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(OPINION) I’ve told this before, but the first vote I ever cast was against Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.

I cast my ballot against him rather than for his opponent, then-President Gerald Ford. I saw Ford as an affable, bumbling, milquetoast kind of guy who probably couldn’t do much harm, so I voted for him. (I’d gathered most of my thoughts about Ford from Chevy Chase’s impersonations on “Saturday Night Live” — not exactly a reliable source.)

I was 20 and in college, trying to leave behind my strict Southern Baptist upbringing. Carter seemed to embody much of what I hoped to escape: he was a Baptist of my parents’ generation who spoke too much and too earnestly about his born-again faith.

No thanks, I told myself. No more of that noise for this kid, especially not in the White House.

It took me a while to realize how mistaken I’d been about the man.

Carter passed away Dec. 29 at 100 years old. Since he died, I’ve been reading various assessments of his life and career. Even in death he’s a lightning rod.

The first take I happened across — which appeared on the Washington Post’s website nearly as soon as Carter drew his last — was a particularly nasty hatchet job from columnist George F. Will.

Will apparently considered Carter an imbecile and a charlatan, and singly responsible for every foreign and domestic U.S. blunder of the past half-century.

Too soon, George. Too soon. Even the most pompous of pundits can generally find a gracious word for the dearly departed on the day of his departure.

Coincidentally, the next op-ed I read — on the same website — was from a former Carter aide, Stuart E. Eizenstat, who might have been talking about an entirely different human than the one Will slashed at. Eizenstat’s piece bordered on hagiography.

He said the conventional wisdom about Carter — that he was a mediocre or worse president, always in over his head — is “palpably wrong. Carter’s accomplishments at home and abroad were more extensive and longer lasting than those of almost all modern presidents.”

So it goes in the dueling realities of Politics Land.

Maybe because my initial take long ago was all about Carter’s outspoken Christian views, or maybe because I mainly write about religion rather than politics, I’m more interested in Carter’s legacy as a man of faith than his performance as a politician, although those two things might be inseparable.

I don’t think you can never really know another person’s heart. If the Bible is right, you can barely know your own heart.

Still, I believe Carter was probably the most genuinely Christian president and post-president we’ve had in my lifetime, maybe ever. I’m an admirer, which is not to say I’m a worshiper.

The difference between admiring and idolizing lies at the heart of the Christian message.

The concept of Original Sin has fallen out of favor among some Christians. That’s too bad. I’m over-simplifying, but in a nutshell, Original Sin says all people arrive from the womb profoundly messed up. We have the capacity for good, but also for evil. Often, given a choice between the two, we’ll choose the latter.

To me, the only way you can miss the truth of that doctrine is to have spent your life residing on some other, happier planet, one where priests don’t molest schoolchildren, invading armies don’t bomb hospitals and adults don’t abandon their ailing parents.

Jimmy Carter the man, the president, the believer, was harassed like all of us by besetting sins. According to those who knew him best, he could be by turns self-righteous, remote, stunningly ambitious, inflexible and sometimes just mean.

One biographer, Peter Bourne, said Carter maintained that in politics principle must be tempered by realism, an idea he’d picked up from Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

There undoubtedly is truth to that premise, but therein also lay a path for Carter to delude himself about the purity of his judgments.

“His absolute determination to win became less a troubling matter of egotistical ambition and now more a prerequisite for fulfilling the commitment he had made to carry out God’s work,” Bourne wrote, as quoted by Jon Ward, chief national correspondent for Yahoo! News.

And yet, there was always that other side of Carter, evident decade after decade. That was the leader who genuinely tried to walk humbly, to follow the teachings of Jesus, to obey the Holy Spirit of peace — the guy who toiled to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

That’s the Carter who brokered the Camp David Accords, labored to eradicate the Guinea worm, hammered nails for Habitat for Humanity, promoted racial equality and taught Sunday school classes that drew capacity crowds to his home church.

I’ve long believed Carter wanted to get it right. He was a man with big flaws, but even bigger virtues. That’s the best you can say about anybody. He tried, imperfectly, to do good.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.