Editorâs Note: A version of this story published last year after President Carter entered hospice care.
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 âGoddamn n***er lover.â
Thatâs the racial slur a White classmate of Carterâs at the US Naval Academy assigned to him right after World War II when the future president befriended the academyâs only Black midshipman.
Carter was called the same racial epithet when he took over his familyâs peanut farm in South Georgia during the Jim Crow era. He repeatedly refused to join a segregationist group called the White Citizensâ Council despite threats to boycott his peanut business. A delegation representing the council confronted Carter at his warehouse one day, with one member even offering to pay his five-dollar membership fee.
âAs one of his biographers has noted, Carter was so angry that he walked over to his cash register, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and declared: âIâll take this and flush it down the toilet, but I am not going to join the White Citizensâ Council.â
Many people are sharing similar stories about Carter since the former president died Sunday at 100. As tributes to Carter pour in from around the globe, certain themes have emerged: his Christian faith, his childhood friendships with African Americans that shaped his views on race, and the founding of his Carter Center, which has cemented his post-presidency role as a peacemaker and ally of the poor.
But there was another source of inspiration for Carter thatâs been overlooked: his distinctive brand of White evangelical Christianity, which remains hidden from most Americans.
Carter was a progressive White evangelical Christian. That may seem like an oxymoron, but it shouldnât. Progressive White evangelicalism was once what one historian called âthe ascendent strain of evangelicalism in America.â
Today White evangelical Christians are associated, rightly or wrongly, with a conservative set of 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 and current president-elect who boasted about sexually assaulting women.
Yet there were periods in the 19th and early 20th century when White evangelical leaders led campaigns against slavery, fought for womenâs rights and became leaders in an array of social justice reform movements.
Carter represented a religious tradition where a White evangelical could credibly claim to be a Bible-believing, âIâve been saved by the blood of Jesusâ Christian â and still be politically progressive, says Randall Balmer, author of âRedeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.â
âHe had no problem being identified as a progressive evangelical,â says Balmer, who in his book recounts the story about Carterâs defense of a Black Naval Academy classmate and his refusal to join a White supremacist group.
âAt one time, there was a strong element within the (Southern Baptist) Convention that would be identified as progressive evangelicalism, but now thatâs pretty much been obliterated,â Balmer says.
Evangelicals are loosely defined as Christians who often share a âborn-againâ dramatic personal conversion, believe theyâre supposed to spread their faith to others, and in Balmerâs words, either take the Bible âseriously or literally.â
To understand how and why Carter represented what one commentator calls the âroad not takenâ by many contemporary White evangelists, itâs helpful to look at two aspects of the former presidentâs religious beliefs.
He split with many evangelicals by speaking up for womenâs equality
Less than a week after Carter entered hospice care in early 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention decided to expel one of its largest and most prominent churches because it installed a woman as pastor. The church was founded by Rick Warren, author of the best-selling book âThe Purpose Driven Life.â
To critics, the groupâs decision offered further evidence that many White evangelicals do not believe in womenâs equality. The convention is the largest Protestant denomination and has nearly 14 million members. It has often been described as a âbellwether for conservative Christianity.â
Many evangelical churches cite scriptures such as 1 Timothy 2:12 (âI do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.â) Critics also cite many White evangelicalsâ opposition to abortion rights as reflective of a theology that does not respect a womanâs body or mind. Many White evangelicals counter that by saying abortion is the murder of an unborn child.
Carterâs progressive evangelism represented another view.
Carter, who spent decades as a Sunday school teacher, said that the Bible permits women pastors and deacons. He also said Jesus treated women as equals and that women played a central role in the churchâs early formation, including being the first to spread the news of the resurrection.
His views on abortion were more nuanced. He said he was personally opposed to abortion, but did not campaign to overturn Roe vs. Wade and opposed a proposed Constitutional amendment to invalidate the Roe decision.
His actions as president offered more concrete evidence of his belief in womenâs equality.
Balmer says Carter was a feminist who appointed more women to his administration than any other president before him. Carter supported the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed change to the Constitution that would have guaranteed legal equality to women. Former President Ronald Reagan, a White evangelical hero, opposed the amendment, which eventually failed.
Carterâs respect for womenâs equality also could be seen in his relationship with his longtime 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.
Elizabeth Kurylo, who extensively covered Carter during his post-presidency as he traveled the world on peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, says Carter valued the opinion of his wife.
âHe views her as his partner â period. That is genuine,â says Kurylo, a former reporter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. âShe was his partner with him on every trip, and in the room with him on every trip. She doesnât always agree with him â even though I never saw a disagreement, I know she would tell him what she thought.â
In 2000, Carterâs differences with contemporary White evangelicalism became so acute that he cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after it barred women pastors and publicly declared that a woman should âsubmit herself graciouslyâ to her husbandâs leadership.
