How Jimmy Carter’s Christian faith shaped his life

The low point of Jimmy Carter’s life came in 1966, and it was then that he recommitted himself to his Christian faith.

Carter — who died on Sunday at the age of 100 — was a 42-year-old state senator from Georgia, and he was at a personal crossroads. He’d made a bid for governor and lost, coming in third out of six candidates. He’d gone deep into debt to finance the campaign. And he was horrified that an avowed white supremacist, Lester Maddox, had been elected governor, in part because Carter had split the moderate vote with another candidate.

Carter was “profoundly depressed,” according to adviser Peter Bourne. He told a friend he questioned if he’d “ever amount to much.” He was also “disillusioned about [his] religious faith,” his biographer Jonathan Alter wrote.

But out of the depths of Carter’s despair, he sought — and found — a newly enlivened faith. He would eventually describe himself as having become a “born again” Christian, a popular term in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Carter’s religious devotion would animate his action for the rest of his life. But it was not a simple faith.

An ‘absolute determination to win’

It was after his loss in 1966 that Carter was introduced to the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian and intellectual who was a powerful voice in mid-century America.

Niebuhr espoused what he called “Christian realism.” His writings became what Carter called his “political bible.”

At the heart of Christian realism was the view that utopianism from the left or right was doomed to fail, that human nature was inherently fallible, and that — as Niebuhr said — “man is the kind of lion who both kills the lamb and dreams of when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together.”

Or as Carter put it: “We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect — a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.”

And so, in political action, Carter would say: “We must always combine realism with principle,” Bourne wrote in his 1997 biography of Carter.

Bourne admired Carter but expressed concern that this political philosophy was a temptation to justify by-any-means-necessary politics. “His absolute determination to win became less a troubling matter of egotistical ambition and now more a prerequisite for fulfilling the commitment he had made to carry out God’s work,” Bourne wrote.

Carter put this philosophy into practice right away. He ran for governor again in 1970. He knew that in order to win, he could not alienate voters who supported or had sympathy for segregationist political figures, such as George Wallace.

Wallace was the former Alabama governor who had run as a moderate on racial issues in 1958 and lost, and then committed himself to a racist platform in the 1962 election, which he then won. He became a national symbol of white supremacism in 1963 when he physically blocked National Guard troops from escorting Black students into a building on the University of Alabama campus.

Carter’s own trajectory in Georgia followed a similar pattern. He’d lost the 1966 election running on a moderate platform. In 1970, Carter was careful not to make the same mistake. He made some overtures to Black voters, but at the same time, his campaign distributed flyers to white voters showing his opponent Carl Sanders — a part owner of Atlanta’s professional basketball team — having champagne poured over his head by a Black member of the team.

Carter also criticized Sanders for blocking George Wallace from speaking on state property and said that, if elected governor, he would invite Wallace to address the state Legislature.

Carter also sought endorsements from some of the most well-known segregationists in Georgia, and signaled to white parents that he’d support their right to keep children in private schools that discriminated against Black students.

In a 2015 interview, Carter was sanguine about the campaign when I asked him about it. “I never made a racist statement,” he told me. “But I did get the more conservative country votes there in Georgia, because I never did anything to alienate them.”

But at the time, when the campaign was over and Carter had won, top aide Hamilton Jordan observed that the triumphant governor-elect was glum and “didn’t seem the least bit excited about it.” Others observed the same, and speculated that Carter was upset about the lengths his campaign had gone to in order to win.

In his inauguration speech, Carter told his audience that “the test of a man is not how well he campaigned, but how effectively he meets the challenges and responsibilities of the office.” These were notes of both remorse and justification.

And then Carter said, “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.”

The white establishment reeled in horror. Some segregationist state senators walked out before Carter’s speech was over. But Carter followed through. As governor, he rapidly expanded the number of Black appointees to state boards and commissions from three to 55. And he appointed the first person of color to a senior state government post.

As president, Carter continued this legacy. He greatly diversified the federal judiciary and bureaucracy. And he pushed for the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which cut down on discrimination against racial minorities by lenders.

One of Carter’s most famous speeches in office came at the end of his governorship, in 1974, when the writer Hunter S. Thompson watched him excoriate the Georgia legal establishment for its lack of progress on reforming the criminal justice system.

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — who was perhaps despised by many in this room because he shook up our social structure that benefited us, and demanded simply that Black citizens be treated the same as white citizens — wasn’t greeted with approbation and accolades by the Georgia Bar Association or the Alabama Bar Association. He was greeted with horror,” Carter told the room of shocked lawyers and judges.

“Still, once that change was made, a very simple but difficult change, no one in his right mind would want to go back to circumstances prior to that juncture in the development of our nation’s society.”

Changing the world

Appealing to racist voters in order to uproot and reverse racist policies was certainly one way to be a “Christian realist.” But not all of Carter’s political action was so morally fraught.

He was the first U.S. president to make support for universal human rights a cornerstone of foreign policy. This was motivated by Carter’s beliefs, but it also paid pragmatic and strategic dividends. National security officials such as Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, credited Carter’s bold stance with helping the U.S. win the Cold War, in addition to his increases in military spending.

Carter faced an intense political backlash from conservatives for signing a 1977 treaty that would transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama. But, again, Carter saw the issue as both moral and strategic.

Carter felt the Panama Canal Treaty of 1903 was unfair to the small Central American nation — as did the Panamanians — and wanted to right past wrongs. But maintaining U.S. control of the vital waterway also had caused violent unrest that cost the lives of American soldiers and civilian Panamanians. After Carter won the presidency in 1976, the outgoing president, Gerald Ford, told him that resolving this crisis was a top priority.

Carter’s advisers told him he should wait until his second term to fix this problem. But, Carter told his wife, Rosalynn, “Suppose there is no second term?” His determination to solve the issue “prevented a major war in Central America,” Alter wrote.

Similarly, at home, the Carter administration cracked down on the tax status of private schools that discriminated against Black students, even though this action galvanized large blocks of religious conservatives to vote for the Republican Party. In fact, it was this issue that some historians say helped create a lasting loyalty and attachment between the religious right and the GOP.

After leaving office, Carter reinvented the post-presidency. He created the Carter Center in Atlanta to alleviate disease and poverty, provide a forum for conflict resolution, and promote and protect democratic elections around the world. The work of the Carter Center was instrumental in effectively eradicating the guinea worm, a debilitating parasite that had long tormented much of Africa.

As an ex-president, Carter also negotiated a ceasefire in the Balkans. In 1994, President Bill Clinton sent him as an emissary to North Korea, which helped keep peace on the peninsula. That same year, he assisted in averting a U.S. invasion of Haiti.

And he continued to teach Sunday school twice a month in his small-town church in Plains, Ga., into his late 90s. Tourists would sleep in their cars in the parking lot on Saturday to get a spot in the crowded sanctuary on Sunday morning.

“In these troubled times today, he is like a beacon of light,” said Jeanie Miglis, who was first in line with her husband, Mitch, when Yahoo News visited Maranatha Baptist Church in the summer of 2019. “He represents good morals; he represents hope and peace.”

This is how Carter was widely seen at the end of his life. But his path to that place was marked by a faith that accepted compromise and moral complexity as part of the bargain.