Jimmy Carter’s Lonely Pilgrimage and Lasting Legacy

Jimmy Carter became President while I was still serving as Senator Mark Hatfield’s legislative assistant. During the Carter presidency, I then moved to work with Jim Wallis in the beginning years of Sojourners magazine. While many sing “Hail to the (Former) Chief” for Carter’s post-presidential years, his presidency, I think, is undervalued. The blend of his personal Christian faith with his political service, with all the inevitable tensions, mark him as a unique President. And his accomplishments during his four-year term, while often overshadowed by crushing economic and global events, have a lasting significance.

It was Carter’s election as President which made “evangelical” and “born again” public terms rather than the private vocabulary of a minority religious community. Ken Woodward, Religion Editor at Newsweek magazine, and a friend from my time at Sojourners, did a cover story titled “The Evangelicals” to introduce this community to the reading public. The President had called himself an evangelical, and most had little idea what this meant.

Yet Carter rejected the fundamentalist and far-right expressions of some evangelicals at the time, which created tension with leaders seeking to merge evangelicalism with right-wing politics and conservative views on divisive social issues. This left Carter in a lonely religious space. The Democratic establishment, with a bias toward public secularism, found Carter’s born-again faith embarrassing. Republican evangelicals, who were beginning to emerge publicly, found Carter’s political views threatening.  And they were infuriated when Carter refused to grant tax-exempt status to private “Christian” schools which discriminated against African American students.

Although Mark Hatfield and Jimmy Carter were not close personal friends, they shared much in common. Both were politicians who publicly identified in their time as evangelicals. Both came from Baptist churches, sensitive to the separation of church and state. Yet Carter and Hatfield each tried to connect their personal faith in Jesus Christ with their commitment to global peace, the reduction of nuclear arms, an affirmation of the human dignity of every person, and the desire to put humanitarian values at the central place of foreign policy. Each experienced the skepticism, political rejection, and even anger of the rising evangelical right wing.  Both displayed a certain civic humility, and in their best moments, a graciousness toward others, including their opponents.

I recall Senator Hatfield coming back from a meeting with Carter at the White House. They read scripture together, talked, and then prayed for each other. It was not Hatfield’s normal report of a meeting with a President.

The Washington political and journalistic establishment never really embraced Jimmy Carter. He was not, after all, one of their own. A common complaint was that he didn’t know how Washington worked. When First Lady Rosalyn Carter wore a dress to the inaugural balls that she had worn before, and their daughter Amy went to a public school, I remember feeling admiration.  But official Washington society scoffed. Jimmy Carter came from outside Washington culture—not from the world of real estate and high finance, but from life first as a peanut farmer and a deacon in a Baptist church. His remarkable achievements after his Presidency resulted, in part, because he never fully integrated into Washington’s official culture and had no reason to remain embedded there.

During his single term as President, Carter took unprecedented steps to place international human rights as a focused priority in U.S. foreign policy. Samatha Power, a highly respected human rights advocate and presently the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, wrote in the New York Times last week, “We should remember that in doing something so radical for his time—elevating attention to the plight and dignity of individuals in U.S. foreign policy and then living those values until his final days—he changed our world for the good.” Carter’s worldview was an outgrowth of his Christian faith, and he quoted Matthew 25 in explaining his commitment.

Focusing U.S. foreign policy around the centrality of human rights had difficulties, of course, in its implementation. Iran under the Shah and South Korea under dictatorship showed the clash between U.S. strategic interests and a consistent commitment to human rights. Yet concrete accomplishments and changes were widely manifest. Embassies around the world gave attention to human rights issues and to political dissidents in repressive regimes which previously had been ignored.  Results were tangible.

Remarkably, Jimmy Carter was first U.S. President to publicly denounce South Africa’s apartheid regime. He also was the first President to declare public support for a “Palestinian homeland,” and brokered the Camp David Accords. Believing that the United States should open its arms and its heart to refugees, he created the Office for Refugee Affairs at the State Department and pushed Congress to enact new laws governing refugees. Over 200,000 refugees were admitted to the U.S. during his administration, a record number.

Carter also successfully negotiated the return of the Panama Canal, gaining approval of two treaties by the U. S. Senate.  It was a hard fight, opposed by the right wing, and Jimmy Carter worked diligently to gain public support.  I well remember being at a White House meeting specifically for religious journalists and spokespersons where Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and then President Carter made the case for the treaties that would transfer control.  The arguments advanced by Carter were not only strategic, but also moral.  Countless forums were held throughout the country, and the treaties, needing two-thirds of the Senate to be ratified, narrowly passed with 68 votes.

A worsening economy, with “stagflation” and rising energy prices, and U.S. hostages held by the revolutionary Iranian regime—factors largely out of his ability to directly control—doomed Carter’s re-election. Ronald Reagan won a sweeping victory, and the evangelical far right became ascendent. All this clouded Carter’s legacy, which only recently is being reconsidered and re-evaluated by historians. 

President Joe Biden has spoken often about “saving the soul of America.” Jimmy Carter also tried to speak to America’s soul. Most remembered was his address dubbed as the “malaise speech” by journalists, even though that word was never used by Carter. He spent 10 days at Camp David speaking with public figures, historians, religious leaders, and others searching for the causes of public disillusionment, the growing lack of trust, and the deficiency of civic engagement. The speech he then gave to the nation is one of most remarkable in the history of Presidential addresses. Again, the Washington establishment was not impressed, but Carter’s public ratings, which were very low by then, moved up.

Following Richard Nixon’s legacy of Watergate, and still in the wake of the Vietnam War with massive alienation toward Presidential deceit and unbridled power, Carter attempted to restore a level of decency and civility to the White House and the public square. He promised that as President he would never lie to the American people, a pledge that is a stark contrast to the incoming President, and his political culture, which is addicted to public disinformation and deceit. 

As Donald Trump begins a second term as President, Jimmy Carter’s character and conduct provide an illuminating example. As Trump constructs a foreign policy based on nationalistic, self-righteous grandiosity, Carter’s commitment to center the nation’s international conduct in rights common to all humanity feels like a naïve, forgotten aspiration. Carter’s promise to be truthful now seems politically irrelevant and almost hopeless. Jimmy Carter was the only President to teach a Sunday School class while in office. In a few days, a President will be inaugurated who is not qualified to teach Sunday School in any church. A copy of the Ten Commandments should be placed on the Oval Office desk rather than in public schools.

Jimmy Carter, of course, had his failures and flaws. But he demonstrated how character matters, how conduct creates a moral example, and how religious faith can nurture policies and actions which rise above political retribution and  transactional calculations. We will be bereft of those qualities as we look to the next Presidential term.  As millions hear tributes and then watch the official memorial service for Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral on January 9, I trust that it might promote sober reflection on why the personal qualities and values of a President are consequential for the nation, and what dangers now lie ahead.  Perhaps that will be the final, prophetic contribution of Jimmy Carter’s legacy.