while he was in the White House. But perhaps he had another agenda: staying true to his faith.