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Jimmy Carter’s born-again Christian legacy
Pope John Paul II addresses a press conference with President Jimmy Carter in the Rose Garden at the White House Oct. 6, 1979(OSV News photo/CNS file, Chris Sheridan).Former President Jimmy Carter celebrates his 100th birthday today, and is the first American president to reach this age.
To know Jimmy Carter is to witness his lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ. Ever since he was a boy growing up in southwest Georgia, no day passed when he did not pray for peace in our fragile world. With one exception, his religious life has been firm and steady, always there but never taken for granted
The only time Mr. Carter temporarily lost faith in Christ was when he lost the primary in the race for his state’s governorship in 1966. “I was really disillusioned,” he told me in an unpublished 1994 interview conducted in his Plains living room. “I had never been defeated before. I had never failed at anything before, except I was a finalist in the Rhodes Scholarship. I had never really gone for anything I didn’t get. And to see Georgia people support [arch-segregationist] Lester Maddox and [Goldwater Republican] Bo Calloway in preference to me was hard for me to understand, which shows a lot about my ego in retrospect. I was feeling quite badly about it.”
A dark depression took hold in Mr. Carter’s soul. He felt utterly unmoored. Enter his sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, whom he called “an absolutely extraordinary person.” She would go on to write five popular Christian-themed books, including The Gift of Inner Healing, and toured widely as an evangelist. At the time, though, Ruth was learning to conquer her own serious bout with depression. Raised like Jimmy as a Southern Baptist, she switched denominations as an adult to become a Methodist, but her passion was Christianity in its many forms. “When the Catholic Church would have a problem in a particular country like Colombia,” Mr. Carter told me, “they would ask Ruth to go down and have a retreat for Catholic priests. She ministered [to] the heads of state, kings, and so forth.”
Seeing her brother’s post-defeat suffering, Ruth convinced him to join her in rural North Carolina to clear his troubled spirit. “We walked out and sat under a pine tree,” Mr. Carter said. “I just told her I couldn’t see what to do next. I’d done my best. I thought I was doing what God wanted me to do, and it seemed like I had been betrayed. She said, ‘Look, sometimes a setback is God’s way of giving you an opportunity to do greater things. And you should look at any sort of tragedy, disillusionment or failure as a means to reassess your goal and strengthen yourself and your attitude…. Losing can be the greatest thing that happened to you.’” In response, Mr. Carter said, “Ruth, that has got to be the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard.”
Slowly, however, as Mr. Carter hiked the backcountry that day, he felt Christ re-enter his spiritual life. Calm and happiness engulfed him. Pundits would describe the moment as Mr. Carter being “born again,” an oversimplification of a sublime religious experience. “A lot of people believe that there was a blinding flash from God and all that,” Mr. Carter told me. “I had always been a dedicated Christian. I was a Sunday school teacher, then I was a deacon in the church. And I didn’t become a believer because of [the walk in the woods]. But I did have a sense that I could build on a disappointment or failure, and modify my positions and correct my mistakes.”
Months later, Mr. Carter attended a Baptist camp in Georgia. It was an annual deacons’ retreat where pastors went to study the Bible and engage in self-analysis. Rejuvenated by the healing powers of Jesus, Mr. Carter agreed to become a missionary, spreading the word for the Southern Baptist Commission in Georgia, Mexico City, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The two weeks he spent in Lock Haven, Pa., in 1968 illustrated his sense of Christian mission. “We called ourselves Pioneer Mission Program then,” Mr. Carter recalled. “We were tasked with calling everybody in the phone book in Lock Haven to counsel on Christ.”
Mr. Carter was resented by the existing Lock Haven pastors, but he wasn’t poaching their communicants; everyone on the list was considered unaffiliated. “There were a hundred families on the roll-call list,” he recalled, “and we had a week to visit them all. So I went with a farmer from Texas named Milo Pennington, and he and I visited each one of these hundred families.”
For Mr. Carter and Mr. Pennington, essentially salesmen for the New Testament, the first rule for getting somebody to embrace Christ was getting invited into their home. “One of them was a Chevrolet dealer who wouldn’t let us come into his house,” Mr. Carter recalled. “And another one was a prostitute who had lived above a store who despised her parents and cursed every other word. Others were lonely and downtrodden, the lost. So we visited all hundred of them. I think 18 of them accepted Christ and said they wanted to become a Christian.”
