What I Learned From Praying With Jimmy Carter
7 min read
Jimmy Carter told me to stop worrying about Donald Trump.
When Carter invited me to meet with him in his Atlanta office, just a few weeks after the world-shocking 2016 U.S. presidential election, I assumed the topic would be Donald Trump. After all, I was a vocal evangelical-Christian critic of Trump, and now the religious right was gathering steam for revenge. Some Trump-supporting evangelicals wanted me to be fired or the religious organization I was working for at the time to be defunded. I was rattled by what a Trump presidency would mean for American democracy and, more important, for the witness of the Church after white evangelicals proved to be Trump’s most loyal base. Carter was unfazed.
“These things have happened before,” he said. “Everything has a way of coming back around. What seems unstoppable and inevitable never is.”
I thought to myself, Well, he should know. Carter had experienced himself how quickly political realities change.
In 1976, Carter’s evangelical Christianity was part of his appeal to some Americans and befuddling to others. One television newscaster assured viewers that Carter’s having been “born again” did not entail a claim to receiving direct messages from God. His emergence seemingly from nowhere had prompted Newsweek to declare 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”
“The idea of a Baptist in the White House has sent some Americans into panic,” remarked Duke McCall, who was president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary during the 1976 presidential campaign. “Maybe they did not notice that Harry Truman and Warren G. Harding were Baptist presidents. The trouble is that Jimmy Carter not only is a Southern Baptist—he talks like one.”
Indeed he did.
Carter’s most prominent statement of the 1976 campaign was saying that he couldn’t judge other people, because he had “looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” To secular America, such talk sounded alien and awkward. For some the comment was quaint and prudish, and for others it was akin to one’s uncle choosing the Thanksgiving table to confess his kinky sexual fantasies. To evangelical America, though, the words recalled Jesus’s admonition in the Sermon on the Mount that no one (except Jesus himself) could claim to be without sin. Giving a word of testimony about one’s own sin was routine in Sunday-school classes all over the country. That Carter told this to Playboy and included the words screws and shacks up was a different matter.
The seminary president’s suggestion that Carter was not just a Baptist but a Southern Baptist, and that he “talks like one” left undefined whether he meant Carter’s un-self-conscious God talk or his widely lampooned Georgia accent. He talked “like one” of us in more ways than one.
Southern Baptists knew that the world outside the Bible Belt didn’t understand our revivals or our conversion testimonies or our biblical allusions. We also knew that the same people mocked our accents, too. A U.S. president from the Deep South was as incredible to some parts of America, it seemed, as the television show Hee Haw winning an Emmy.
Carter captured the white evangelical vote, winning the Bible Belt (including my home state of Mississippi). An evangelical publisher released The Miracle of Jimmy Carter. His public witness was praised in Christianity Today, and he had the support of such figures as Pat Robertson and Richard John Neuhaus.
And then he went from Bible Belt icon to loathed foe of a newly energized religious-right political network in four short years—a network that was itself a kind of trans-denominational, parachurch “evangelical” project. As Randall Balmer’s biography, Redeemer, demonstrates, Carter was representative of a kind of fusion evangelicalism—strong on the need for personal conversion and sharing one’s faith with others but also politically liberal or moderate on such questions as racial justice, women’s rights, nuclear disarmament, and so on.
Carter clearly was out of step with most of his fellow white evangelicals—especially on abortion (about which he was squeamish but which he was unwilling to see legally curbed), the Equal Rights Amendment, and other “family values” questions. While identity politics at first earned Carter an unusual coalition of the South’s Black and white working-class constituencies, the accent and the testimony were eventually not enough.
Ronald Reagan didn’t go to church—much less teach Sunday school—and yet he solidified white evangelicals, especially southerners, against Carter. That Republican-evangelical alliance has, if anything, grown more and more uniform ever since.
In fact Carter became an example commonly offered by Trump-supporting evangelical leaders as to why they could support a three-times-married casino magnate who boasted of his adultery. “Jimmy Carter was a good Sunday-school teacher, but he wouldn’t stand up for us,” they would say in the 1980s. “Ronald Reagan would.” By the time of Trump, almost every example of his lack of personal character would be met with “We’re electing a president, not a pastor.”
In some ways, this argument—whatever one thinks of Carter or Reagan or Trump—is sound and in line with American evangelical heritage. The colonial-era Baptists would never have allowed Thomas Jefferson or James Madison to teach Sunday school but were more than happy to ally with them for religious liberty. Being born again does not give one any special expertise in governance.
Few evangelicals, Carter supporters or not, questioned his personal integrity. He might lust in his heart, but no one could imagine Jimmy Carter paying hush money to a porn star. The idea that personal integrity is notenough hadmorphed, by the Trump era, into the idea that personal integrity doesn’t matter at all. When Donald Trump Jr. ridiculed the idea of “turning the other cheek” as a sign of weakness, the biblical reference seemed just as lost on this generation as “adultery in my heart” had to the last—except, this time, it seemed lost on evangelicals themselves.
I expected the 2016 meeting with Carter to be a kind of awkward “I told you so” session. I am, after all, from the more conservative theological wing of Southern Baptist life; Carter, the more moderate. I was then president of the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention with which Carter had loudly broken in the early 2000s, arguing that the “conservative” leaders were concerned not about biblical fidelity but about power. I couldn’t have imagined that five years after our meeting, I would be gone from Southern Baptist life too.
The reality of the conversation, though, was the opposite. Carter wanted to know how the missions boards were doing, reminiscing that he had expected to serve on a “Bold Mission Thrust” effort in 1978, but “I couldn’t because of work.” He asked about the Baptist Woman’s Missionary Union and talked about the Brotherhood Commission, a now-defunct Southern Baptist men’s ministry. He talked—in detail—about the workings of Southern Baptist entities, about the personalities of past Southern Baptist leaders. I would later remark to my wife that I couldn’t think of a single Southern Baptist Church member, save maybe one, who would have known even half the acronyms and names he discussed.
This, too, is part of an evangelical America that no longer exists. Survey after survey shows the rise of nondenominational churches, and the collapse of membership in the Christian denominations. Most people in a typical Southern Baptist church would see themselves as devoted to the gospel and to Jesus but would hardly shape their identity around being Southern Baptist. In fact, some studies—such as those referenced by the political scientist Daniel K. Williams—show one of the most rapidly growing sectors of politically active self-identified “evangelicals” as those who never attend church at all. It’s not just that they want a president and not a pastor in the Oval Office. They don’t want a pastor at all.
Now that Jimmy Carter has died—our longest-living president—I think of what he said when he finally got around to what he wanted to talk about, back in 2016. “Getting beat up in public is hard,” he said. “I want to pray for you.”
I don’t remember what all he said in the prayer. I remember he used all of these phrases pulled straight from the Baptist Hymnal. I remember him asking God to keep “my heart close to Jesus.” And I remember that at the end he pronounced Amen the way any Southern Baptist from our background would: “Ay-men.”
If I could go back to that meeting, I would probably talk less with him about Trump and more about what those of us who are born-again Christians believe about eternal life. I might have said that death, like political ups and downs, is not the last word. “Everything has a way of coming back around,” I might say. “What seems unstoppable and inevitable never is.”
But, then again, he already knew that.
