Reflections on Jimmy Carter
Some Personal Thoughts and Recommended Reading
President Jimmy Carter passed away on December 29 at the age of 100. Funeral services were held yesterday in Washington DC and Plains, GA. All five living presidents attended the former. Georgia Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers served meals to workers at the latter. Carter was laid alongside his late wife, Rosalynn, to whom he was married for 77 years.
Carter lived longer than any president before him. His post-presidency life lasted longer than any other president. He was married longer than any other president. His political career ended as a one-term president with a mixed legacy that historians still debate over four decades later. He ended life as a world figure who was widely respected for his commitment to democratic elections, his efforts to eradicate Guinea worm in African nations, his volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity, and many other endeavors.
I was born in 1979, about midway through Carter’s presidency. I’m just a little too young to remember when Carter was in the White House. But as Southeast Georgia native, what I do remember of my childhood years is how proud Georgians were that one of our own had been president. My recollection is that Carter was respected, even beloved, by nearly everyone I knew, including people who never voted for him (or, like my parents, voted for Carter in 1976 but flipped to Ronald Reagan in 1980). We all knew he had served in the Navy, been a nuclear engineer, and was Georgia’s governor prior to his presidency. Georgians were required to know these sorts of things about Jimmy Carter. But you know what really mattered, at least in my neck of the woods? Carter was a peanut farmer who lived in rural Southwest Georgia.
Not everyone knows this about Carter, but he was involved in Boy Scouts. He served as a scoutmaster when his sons were Scouts. Over the year, Carter wrote countless congratulatory letters to Eagle Scouts. Occasionally, Carter even showed up at Courts of Honor, the Scouting ceremony where the Eagle Scout award is conferred publicly. In the 1980s and 1990s, at least, everyone involved in Scouting loved Jimmy Carter. Especially Georgias who were involved in Scouting.
The Finns were a Scouting family. Both my brother and I are Eagle Scouts. Our mom was a den mother when I was a Cub Scout. Our dad was our assistant scoutmaster when we became Boy Scouts. When I earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 1994, I invited Carter to my Court of Honor, which was held in the sanctuary of the First Christian Church of Waycross, GA. First Christian was not only the church that sponsored the Scout troop, but it was also my grandparent’s church. Many of my extended family were members there. My parents were married in the same sanctuary. It was my childhood church before our family became Southern Baptists about a year before I became an Eagle Scout. Needless to say, we all wanted Carter to come to the event.
Alas, Carter was unable to attend. However, he wrote me a kind letter, congratulating me on the achievement. President Clinton also sent a nice congratulatory letter, but that was less meaningful. Unlike Carter, Clinton wasn’t beloved by most of the Boy Scouts I knew. We Scouts were a conservative lot back in those days, and while Carter got a pass because he loved Scouts and was a native son of Georgia, we viewed Clinton with suspicion. Thirty years later, my views of Clinton are pretty much the same as they were then.
If you know much about Carter’s personal life, then you likely know he was a lifelong Baptist. He not only attended church regularly throughout his adult life, but also participated in short-term mission trips, served as a deacon, and taught Sunday School. Over the years, many folks made the pilgrimage to Carter’s famous Sunday School class at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains. If I’m remembering correctly, my late grandparents attended once when I was a teenager. They loved Jimmy Carter.
Carter had a complicated history with the Southern Baptist Convention. He identified with what became known as the “moderate” wing of the SBC, a center-left coalition that had been in denominational leadership for a generation when Carter was elected president. Beginning in 1979, in the middle of Carter’s presidency, theological conservatives launched their successful campaign to gain control of the SBC. By the early 21st century, Carter no longer identified as a Southern Baptist. (Most moderate churches left the SBC gradually in the two decades between 1988 and the late-2000s.) However, Carter remained involved in moderate Baptist life. Most notably, in 2008 Carter was co-convener of the New Baptist Covenant, which he envisioned as a coalition of Baptist groups committed to social justice.
Carter was also a self-confessed evangelical. When Carter began referring to himself as a born-again Christian during his presidential candidacy in 1976, many Americans had never heard the term. Carter’s candidacy, along with Charles Colson’s bestseller Born Again, published in February of 1976, changed all that. A month before the election, major magazines such as Time and Newsweek reported George Gallup Jr.’s observation that 1976 was the “Year of the Evangelical,” with over 1/3 of Americans identifying as born-again Christians.
To my knowledge, Carter never rejected the evangelical label, even as the term became more contested. One of the ironies of history is that Carter’s fellow evangelicals played a key role in his failed re-election campaign. In 1980, many evangelicals who had supported Carter four years earlier voted for Ronald Reagan. Though Reagan seemed less devout than Carter, the former’s views, especially on so-called “social issues,” aligned more with those of evangelicals. Most evangelicals were, and remain, social conservatives. Carter’s views on abortion and homosexuality were more center-left, aligning more with those of the mainline Protestants of his generation than his fellow evangelicals. As Carter grew older, his views on social issues moved further to the left.
As a Georgian and an Eagle Scout, I will always have a special place in my heart for Jimmy Carter. As a political conservative, I strongly disagree with many of his views, including some of his post-presidency positions (especially his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). As a theological conservative, I have a different understanding of Baptist identity than Carter had, rooted in our different understandings of the doctrine of Scripture and its implications for mission. Carter was influenced more by Neo-orthodoxy and the Social Gospel; I resonate more with Carl Henry and Charles Colson than Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. As a historian who studies both the Baptist tradition and modern American evangelicalism, I believe Carter is a consequential figure who will continue to attract the attention of scholars in numerous disciplines.
I will close these reflections by linking to some of the articles I’ve read about Carter over the past couple of weeks. With the exception of the Hankins article, most of these were written by fellow Southern Baptists.
Al Mohler, “The Death of a President” (WORLD Opinions)
Bart Barber, “The Faith and Message of Jimmy Carter” (The Baptist Review)
David Dockery, “Personal Reflections on Former President Jimmy Carter” (Baptist Press)
Tommy Kidd, “Jimmy Carter’s Most Perplexing Legacy” (The Dispatch)
Obbie Todd, “The Year of the Baptists: Jimmy Carter and the Election of 1976” (The Gospel Coalition)
Barry Hankins, “From Plains to the White House: Jimmy Carter’s Legacy for Evangelicals” (The Gospel Coalition)