“There was a game-and-fish ranger who lived in Lock Haven who worked with us,” Mr. Carter continued. “He was a focal point. We lived in the Y.M.C.A. We would just go from one door to the other and just knock on the door and say, ‘This is Milo Pennington from Texas, and I’m Jimmy Carter from Georgia, and we’d like to talk to you about Christ.’ But the experience was transforming. It was glorious.” Before Carter left Lock Haven, he rented an abandoned church near the end of an airplane runaway—a small stone church. “And we organized a church with 18 new members,” Mr. Carter said brightly. Mr. Carter enjoyed Lock Haven so much that he stayed in touch with a number of the people he converted.
In the last months of 1968, Mr. Carter went to Springfield, Mass., as a missionary for the Southern Baptists. In the midst of that year of unrest, he was on the ground in a Hispanic neighborhood, engaging with one person at a time. “I was with a Cuban pastor from Brooklyn named Elroy Cruz, and he did most of the actual witnessing,” Mr. Carter recalled. “I was able to read the Bible in Spanish, and I pretty much backed him up.” Handing out free Bibles, he tried, as before, to share the strength he’d found. In the process, he reaped his own benefit during his stint in the Springfield neighborhood, becoming, as he later wrote, “uniquely aware of the Holy Spirit as an integral part of my life.”
At the same time, Mr. Carter was making big plans with the Rev. John Simmons, who lived near Plains. They wanted the Rev. Billy Graham to hold a crusade in Sumter County, the small county where Plains is located. Mr. Carter was overjoyed at the prospect; Graham was and always had been a personal favorite. But there was a massive problem, the problem of the South in that era. “Graham required that the services be racially integrated,” Mr. Carter recalled. In that case, no local leaders were interested in pursuing the visit.
“So I took it on,” Mr. Carter said, “I was the chairman of it. We tried to have planned meetings. It was built around motion pictures. Billy Graham never did come here to the Macon Theatre, but there was a wonderful movie that you looked at in the Americus theater [in the nearby town of Americus], and you learned in the planning sessions how to supplement the movie’s message with personal advice. [Graham’s ministry had a subsidiary that distributed films produced to spread its message.] We had hundreds of people who had accepted Christ as a result of the movie. Some of our most ardent segregationists would meet with the folks whether they were Black or white. It was the first time we ever had anything integrated in Sumter County. It was reIt was the first time we ever had anything integrated in Sumter County. It was really defiant.”
In the early 1970s, when Mr. Carter was governor of Georgia, he went to a White House prayer breakfast with Richard Nixon. “Billy Graham was a speaker,” Mr. Carter recalled. “And when I walked into the room, Graham had apparently seen my photograph and said, ‘Governor Carter, come here,’ and I went up. Billy Graham put his hand on my shoulder and said to President Nixon, ‘This man ran one of my crusades in Sumter County, Ga.—under very difficult circumstances—and it was a very wonderful success.’”
Mr. Carter soon invited Graham to spend the night with his family in Atlanta. The two bonded and Mr. Carter became a very active honorary chairman of the Billy Graham crusade. At revivals, he’d speak before Graham. Given their closeness, I asked Mr. Carter if he invited Graham to the White House when he was president. “Yes,” he answered. “But I didn’t bring Graham in like Johnson, or Nixon, or Ford did. That was against my principles to mix worship and state. So I worshiped as a Baptist at the closest church. I was just a member of the Sunday school class and a member of the congregation.”
During Mr. Carter’s presidency, detractors described his born-again embrace of Christ as self-righteous, a convenient political tool for a Southern Democrat. His hard work for human rights and charity—notably as a carpenter with Habitat for Humanity—have completely silenced such cynical assessments. To practicing Catholics like myself, Mr. Carter always made perfect sense. He was simply a good Christian willing to keep the Gospel of Jesus alive in his daily life. As a Sunday school teacher for most of his life in Plains, he practiced his faith along the same lines: with the catechism values taught in my boyhood Sunday school classes at St. Rose in Perrysburg, Ohio.
“The closest fellowship Rosalynn and I have with those outside our family is through the Maranatha Baptist Church,” Mr. Carter wrote in Living Faith (1996). “But church does not mean ‘Maranatha’ or ‘Baptist’ or ‘Protestant’; it is the totality of those united in the love of Christ.”
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown chair in humanities and professor of history at Rice University and author of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize.
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