âI personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God,â he said at the time. âI personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Christ in the church.â
Yet the most profound source for Carterâs belief in womenâs equality was non-religious. It was his mother, Lillian Carter.
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 ân***er loverâ and her car was covered with racial slurs. She joined the Peace Corps at 68 and went to India to serve the poor.
Carter has called his mother the most influential woman in his life.
âI think more than any other person that Iâve ever known, my mother exemplified what is best about this country,â he said in a 2008 interview. âMy 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.â
He embodied a brand of faith that once led the way on social justice
In October of 1978, Newsweek magazine put an illustration of Carter flashing his famous toothy grin on its cover with the headline: âBorn Again!â
Today itâs common to hear White evangelical leaders take political positions and solemnly bow their heads with political leaders in prayer. 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 ânot of this world.â
It was Carter, though, who 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 âborn againâ into political discourse and talked openly about his faith in a way that no modern politician had before.
No other president had spoken publicly about his âpersonal relationship with Jesus Christ,â confessed in a famous magazine interview that âIâve committed adultery in my heart many times,â and vowed that he would never lie to the American people.
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 âdone everything this side of breaking FCC regulationsâ to elect Carter in 1976, Balmer recounts in his book.
Images of Carter on his peanut farm, wearing jeans and an Allman Brothers Band T-shirt and quoting scripture, appealed to White evangelicals, says Nancy T. Ammerman, a sociologist and author of âBaptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention.â
âThe notion that this ordinary, church-going, non-coastal elite kind of guy could be president was exciting to people,â Ammerman says.
Yet Carter quickly fell out with many White evangelicals over issues that have come to define evangelical culture today: public stances on racism, homosexuality, abortion and the separation of church and state. To varying degrees, Carter disagreed with conservative White evangelicals on all those issues.
During Carterâs 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 Courtâs landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Balmer says.
To enforce the Brown decision, the IRS refused to grant tax-exempt status to schools like Bob Jones University in South Carolina that practiced racial discrimination, a move that White evangelical leaders unfairly blamed on Carter, Balmer says.
It was White evangelical opposition to racial integration, not abortion, that originally motivated many evangelicals to get involved in politics in the 1970s, Balmer says.
âThey decided then to appoint Ronald Reagan as their political messiah,â Balmer says.
Unlike former President Bill Clinton, another progressive White evangelical, Carter refused to âtriangulate,â or adjust his beliefs to win favor with evangelicals.
âAs other evangelicals drifted to the religious right, Carter advocated universal health care, proposed cuts in military spending and denounced the tax code as âa welfare program for the rich,ââ wrote Betsy Shirley, an editor of Sojourners magazine, in a review of Carterâs book, âFaith.â
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.
âMany times the one argument that I would find would ruin a personâs case is when heâd say, âThis is good for you politically,ââ Mondale said. âHe didnât want to hear that. He didnât want to think that way and he didnât want his staff to think that way. He wanted to know whatâs right.â
Carter would pay a political price for his idealism. White conservative evangelicals voted decisively for Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. These voters didnât just turn away from Carter â they turned away from part of their own tradition, historians say.
Thatâs because 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.
âThey were also active in womenâs equality, including voting rights, which was a radical idea in the 19th century,â Balmer says.
Those strands of progressive evangelicals survived well into the 20th century. During the 1960s and â70s, Southern Baptists started to ordain women, passed resolutions supporting moderate pro-abortion stances and many members participated in the civil rights movement, Ammerman says.
Much of that progressive momentum dissipated, though, when conservatives gained control of the group in 1979 and the large White evangelical community aligned with the Republican Party. White conservative evangelicals eventually gained so much power that their dominance convinced many Americans that the only true evangelicals were conservative. Many forget that progressive White evangelists existed.
âHe (Carter) does represent the road not taken by the denomination,â Ammerman says. âThrough the â60s and the â70s, the (Southern Baptist) denomination had been moving into a more progressive direction.â
He leaves behind a looming battle over the future of White evangelism
The road Carter took in his post-presidency has been more celebrated than his time in office. He has been called the most successful former US president, someone who spent four decades building houses for the poor and traveling the world brokering peace.
âThe world is a better place because of him,â says Kurylo, the former reporter who spent years traveling with and writing about Carter.
But Kurylo says she doesnât want to dwell on the end of Carterâs life.
âI chose to celebrate the impact that his remarkable life has had on the people in the world who will never know him,â she says. âWhat a remarkable life heâs had, and how wonderful it is that I got to observe it for 10 years.â
Part of what Carter leaves behind is the White evangelical subculture that nurtured him â 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 White evangelicals gained political power but lost their souls by aligning themselves too closely to a political party.
But Carterâs 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.
The road Carter took proved to be the right one for him, and the innumerable people he helped along the way.
John Blake is the author of âMore Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.â