Jimmy Carter was the model of a Christian President

He knew that faith and political power are a dangerous combination, and sought to combine them with humility, restraint and prudence. Then he returned home & revolutionized the post-presidency

Yahoo News was kind enough to publish three pieces of mine on the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s passing: my obituary of the nation’s 39th president, a piece on how Carter’s Christian faith shaped his political action, and an essay on the highs and lows of his presidency.

Carter became a personal hero of mine when I delved into his life story for my book Camelot’s End.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the obituary, and the full piece can be read at this link:

Jimmy Carter was arguably the most enigmatic president of America’s post-World War II era. He died on Sunday afternoon in Plains, Ga., the Carter Center said.

Leaders who reach the pinnacle of power are usually complicated individuals. But Carter was a man whose outward image was often the opposite of what lay underneath. He strove to convey simplicity and humility, yet he was a highly sophisticated man with ego and ambition that burned hotter than most.

“Don’t pay any attention to that smile. That don’t mean a thing,” said Ben Fortson, Georgia’s secretary of state for a period of 33 years that included Carter’s tenure as governor. “That man is made of steel, determination and stubbornness.”

Carter’s own wife, Rosalynn, once said that her husband “appears kind of meek or something. People always underestimate him.”

Carter has been widely considered an unsuccessful president who was overwhelmed by events. And compared with the presidencies of, say, Johnson, Nixon or Reagan, Carter’s single term is a period that historians and the public showed very little interest in revisiting, though that began to shift in his last few years. Yet he lived a compelling, exemplary life, and he was beset by challenges in office that would have stymied most leaders.

During Carter’s term, he was unable to resolve the major problems that confronted America in the late 1970s. He could not tame inflation or unite the Democratic Party, and he couldn’t free the Americans who were held captive in Iran for more than a year. It’s not well known, however, that the agreement that led to freedom for the 52 American hostages in Tehran was negotiated by Carter and his administration during his final weeks in office. Ronald Reagan had little if anything to do with it, even though he is commonly given credit, since the Iranians released the hostages moments after he was inaugurated.

In 1979 Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve; Volcker’s policies brought down inflation, which was running in double digits by the end of the decade, though it took time for that to happen, and Reagan reaped the political benefits. Some critiques of the Volcker appointment have come from the left, who said his policies benefited Wall Street at the expense of the working class.

Reagan is also given all the credit for the fall of the Soviet Union and communism. But Carter’s one-two punch — he increased defense spending and made human rights a core plank of American foreign policy — put pressure on the Soviets fiscally and morally, and Carter has been credited for forcing the USSR onto an unsustainable trajectory.

… Over the years, Carter has been commonly remembered as a kind of Mister Rogers figure, a soft-spoken man wearing a sweater who was good but not strong. Yet Carter’s strength was on display all his life. He grew up in rural poverty and worked his way into the Naval Academy. He had few political connections in Georgia and yet willed his way to the governorship. And he won the presidency with few insider party credentials.

And then, after a devastating and overwhelming loss to Reagan in 1980, Carter revolutionized what it means to be an ex-president. He won the release of political prisoners around the world, resolved conflicts in war zones, monitored elections in fledgling democracies and helped eradicate disease. He wrote or published more than 30 books in the years after his presidency, including a novel (the first by a U.S. president), a book of poetry, a children’s book, a book on fishing and other outdoor sporting activities, two on making the most of older years (one of which he co-wrote with Rosalynn), a few on the Middle East, a few personal history books focused on different periods of his life, and a handful of religious devotional books. And finally, he remained married to Rosalynn for 77 years — until her death in 2023 — and he lived to the age of 100. Carter’s father and his three siblings had all died in their 50s or early 60s of pancreatic cancer, and yet he overcame brain cancer at age 90. He never lost his intense zeal for life.

Here are the first few paragraphs of my piece on how Carter’s faith shaped his politics:

The low point of Jimmy Carter’s life came in 1966, and it was then that he recommitted himself to his Christian faith.

Carter — who died on Sunday at the age of 100 — was a 42-year-old state senator from Georgia, and he was at a personal crossroads. He’d made a bid for governor and lost, coming in third out of six candidates. He’d gone deep into debt to finance the campaign. And he was horrified that an avowed white supremacist, Lester Maddox, had been elected governor, in part because Carter had split the moderate vote with another candidate.

Carter was “profoundly depressed,” according to adviser Peter Bourne. He told a friend he questioned if he’d “ever amount to much.” He was also “disillusioned about [his] religious faith,” his biographer Jonathan Alter wrote.

But out of the depths of Carter’s despair, he sought — and found — a newly enlivened faith. He would eventually describe himself as having become a “born again” Christian, a popular term in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Carter’s religious devotion would animate his action for the rest of his life. But it was not a simple faith.

… At the heart of Christian realism was the view that utopianism from the left or right was doomed to fail, that human nature was inherently fallible, and that — as Niebuhr said — “man is the kind of lion who both kills the lamb and dreams of when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together.”

Or as Carter put it: “We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect — a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.”

And so, in political action, Carter would say: “We must always combine realism with principle,” Bourne wrote in his 1997 biography of Carter.