Former US President Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, had a strong Christian faith which motivated him in all he did.
In his final book, Faith – A Journey for All (2018), Carter wrote: ‘I consider myself to be an evangelical Christian … the basic elements of Christianity apply personally to me, shape my attitude and my actions, and give me a joyful and positive life, with purpose.’
He also stated, in the same work: ‘People in my Bible class often ask what it means to be a Christian. My best explanation is that a Christian is a person professing Jesus Christ as personal saviour and striving to have the human qualities demonstrated by Jesus.’
Jesus, he wrote, is ‘both God and man, all-powerful but gentle and loving, all-knowing, compassionate, suffering, despised, burdened with the sin of others, abandoned by his followers, publicly executed but resurrected, and now worshipped by billions of believers throughout the world. Personal faith in Christ and a special reverence for him help us comprehend God’s transcendent love’.
His experience of racial segregation was strongly formative in how he put his faith into practice. ‘Carter grew up amid racial segregation and inequality, and he concluded that the white evangelical churches of his region were mostly on the wrong side of Black Americans’ struggle for justice,’ US magazine Christianity Today reported in October 2024.
At various points his faith departed from several evangelical touchstones. For example, ‘for Carter… Biblical inerrancy was a non-issue,’ the same article stated. ‘Perhaps the Bible did contain some internal contradictions that could not be harmonized, he decided, and perhaps parts of the Bible did need to be reinterpreted in the light of modern science. But that really didn’t matter as long as the general narrative of Jesus’ life was historically correct.’
And in 2018, he expressed approval for same-sex marriage. ‘I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else,’ according to website thehill.com.
However, on abortion, Carter was quoted as saying: ‘I have a hard time believing that Jesus would approve abortions unless it was because of rape or incest or if the mother’s life was in danger… I’ve had that struggle, but my oath of office was to obey the Constitution and the laws of this country as interpreted as the Supreme Court [after the then-extant landmark pro-abortion Roe v Wade ruling], so I went along with that.’
This mix of the orthodox and less orthodox is seen in Carter’s writings.
In his 1997 book, Sources of Strength, he wrote: ‘Convinced as we are that the miracle of Christ’s resurrection really happened some 2,000 years ago, we must consider this the most important event in the history of the universe. For us, it means that Christ still lives, that his spirit is still with us, and that we can build our lives around him as our Saviour.’
But in his 2018 book, Faith – A journey for all, he says: ‘It is urgent that humans take a new look at the rapidly growing need for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Ten Commandments, the Koran, or the teachings of Jesus Christ and to see if these visions of improved human interrelationships might be used to meet the challenges of the present moment and evolve a future of peaceful coexistence, based on faith in each other.’
Daniel K. Williams of Ashland University concluded in Christianity Today: ‘Functionally, Carter’s faith had more in common with mainline Protestantism than with late 20th- or early 21st-century American evangelicalism – and evangelicals weren’t incorrect when they observed that difference.
‘But Carter was also a lifelong Baptist who believed in born-again conversion, a personal relationship with Jesus, and the need to share one’s faith with others. He always spoke of faith with an evangelical accent, and despite his differences with more conservative Christians, he cherished a love for the same Saviour.’
And a Catholic News Agency obituary declared: 'Perhaps more than any other president in American history, a clear and consistent profession of Christian faith, both in word and deed, characterized Carter throughout his life.'
