The faith of Jimmy Carter: A born-again Christian who practiced his own version of progressive evangelicalism

Jimmy Carter referenced Jesus in an interview with Playboy magazine and it cost the Democratic presidential nominee more than he could fathom in the moment.

“I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” Carter said, a quote that Playboy published weeks before the 1976 general election.

The article included other remarks related to Carter’s faith – such as the importance of the separation of church and state, a conviction born of Carter’s Southern Baptist upbringing – but the adultery comment opened a rift with Carter’s kin in Christ.

“I am quite disillusioned,” the Rev. Jerry Falwell told The Washington Post, according to the book, “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter” by Randall Balmer. Falwell, among other notable preachers, criticized Carter's interview with Playboy as an example of voicing impure thoughts.

“Four months ago, the majority of the people I knew were pro-Carter,” added Falwell in the Washington Post. “Today, that has totally reversed.”

That divide only widened after Carter’s election that November, and it fueled a fearsome counterattack to the president’s progressive evangelicalism, even though the two sides shared certain core beliefs. That opposition, called the religious right, was instrumental in denying Carter a second term.

Carter was one of the most explicitly religious presidents in modern U.S. history. But his rise in politics from Georgia to the White House came during a transformative era in American Christianity. The rise of the religious right limited the influence of progressive evangelicalism in national politics, setting the stage for decades of cultural battles over issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

Still, it didn't deter Carter from pursuing his progressive Christian ideals after he left the White House through teaching, funding initiatives abroad for health care and conflict resolution, and starting a coalition for Black and white Baptists.

Carter died Sunday at age 100, and as the nation reflects on his legacy and specifically that of his religion, the religious movement and countermovement his presidency catalyzed is of equal importance to his lived faith.

Maranatha Baptist Church deacon Zac Steele saw it up close during the many years Carter attended the Plains, Georgia, church and where he famously taught Sunday School.

“He paid attention to people,” Steele said. "If people think it was a theatrical show for many years for him to just use the church as a platform to speak, that is absolutely false.”

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Years of the (progressive) evangelical

The son of a church deacon who taught Sunday school and was baptized at 11, Carter experienced a religious reawakening in 1967 that became the basis for his social and political ethic.

Following his 1966 defeat in Georgia’s gubernatorial election, Carter came to realize “my relationship with God was a very superficial one,” he said, according to “Redeemer.”

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He went on eye-opening mission trips to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and continued to study theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.

“It was clear that he knew his Bible and he read his Bible very seriously and consistently,” said Balmer, author of “Redeemer” and a Dartmouth College historian. “I think that shaped him in many ways personally but also politically throughout his career.”

Carter's governorship, following his election in 1970, showed support for prison reform and equal rights for women, and concern about poverty and educational equity, the environment, and the Vietnam War. Though Carter courted segregationists during his gubernatorial campaign, he promoted a message of racial reconciliation in office.

Meanwhile, the same issues animated some evangelical leaders to organize.

Fifty-three Christian leaders signed the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern of 1973. Signatories included burgeoning progressive voices, like Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, and leaders from Carter’s own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The 1970s was a high moment in the history of progressive evangelicalism,” Balmer said in an interview.

Carter was unaware of the Chicago Declaration at the time, but he professed the same platform when he ran for president in 1976. That, plus his unabashed embrace of the label “born-again Christian,” helped him win primary elections in states with large evangelical populations, according to “Redeemer.”

Famously, Time magazine called 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”

Carter’s Playboy interview was a turning point, but not enough to cost him the presidency in November. Once in office, Carter’s attendance at Sunday services at First Baptist Church in Washington and at the National Prayer Breakfast impressed Christian leaders who felt the president’s faith commitment was authentic.

Some of those Christian leaders, such as the Rev. Billy Graham, also favored Carter for brokering the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, and for participating in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union.

But Carter’s problem-solving abroad was unable to quell evangelical defection at home.

Fellow Christians, unwavering adversaries

The religious right, though an agent that helped deny Carter a second term, began stirring to life before he took office.

It started with a battle over the tax-exempt status of Christian schools that refused admission to Black students, creating evangelical consternation about religious liberty protections, according to Balmer and Anthea Butler, professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Conservative political strategists like Paul Weyrich tapped into and grew that evangelical fervor with issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, the Equal Rights Amendment and school prayer.

On those issues, Carter "was espousing values that they did not want,” said Butler, author of “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.” “So how could he be the same kind of Christian that they were?”

Like the religious right, Carter personally disagreed with abortion and same-sex marriage. But the two sides were at an impasse when conservatives supported legislation Carter felt infringed on the separation of church and state, such as a proposed constitutional amendment banning abortion and a legislative attempt to restore prayer in public schools.

“He was trying to get them back and he can’t get them back,” Butler said.

In 1979, Falwell formed the Moral Majority political organization, while Southern Baptist Convention voting delegates elected the first leaders in the "conservative resurgence," a movement that pulled the denomination further to the right. The effects of those inaugural victories started to show almost immediately.

