Former President And Sunday School Teacher Jimmy Carter Dies At 100
Former United States President Jimmy Carter, who spoke of his faith more openly than other modern leaders, taught a Baptist Sunday School class for decades and became the nation’s longest-lived president, died Sunday at age 100.
A member of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., Carter was a third generation Southern Baptist and the first U.S. president to call himself a “born again” Christian.
Despite this, his unsuccessful Democratic bid for reelection in 1980 fueled the rise of the Religious Right as evangelicals concluded he didn’t stand where they did on important policies from abortion to stopping the spread of communism, which threatened religious freedom abroad.
Carter “helped activate a massive army of politically minded evangelicals in the elections that followed — most of whom have voted for Republicans ever since,” Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs wrote in “The Preacher and the Presidents.”
As the nation’s 39th president, Carter is credited with achieving the Camp David Accords, which led to Egypt and Israel formally signing a peace treaty ending 31 years of war between them. Domestically, he established the Department of Education and the Department of Energy.
Carter was known in his post-presidential years for his international conflict mediation and his efforts at housing the impoverished through Habitat for Humanity, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The first president to be born in a hospital, Carter’s life began in the small farming town of Plains, Ga., in 1924. His father was a farmer and businessman, and his mother was a registered nurse. Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and married his wife Rosalynn the same year.
Carter served on submarines in the Navy before returning to run his family farm in 1953. He quickly became a community leader and went on to serve in the Georgia Senate. He was elected governor of Georgia in 1970 and in 1976 was elected president.
Wikipedia Commons photo
Influenced by the local church
More than any modern U.S. president, Carter had close ties to a local church throughout his life. He gave one of several interviews to the SBC Historical Commission in 1991 detailing his faith.
“It was a part of my life like breathing — like being a Georgian or being a human being — to be part of a church life,” Carter told Bill Sumners of the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives during an interview published in the journal Baptist History and Heritage in 1997.
Carter explained that until he returned from the Navy, “both the Methodist and the Baptist churches in Plains were half-time.”
“So, the Methodists would worship the first and third Sundays and the Baptists would worship the second and fourth Sundays, and quite a lot of their congregation would go back and forth between churches,” Carter said. “There was not much distinction between the denominations.”
Racial tensions were strong in the community, and Carter took some unpopular stands as a deacon in favor of integration. While he was president, the church in Plains divided.
“About 25 or 30 members, whom I would characterize as more moderate in their attitude on the race issue and so forth, split off from the Plains Baptist Church, my boyhood church, and formed a new church called Maranatha,” Carter told Sumners. “When we came home from the White House, we joined the Maranatha Baptist Church.”
Carter went on to teach a popular Sunday School class at Maranatha for decades, welcoming members of the media, tourists and other curious visitors.
“We also have a good many Mennonites, Amish. Quite often Jewish rabbis will come sit in the class with Catholics and others,” Carter said.
Photo courtesy of The National Archives
A faith-shaking setback
When Carter began referring to himself as “born again” on the presidential campaign trail, he was thinking not of his personal profession of faith at age 11 at Plains Baptist Church, according to The Preacher and the Presidents, a book on Billy Graham’s relationships with U.S. leaders.
“He was talking about his decision in 1967, at the age of forty-two, to recommit his life to Christ following a particularly difficult year,” the book says.
His long-shot bid for governor of Georgia in 1966 had distressed him because it was the first time in life he had a major goal fail, he said.
“I kind of turned away from my faith and myself and from God,” Carter told authors Duffy and Gibbs.
On the advice of his older sister, Carter dropped everything and devoted himself to God for a time in response.
When a call went out from the Billy Graham headquarters tor someone in his county to head up a crusade, Carter volunteered. He faced some friction when he learned the Graham organization required racially integrated crusades, but he found a way, the book says.
The same year, Carter joined his pastor and a few other Baptist laymen on a pioneer mission trip to Lock Haven, Pa., where they spent a week visiting a hundred unchurched families.
“We had a wonderful religious experience working together,” Carter told Sumners. “We had 18 people who accepted Christ that week, and we organized a church in Lock Haven before we left — even rented a building for the church congregation to use.”
Carter realized early on that trip that he didn’t have much of a testimony to give, he told Duffy and Gibbs, but he left “the closest to Christ” he had ever felt, and he pointed to that trip as a life-changing experience.
Wikipedia Commons photo
Tension with the SBC
Though he identified himself as a Southern Baptist, Carter repeatedly distanced himself from the Southern Baptist Convention in later years — particularly in 2000 when he mailed a letter to 75,000 Baptists nationwide expressing opposition to the revised Baptist Faith and Message doctrinal statement.
“I have seen an increasing inclination on the part of Southern Baptist Convention leaders to be more rigid on what is a Southern Baptist and exclusionary of accommodating those who differ from them,” Carter told The New York Times.
Carter more closely identified with moderates of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and in 2008 he convened the “New Baptist Covenant Celebration” in Atlanta, calling for Baptists of all races, political leanings and theological stances to unite around a common belief in the Gospel and to set aside differences.
His desire to see that movement grow was not fulfilled, and by 2016 a similar summit with only an estimated 240 people saw a 97 percent decrease in attendance from the inaugural gathering, Baptist Press reported.
Carter spoke for an hour by phone with the Baptist Press in 2000, expressing views that appeared at odds with conservative evangelicals. Among them, he said homosexuality is a sin but supported ordaining homosexuals who are “demonstrating the essence of Christianity.”
He also said he has “never believed Christ would approve of abortion,” but Carter was willing to administer laws permitting abortion.
Also in 2000, R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “The former president is solidly identified with the liberal wing of the SBC and has opposed the conservative leadership elected by the convention for the last two decades. On an entire spectrum of theological and moral issues, Carter has been estranged from the SBC.”
Carter only missed one Sunday at Maranatha after fracturing his pelvis in 2019. When he returned to lead his class, he referred to a cancer diagnosis he received four years earlier and said of that time, “I assumed, naturally, that I was going to die very quickly.”
“I obviously prayed about it,” Carter said, according to CNN. “I didn’t ask God to let me live, but I asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death, and I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death.”
This article has been republished with permission from Baptist Press.
Erin Roach, a journalist and pastor’s wife, works as a correspondent for The Southern Baptist Texan.