Can a good man be president?

(RNS) — My homeschool American history textbook was a trip, and it saw the arc of the United States bending toward fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The narrative of America as God’s favorite country is not without its hiccups, and to the hyperconservative evangelical mind, one major bump was the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the last true evangelical. 

It’s ironic. Carter was a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher from “real America,” who devoted his life to serving others in whatever capacity was available to him. America was reeling from Watergate, its institutional trust in a tailspin, and here came a plainspoken outsider who didn’t look like the kind of guy who would even get a “Deep Throat” reference. America was ready for a Mister Rogers presidency, and Carter fit the bill. 

But like Fred Rogers, Carter’s everyman charm belied furious conviction. Progressive evangelicalism, while never exactly a popular movement, was in the middle of a post-Vietnam War surge, and Carter ran with many of its most countercultural tenets. In 1974, Carter delivered an extemporaneous speech at the University of Georgia Law School that blew the doors off the place, decrying the poisonous influence of wealth in politics, of corporate interests, of the justice system’s bias against the poor. Hunter S. Thompson was there and would later write that “I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more.”

Carter ran on that speech, championing racial, gender and economic justice. It was the sort of stuff that would get you called “woke” today, but for Carter, it was Sunday School 101. The Southern Baptist Convention was already in a rightward tilt, but Carter was old enough to remember when being an evangelical meant social concern. He attributed his sense of justice to the protest songs of Bob Dylan and the progressive teachings of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. 

The policy implications of those teachings (both Dylan’s and Neibuhr’s) are well summarized by the Chicago Declaration for Evangelical Social Concern, a winning 1973 call for American evangelicals to take up the cause of the poor and marginalized, and to stand against the cancerous creep of racism, militarization and economic inequality. As the declaration proclaims: 

We acknowledge that God requires love. But we have not demonstrated the love of God to those suffering social abuses. We acknowledge that God requires justice. But we have not proclaimed or demonstrated his justice to an unjust American society. Although the Lord calls us to defend the social and economic rights of the poor and oppressed, we have mostly remained silent. We deplore the historic involvement of the church in America with racism and the conspicuous responsibility of the evangelical community for perpetuating the personal attitudes and institutional structures that have divided the body of Christ along color lines. Further, we have failed to condemn the exploitation of racism at home and abroad by our economic system.

“We proclaim no new gospel, but the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ who, through the power of the Holy Spirit, frees people from sin so that they might praise God through works of righteousness,” the declaration concluded. Carter took it upon himself to turn those works of righteousness into public policy. His success was uneven.

Can a good man be president? It’s a question worth pondering. The challenges are enormous and, as Carter’s own theology teaches, people are so frail. As president, Carter accomplished a great deal more than he is given credit for and was a far more savvy politician than the subsequent smear campaign would lead you to believe. He was an effective environmentalist, a fierce advocate for women and people of color and, most consequentially, an absolute giant of international diplomacy. He spent decades as a favored punching bag of both Republicans and Democrats who could not have brokered a fraction of the peace deals and diplomatic relations he did. Even his failure to secure the release of hostages in Iran, long seen as the nail in the coffin of his reelection bid, is alleged to be at least partly the fault of Reagan campaign interference. 

In this Oct. 28, 1980, file photo, President Jimmy Carter, left, and Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan shake hands in Cleveland before debating before a nationwide television audience. (AP Photo/staff, file)

But Carter also highlighted just how difficult it is for sound Christian doctrine to score favorable public approval numbers. Carter thought giving the Panama Canal back to Panamanians was the right thing to do but, to his critics, it looked like surrendering a high-value property. Carter thought pardoning Vietnam draft dodgers was a gracious gesture, but his critics saw it as coddling anti-capitalist forces. It took less than a year for his approval rating to dip to 28% from its inauguration high of 70%. His successes couldn’t escape the shadow of an anemic economy and he was frequently bullied by his own party.

And then there was the Moral Majority. 

Jerry Falwell had spent years working with other high-powered Southern Baptists to build a durable evangelical voting bloc. Their early attempts were frustrated both by the unpopularity of their core issues (defending segregation) and the prevailing winds of the sexual revolution. But the religious right finally landed on a galvanizing issue in abortion and, just as importantly, a rallying figure in Ronald Reagan. Reagan married Christian lingo to a muscular rhetoric in a way that made him an electoral juggernaut and has been the blueprint for Republican politicians ever since. 

Carter only landed about 30% of the evangelical vote in 1980, compared with Reagan’s 60%. There was a sense among Americans that the tough-talking Reagan was the “real Christian” and Carter was, at best, a misguided phony and, at worst, a traitor. Carter served as “an example of a Christian whose mind was unrenewed by Scripture,” surmised Stephen McDowell in his book “America’s Providential History.” “And thus, reasoned and governed from a ‘humanistic’ worldview.”

Reagan’s hijacking of Carter’s evangelical voting bloc serves as a microcosm for the Republican Party’s absorption of American evangelicalism. The seeds for today’s GOP — fully in the thrall of a tough-talking celebrity who sprinkles some evangelical vocabulary over an endless invective of victimization — were sown here. 

Former President Jimmy Carter. (Photo by Sara Sanders Mitchell)

Carter took all this very tough. He and his wife, Rosalynn, moved back to Plains, Georgia, and set about doing the humanitarian work that would eventually define their legacy even more than the presidency did. Through his work at Habitat for Humanity and his own Carter Center, this former president seemed to find it far easier to live out the teachings of Jesus when not boxed in by the demands of the White House and its attending ethical knots. 

He seemed to acknowledge as much in a 2005 interview with GQ. “If I were a purist in my faith, I couldn’t hold public office and preside over a nation that honored abortion,” he said. In that interview, he spoke thoughtfully about the tension between his personal faith and his oath to uphold the laws of a country that often ran counter to the call of Jesus. At least part of the way he dealt with that was through humility, saying: “I accept the fact that some of my beliefs could be wrong.”

“There may be some fallibilities in my own personal beliefs, sure,” he continued. “I can’t change my mind just because I think I might be wrong. My present beliefs have been evolved over 75 years of thought and study, analysis, teaching.”

Part of that evolution involved leaving the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, citing the SBC’s treatment of women as his primary motive for severing the tie. But of course, the SBC left him long before he left it, beelining toward the hard right along with the rest of evangelicalism and, indeed, the country at large. But Carter stayed steadfast to the end, fighting for peace, standing with the marginalized and seeking out practical solutions to major problems, and doing it all in as much obscurity as could ever be afforded someone who spent four years as the most powerful man alive. 

And maybe this is a lesson of the Carter administration, that true Christianity often finds itself drawn away from places of power and into the wilderness, away from the spotlight and down in the muck. Maybe his single term was at least partly the halls of power expelling a foreign agent, or God maneuvering a faithful servant to a place where he could do the most good. There are very few Christians like Carter, now or in any era, but his life is a testament to an impact that far outweighs their number.

(Tyler Huckabee is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and dogs. Read more of his writing at his Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)