SBC leaders gathered in secret with Graham and other prominent Christians in Dallas in early 1980, where the group prayed and determined it wouldn’t back Carter in the upcoming presidential election.

“He wasn’t the same kind of culture warrior that they were,” Butler said.

Ronald Reagan, however, was and Reagan’s eventual alliance with the religious right and its media empire paid off. The Republican nominee received an estimated 56% of the evangelical vote that November.

A ‘bad marriage’ officially ends

Carter’s divide with his Southern Baptist tribe was irreversible by the time he left office.

But it didn’t hinder him from practicing his faith where he knew best: a Southern Baptist church.

“I sometimes characterize Carter’s relationship with the SBC as a bad marriage,” Balmer said. “They’ve gone through various trials and separations and have tried to reconcile. Then they go again into a separation.”

The Carters returned home to Georgia in 1981 and joined Maranatha Baptist, a congregation that splintered off from Plains Baptist Church, where Carter grew up attending, following a vote at Plains Baptist to prohibit Black members.

Carter began teaching weekly a Sunday school class at Maranatha. At one point, he decreased his teaching to once a month. Then, church members asked him to do it more often.

"There was such a demand for it that the church pleaded with him to do it twice a month, to see more visitors," Steele said. "And then, of course, it was good for tourism, too, with a very small town of a population of 800 to 900 people."

Carter encouraged everyone who attended the Sunday school class to attend the church service that followed. Steele said in addition to their sincere interest in Sunday school attendees, both Carters also exhibited patience, staying after church to take pictures with visitors, sometimes for more than an hour.

"Obviously, it's a big tourist attraction," Steele said. "On any given Sunday, we might have in excess of 500 people show up. There's been some days where if you weren't in the parking lot by Saturday, there was a pretty good chance you weren't going to get a seat on Sunday morning for Sunday school."

Steele said Carter used his platform to reach people. He had a genuine interest in participants' spiritual growth and showed it by the way he interacted with them.

"His entire goal in that is to engage you and he always finished up with a challenge to you," Steele said.

Though Carter continued teaching Sunday school at Maranatha for four decades, he stayed with the denomination for about half of that time.

Carter announced in 2000 he was formally severing ties with the SBC, citing exclusionary “policies and an increasingly rigid SBC creed,” he said in a letter in 2000.

To Butler, Carter’s break with the SBC doesn’t exhibit forward-thinking but in fact points to Carter’s overdue acceptance of the SBC’s racial status quo.

“It means the racial politics of the SBC didn’t bother him the same way,” Butler said. Just five years before his departure did the convention formally apologize for its history of defending slavery.

A new union, near the end

Carter's departure from the SBC didn’t mean he abandoned Southern Baptists and, in fact, the two crossed paths just a few years later for a momentous gathering of the New Baptist Covenant.

Carter teamed up with Mercer University President Bill Underwood starting in 2006 to bring together Baptists of different races and ethnicities, regions, backgrounds and theological perspectives to form an informal alliance. It was the group’s second annual meeting in Atlanta in 2007 that everyone still talks about.

“It was one of the greatest meetings that I've ever attended –remarkable," said the Rev. Mitch Randall, CEO of Good Faith Media. “It was President Carter's lifelong dream to put Baptists together who had been divided.”

More than 15,000 people reportedly attended the 2007 event representing 30 Baptist organizations, including historically Black Baptist denominations, moderate Baptist alliances and, perhaps most notably, the SBC.

"You couldn't have had that lineup of people without Carter," said the Rev. Johnny Pierce. “There was a lot of high energy. It was the first time they all got together and said, 'We're going to cross convention lines, affiliation lines.'"

In one of its most significant achievements, the 2007 assembly inspired participants to organize similar gatherings in their respective regions for more local churches to implement the vision of Baptist unity and Christian goodwill.

In subsequent years, New Baptist Covenant regional conferences emerged throughout the country to empower Baptist churches to collaborate on key projects focused on racial reconciliation. For example, churches in Macon, Georgia, and Dallas reached across the barrier of racial division to begin conversations aimed at collective healing.

"It inspired these churches to look deep into their past," Randall said, an important acknowledgement of some of the roadblocks that had kept them divided for decades.

The work of New Baptist Covenant stalled in recent years due to the pandemic but also from heightened tension following debate over racial injustice, according to Randall and New Baptist Covenant Executive Director Aidsand Wright-Riggins in an article in Baptist News Global. Around the same time the New Baptist Covenant movement underwent transition, so did its co-founder.

In November 2019, Carter led his last Sunday school class at Maranatha. “Though none of us at the church knew that,” said Steele, the Maranatha deacon.

The former president became ill shortly after the pandemic began, bringing his tenure as a Sunday school teacher to a close, but he continued to worship at Maranatha on Sundays.

Carter’s last Sunday school lesson focused on the "age-old question" of knowing where one's soul would spend eternity, Steele said.

"Looking back now, how fitting was that?"

This story has been updated to correct the name of Mercer University's president.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jimmy Carter's faith: A born-again Christian, progressive evangelical