Jimmy Carter’s Presidency was not what you think

Jimmy Carter: Bringing about the World to Ends and Rethinking the World by Riving the World of Guinea Worm Disease during His White House Years

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 built houses for the poor and traveled the world brokering peace.

While interviewing him a few years ago he was still rising with the dawn and getting to work early, despite being in his 90s. He lectured for 40 minutes in front of an audience at the Carter Center, explaining to them his program to rid the world of Guinea worm disease. He was persistent. I was given 50 minutes to discuss his White House years. The bright blue eyes that bore into me were very strong. He was more interested in the Guinea worms.

“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.”

Jimmy Carter was dubbed a “goddamn n**er lover” before he became a humanitarian and the 39th president of the United States.

That’s the racial slur a White classmate of Carter’s at the US Naval Academy assigned to him right after World War II when the future president befriended the academy’s only Black midshipman.

Many people are telling similar stories about Carter’s time as president. 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.

Unlike former President Bill Clinton, another progressive White evangelical, Carter refused to “triangulate,” or adjust his beliefs to win favor with evangelicals.

Yet there were periods in the 19th and early 20th century when White evangelical leaders led campaigns against slavery, fought for women’s rights and became leaders in an array of social justice reform movements.

Carter refused to join a White supremacist group in order to be identified as a progressive evangelical and he had no problem being identified as such, according to Balmer.

Those strands of progressive evangelicals are still going strong. In the 60s and 70s, Southern Baptists started to ordain women, passed resolutions supporting moderate pro- abortion stances, and participated in the civil rights movement.

Evangelicals are loosely defined as Christians who often share a “born-again” dramatic personal conversion, believe they’re supposed to spread their faith to others, and in Balmer’s words, either take the Bible “seriously or literally.”

In 2000, Carter’s 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 “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership.

To critics, the group’s decision offered further evidence that many White evangelicals do not believe in women’s equality. More than 14 million people are members of the convention. It has often been described as a “bellwether for conservative Christianity.”

The Bible tells him that all people are equal in God’s eyes. “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.

A Love Story About His White House and His First Lady: Rosalynn Carter, the First Lady of America, Revealed in his Letters to the Editor

Carter and his wife,Rosalynn Carter, could be seen as advocates for women’s equality in Carter’s writings. She was in on his meetings when he was president. By many accounts, she was his most trusted political adviser.

Carter valued the opinion of his wife, says Elizabeth Kurylo, who covered him during his post-presidency.

He sees her as his partner all the time. A former reporter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution says that it is genuine. He had a partner in the room on every trip. I know she would tell him what she thought, even though I never saw her disagree with him.

She stood up for Black people and she was also called a racist and had her car covered in racism during the Jim Crow era. She joined the Peace Corps at 68 and went to India to serve the poor.

“I think more than any other person that I’ve ever known, my mother exemplified what is best about this country,” Carter 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 so fond of my mother.

No other president had talked openly about his “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” confessed in a famous magazine interview that “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” and vowed that he would never lie to the American people.

Carter won the presidency due to support from White evangelicals who were overjoyed to see a person of their race in 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 book.

White evangelicals were blamed for Carter’s refusal to grant tax-except status to Bob Jones University in South Carolina because of its racist practices, according to Balmer.

Many evangelicals got involved in politics in the 1970s because of their opposition to racial integration, not abortion, says Balmer.

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 did not want to hear that. He didn’t want to think that way and he didn’t want his staff to think that way. He wants to know what is right.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/us/jimmy-carter-evangelicals-blake-cec/index.html

The Road Not Taken by the Diocese of Carter, Ammerman Described in the ’60s and ’70s

The road not taken by the denomination is represented by Carter, Ammerman says. “Through the ’60s and the ‘70s, the (Southern Baptist) denomination had been moving into a more progressive direction.”

She said she chose to celebrate the impact his remarkable life has had on people who will never know him. “What a remarkable life he’s had, and how wonderful it is that I got to observe it for 10 years.”