Two years ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with a representative of a national prayer organization in Washington DC while attending that year’s Mere Anglicanism conference in South Carolina. While we were talking, I wanted to ask him a pointed question, “Are politicians sincere in their faith?” A politician, almost by definition, is someone who lies more than they breathe, and it can be very hard to tell when a self-described “Christian” politician sincerely cares about their faith or just wants to virtue signal.
To my surprise, he confirmed that plenty of politicians behind the scenes are quite sincere in their faith. He didn’t name names, but given his proximity to the DC establishment, one can imagine that a handful of major congressmen and presidential candidates have shaken his hands.
I mention this because former President Jimmy Carter, frequently praised as a genuinely devout political leader, died late last month. The 39th President of the United States entered hospice on February 18, 2023, before passing away 22 months later on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100. He leaves a complicated legacy behind as one of the most controversial presidents of our era.
You can call Carter many things, but the funniest summation of his presidency came from The Simpsons. When the town of Springfield can’t afford an Abraham Lincoln statue, they are forced to settle for a Jimmy Carter statue. The angry crowd declares him “history’s greatest monster” and proceeds to riot—many such cases.
This kind of “history’s greatest monster” rhetoric frequently arises when discussing presidents. President Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, and Johnson all evoke similar reactions. President Carter was no different. Many have noted the similarities between President Biden and Carter; both presided over military disasters, high inflation, and pushing tolerance from the bully pulpit—a legacy many look back upon negatively. Both were also stalwarts of progressive Christianity, with Biden remaining a loyal if heterodox Roman Catholic who attends Mass more frequently than his contemporaries.
What has made President Carter interesting in recent months was contemplating the nature of his public religious life. He was a leading figure in the New Baptist Covenant, a progressive breakaway group from the Southern Baptist Convention. He formally broke away from the Southern Baptists in 2000, preferring the “moderate” Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and condemning the convention’s rigidly conservative stances on women’s ordination and homosexuality. He still served as a Deacon in his local Baptist Church for years afterward and wrote several books on religion.
While I don’t support all of the late president’s political motivations and interpretations of scripture, I’ve come to respect the late president’s faith more than I would have before. After his hospice announcement, I bought a copy of his 2018 book Faith: A Journey For All, where he reflected on the nature of faith and how it has played out in the lives of people around him. To my surprise, my primary takeaway was that the late president was a sincerely good and kind person (if also “history’s greatest monster”).
I tend to think the same thing as well about President George W. Bush, a deeply unpopular figure who wore his faith openly and campaigned on it as a strategy to appeal to the remnants of Reagan-era religious-right voters, all while promoting wars and overseeing domestic infighting. By all rights, President Bush was also a similarly rare pious figure in his private life, even if he erroneously called upon Christ at the bully pulpit to defend his policies.
President Bush may well have been a poor leader for an important historical moment. However, he has publicly owned the consequences of his mistakes more deeply than any recent American president. He became a painter and began meeting with wounded war veterans from his administration to paint somewhat ugly and amateurish portraits of them. The general consensus on the paintings was negative, but the effort spoke for itself. He seemed to grasp the reality of his actions and wanted to connect with the people he hurt. Guilt is often the sign of a healthy conscience, something most politicians are too egotistical to express.
The same is true for President Carter. Indeed, one could treat Carter and Bush as admirable yet ultimately failed attempts to model a kind of “middlebrow Protestant” public spirit tied to a more evangelistic faith. As he writes in his book, Faith: A Journey for All, faith is something that must be lived out. Among the dozens of anecdotes he tells, he briefly discusses Jerome and Joann Ethredge, a couple from his church who were called to open up a small Christian library in West Africa. Through Baptist charitable support and efforts to open freshwater supplies in local villages, their efforts paid off with 81 new church plants and more than 5,000 new Baptist congregants.
The Carter Family are very open about their active service, donating a week per year for nearly 40 years volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and helping build homes for poor people. A great deal of Faith impresses the president’s belief that faith must be lived out following the Epistle of St. James, “What good is it if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?”
Carter’s reflections on faith are fascinating, but like many things in modern politics, they are flawed by an incestuous relationship between religion and partisanship. The former president’s morals as he presents them are deeply ingrained with his partisan priorities as a Democratic politician and an advocate of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and he is prone to moral relativistic statements that place the Bible on equal standing with the Koran and the laws of the United Nations. The reader can’t help but also walk away with a sense of the former president’s bitterness about the 1980 election and the state of the world in the past five decades.
It is clear Carter was quite frustrated with the conservative moral majority of his time and disinterested in what he saw as their cruelty towards women and minorities. This is understandable, but entire sections of the book are also dedicated to pontifications about declining American infrastructure, climate change, and the evils of the National Rifle Association—which feel out of place in a book about faith, but make sense when one intermingles their moral assumptions on gun violence with those of religious duty.
For whatever one can say about Jimmy Carter’s politics (and there is much to be said), his particular brand of faith remained sincere. He was among the last vanguard of an older order of Protestant moral leaders to emerge during the 20th century who encouraged ecumenism, tolerance, and a pragmatic approach to faith.
As Compact editor Matthew Schmitz writes for First Things, “middlebrow Protestants embraced a pragmatic creed that saw Christianity less as a summons to individual salvation or social transformation than as a guide to living a better life—as a spouse, parent, and member of the community. Theirs was a tolerant, optimistic faith. It placed less focus on doctrinal points than on a certain cultural sensibility rooted in the mores of the Midwest, where many middlebrow Protestants had their roots.”
This approach to faith has certainly fallen out of favor in recent decades, harmed by ideological capture on both sides of the aisle. Bush and Carter never fully divorced their faith from their politics and it was to their detriment. Theirs was likely a failed experiment, but a nostalgic one in light of the growing influence of post-Christianity on both sides of the aisle.
Carter seemed to be a genuinely decent and gracious man for all his flaws; one of the few recent presidential politicians to consider what it means to authentically live one’s faith. He did so in a manner many of his fellow Baptists wouldn’t approve of and it is clear his life mission wasn’t fully lived out with success—there but for the grace of God go I. Who among us is ready to stand before his creator knowing the weight of our failures?
The “middlebrow Protestants” represented the heart of a culture working through its contradictions and failures. One must wonder whether a post-Christian America will work through its own so gracefully or earnestly.
