For years, visitors pulled into the parking lot of Maranatha Baptist Church in rural Plains, Georgia in the wee hours to queue in the pitch black for Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school class.
Some were Christians, some were not. Many were Americans, while a substantial number came from other countries — Brazil, Canada, Russia. If evangelical Christianity was not their thing, it didn’t really matter.
Carter’s death Sunday at age 100 marks not just the passing of a former US president whose single term was defined by an unshakable Christian faith.
It is also a farewell to a leader whose deep evangelical roots and liberal politics are seemingly antithetical in today’s America.
Carter — a Democrat, Baptist and peanut farmer — was elected in 1976 on the heels of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, which saw Richard Nixon resign the presidency rather than face near-certain impeachment.
The Gospel-loving, “born again” Christian was the antidote to America’s woes.
“Casting a ballot for Carter, the redeemer president, would expunge the voters’ sins and absolve them of complicity” in Nixon’s rise, historian Randall Balmer wrote in “Redeemer,” a Carter biography focused on religion.
Carter said Christian tenets such as justice and love were the bedrock of his presidency.
“We never dropped a bomb, we never fired a missile, we never shot a bullet to kill another person,” he said in the 2020 documentary “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,” citing his own “religious commitment to the Prince of Peace.”
While Carter was busy brokering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and grappling with the Iran hostage crisis, however, a powerful new force emerged in American politics: the religious right.
The movement — promoted by fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell, a televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority — would sweep Ronald Reagan into office on a wave of staunch social conservatism.
Carter’s brand of Christian progressivism was quickly eclipsed by a conservative fervor on hot-button topics such as endorsing prayer in school and opposing abortion rights.
The religious right remains a major US political force, with more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestant voters who “frequently” attend religious services having voted for Donald Trump in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
– Sundays with Jimmy –
Carter taught on multiple weekends each month — before the coronavirus pandemic hit, anyway — at Maranatha Baptist Church, where a diverse crowd of hundreds filled the pews on Sunday mornings.
To guarantee a seat, attendees were advised to arrive five hours early, waiting in their cars near several rows of pecan trees as the Secret Service swept the perimeter.
After daybreak, all were drilled on protocol: Do not touch the aging president, do not engage him in conversation.
Jan Williams, who served as self-described drill sergeant, said Carter’s classes went from “a few visitors” in the beginning “up to 600 to 800 visitors.”
Standing outside the church, she told AFP how Carter, an avid woodworker, had asked how he could help Maranatha: “I said, can you make us some collection plates, made out of wood?”
He made four, one of which Williams overturned to reveal the carved initials J.C. — not, in this case, short for Jesus Christ.
Carter’s church was typical of small-town Baptist congregations: a red-brick building with a white steeple, and an interior decorated in various shades of green. A cotton field sprouted down the road.
His sermon was usually a melange of common decency, Jesus and the Gospel — and international human rights or current events.
“The main thing I get out of it personally, and I think what the audience gets out of it, is the relationship of biblical lessons or verses with current events or challenges or opportunities or fears or dreams in their own lives,” Carter explained in a video by publisher Simon & Schuster.
After church, Carter and his wife Rosalynn allowed visitors to take a picture beside them — a souvenir of their brief encounter with a president.
“It was him still being able to have a special moment with everybody who came,” Williams said.
– ‘Adultery in my heart’ –
Carter’s presidency was secular even if his faith was the basis for his personal worldviews.
A religious person “can’t divorce religious beliefs from public service,” the 39th president said in a speech to members of the Southern Baptist Brotherhood Commission in 1978.
“At the same time, of course, in public office you cannot impose your own religious beliefs on others.”
As a presidential candidate in 1976, the squeaky-clean Carter — perhaps looking to appear a little less holier-than-thou — granted an interview to Playboy magazine in which he famously confessed to having “looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”
The prim one-liner was widely mocked, but Carter won anyway.
In his 2018 book “Faith,” Carter described how he believed “Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world.”
“I’ve sought to carve out for myself a productive, and I hope useful, and certainly a gratifying life,” he told CBS that same year. “I’ve been very lucky.”
AFP
