This article explores the profound influence of Jimmy Carter's Christian faith on his life, political career, and humanitarian work. It highlights the media's often overlooked aspect of Carter's faith and how it shaped his views on issues like abortion and poverty.
It is impossible to understand the former US president without taking seriously his faith, which underpinned his whole life, both public and private. Former US president Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, in 1996, the year after his trip to Co Waterford. Photograph: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times in 1995 at St Anne’s Chapel, Ballylaneen, was much more astonishing than the news that Donald Trump would like to annex Canada and Greenland and rename the Gulf of Mexico.
My parents were married in the little Waterford village of Ballylaneen, or Bally, as the locals call it. It is somewhat surreal to imagine burly, black-suited Secret Service agents cramming into the pews of this lovely but small country chapel., and his wife, Eileen. Queally had met Carter after a recent expansion of his business empire to Georgia, including buying a Christmas tree farm long before Taylor Swift immortalised one in song. Carter apparently wished to attend church during his visit. One of the oldest Baptist churches in Ireland, dating from the 1600s, is to be found on Catherine Street in Waterford city, but the Queallys took him to Mass. The Carters’ Baptist faith was central to everything they did, but the media’s blind spot regarding religious faith was evident in the way recent tributes often skirted around or just ignored this reality. When Carter made his bid to become president in the mid-1970s, this blind spot mostly emerged as bafflement. Terry Mattingly, formerly a nationally syndicated US religion reporter, describes how ABC News anchor, Howard K Smith, reacted in 1976 to Carter’s explanation in 1976 that he was a born-again Christian. Smith was nonplussed. In tones more appropriate to an investigation into Martian aliens, he concluded the interview by saying that ABC News was investigating born again Christians. At the time, some 40 per cent of the US would have identified as born again.It’s a pity more of us don’t identify with Scrooge, the skinflint who was capable of changeIt is hard for us now to imagine a time when someone like Carter could hold evangelical Baptist beliefs and be elected as a Democratic president. It was ironic that when Ronald Reagan’s advisers realised they needed white Evangelical support for the much more worldly and secular Reagan to be elected, one of the issues they focused on was abortion. This had a profound effect on the trajectory of US politics, to the extent that evangelical is no longer shorthand for born again but for white Trump supporters. Carter was personally anti-abortion but believed in the separation of church and state. Therefore, he sought to decrease abortions by addressing root causes such as poverty, not by rendering them illegal. For example, he eased adoption processes and expanded the Women and Infant nutrition programmes. But he also signed the Hyde Amendment into law, which forbade federal funding for abortion. In 2012 he went further and called on the Democratic Party to embrace his own personal position. He wanted a ban on abortion except in the cases of rape, incest and threat to the life of the mother because he thought it was right but also because he could see how anti-abortion people were being forced out of the Democratic Party. In 2018 in a commencement address at Liberty University, he told the assembled students that he used to think that the disparity between the wealth of the rich and the hardship endured by the poor was the world’s greatest problem. But he had come to believe that it was how 160 million women and girls were missing because the higher value placed on sons meant girls were either aborted or strangled at birth.-supported Ethiopia Public Health Training Initiative trained more than 26,000 health service professionals to serve 90 per cent of the Ethiopian population. The centre also averted at least 80 million cases of the devastating The liberal establishment preferred to ignore the Carters’ openly professed Christian motivation for their peacemaking and development efforts. However, as Evangelicals became more locked into the GOP, some openly declared that the Carters were too liberal to be authentic Christians. He was viewed with most suspicion by those Evangelicals who attended church rarely, if at all, and whose evangelical credentials consisted mainly of being staunch Trump supporters. Meanwhile, Carter continued to read his Bible, pray many times a day and teach Sunday school once a month. Their church, Maranatha Baptist in Plains, only had about 25 core members but the congregation swelled to hundreds when Carter taught. It often included Jewish scholars and Christians of all denominations. Perhaps even more impressive is that the Carters also participated until relatively recently in the church’s lawn-cutting and bathroom cleaning rotas. Carter was not a plaster saint. He could be irritatingly self-righteous. His work with Habitat for Humanity, where he built houses alongside Rosalynn, may have smacked of paternalism. It is not necessary to agree with everything that he believed in order to admit that it is impossible to understand him without taking his faith seriously. It underpinned his every act of service, his commitment to democracy and international peace, and indeed, his whole life
JIMMY CARTER FAITH CHRISTIANITY POLITICS ABORTION HUMANITARIANISM PEACE
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