The death of a president

James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th President of the United States, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga., at age 100. Carter, who introduced himself to American voters as simply “Jimmy Carter,” lived longer than any U.S. president and became the first to reach 100 years old. Given the fact that he had entered hospice care nearly two years ago, Carter’s centennial birthday in October came with an unusual assortment of commemorations and historical reviews. Time does seem to mellow powerful memories—even powerful political memories. That is especially true when most Americans alive today were not yet born when Carter left the White House, overwhelmingly rejected by voters in the 1980 presidential election.

Jimmy Carter was the first American president to have been born in a hospital setting. His emergence in Georgia came as the nation had entered the modern age and won “the war to end all wars.” The 20th century was well underway, and the nation was changing. Carter was born in the South—a fact that was hardly auspicious in political terms at that time. Famously, he eventually gained admission to the U.S. Naval Academy and upon graduation entered service on a nuclear submarine under the legendary Adm. Hyman Rickover, seen as one of the powerful leaders of the nuclear Navy. Carter would leave the Navy and return to Georgia to rescue his father’s peanut farm and business. His young wife, Rosalynn, later confessed her disappointment in her husband’s choice to abandon a naval career for life back in rural Georgia. She feared boredom. Her life did not remain boring for long.

Carter developed a keen political interest and plotted a way to reach high political office. His own family seemed less than enthusiastic. Later, when he was serving as governor of Georgia, Carter announced at a family meal that he had decided to run for president. “President of what?” his sharp-tongued mother, known as Miss Lillian, asked. She soon found out, and so did the Democratic Party and then the nation.

Carter is seen by many on the American political left as a failed liberal. He has also been hailed as a man of strict personal morality. Compared to more recent arrivals on the political scene and compared to the sexual exploits of someone like President John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter was a choirboy. He was famous for promising Americans, “I will never lie to you,” but Carter was hardly an exemplar of political truth-telling in some chapters of his political life. His successful run for the governor’s office in Georgia came only after he accused his Democratic primary opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, of being too liberal on issues of race and had cozied up to Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. Once in office, he instantly turned into a liberal on the issue and was understood to have basically pulled the wool over the eyes of Georgia’s voters.

Carter had his eye on the White House when no one thought he was a credible candidate. But the downfall of Republican President Richard Nixon, persistent inflation, and a general urge to “throw the bums out” added momentum to Carter’s indefatigable campaigning in the 1976 Democratic primaries and led to him astoundingly winning his party’s nomination. Then, in an extremely close general election vote, Carter won the White House over incumbent President Gerald Ford.

In office, Carter started with great promise, but it was quickly apparent that he was a better candidate than president. He tried to deflate the presidency itself, famously refusing to allow the U.S. Navy Band to play “Hail to the Chief” on formal occasions. He soon discovered that Americans like a president who seems to understand the presidency.

Carter faced continuing economic pressures and an energy crisis that exposed a national weakness. He often appeared to scold the nation, as if Americans expected too much and should settle for less. He advised putting on sweaters rather than raising the thermostat and modeled the same in the White House. But Carter soon learned that Americans like political expertise that wears a business suit, not Oval Office moralizing that, in truth, demoralized the nation.

Jimmy Carter was the first Southerner to win the White House in decades and his combination of social liberalism and economic discipline rankled the nation. In terms of foreign policy, he is rightly credited with using personal diplomacy to achieve a genuine and lasting achievement in the Camp David Accords that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. But Carter, and with him the American nation, looked increasingly weak on the world stage. Then, in 1979, came the Iran hostage crisis, when the militant Islamic regime in Tehran took 66 Americans captive at the U.S. Embassy. A disastrously failed hostage rescue attempt on April 24, 1980, only added to the perception that Carter was a failure. Months later, Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House in a landslide. Carter had been wounded by an insurgent challenge for the 1980 nomination within his own party, with liberal icon and Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts running against him. But it was Reagan who delivered the knockout blow. Carter never got over the loss.

Reagan’s election also represented tectonic shifts in the political landscape. Carter ran for office as a born-again evangelical in 1976. At the time, he was a famous Southern Baptist layman. It is often assumed that Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, but he lost that count by more than 3 million votes when he successfully ran against President Ford in the general election. He then lost the evangelical vote by an apparent landslide in the 1980 election against Reagan. The issues had become that clear.

Carter was far too socially liberal to maintain the evangelical vote. A White House Conference on Families revealed his administration’s embrace of a far more liberal agenda. Carter said he personally opposed abortion but accepted the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and basically advocated for its guarantee of a woman’s right to kill her unborn child. His administration signaled advances on what are now known as LGBTQ issues.

Jimmy Carter, along with his wife Rosalynn, spent decades after their White House years working on humanitarian projects all over the world. They made major advances against the blight of Guinea Worm Disease. Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. At the same time, he broke the protocols for former presidents (and may have broken the law) when he repeatedly criticized the foreign policy decisions of his successors.

Carter opposed the conservative movement that emerged within the Southern Baptist Convention about the time he entered the White House. He assumed positions that were far more liberal than the SBC, and the Carters loudly (and repeatedly) distanced themselves from the denomination. His view of the Bible’s inspiration and authority were more liberal or neo-orthodox than Southern Baptists, and on issues like abortion (and eventually homosexuality), the Carters dropped their Southern Baptist identity in a series of public actions.

I had a long conversation with the former president in 2012 for my program, Thinking in Public. In the interview, Carter spoke of the change in his understanding of moral issues like abortion and homosexuality and told me, “I know what I’ve just explained to you might be somewhat controversial, but it’s the way I feel.” Just three years later, he told another interviewer, “I believe Jesus would approve same-sex marriage.” Seriously. Carter revealed an inordinate confidence in how he personally felt and how he personally imagined Jesus—while rejecting the clear teachings of Scripture.

You can count on the mainstream media devoting hours of coverage to the death of President Carter, along with piles upon piles of commentary and assessment. Already some are arguing that Carter was, counter to most previous judgments, an unappreciated success during his years in office. Historians will claim that the verdict on the Carter presidency remains unsettled. But the most important verdict on a presidency is made by voters, and they conclusively settled that argument in 1980.

But the dignity and greatness of the American presidency is never more evident than in the process of national recognition and in the formalities that surround a former president’s death. By any measure, Jimmy Carter lived one of the strategic lives of our times, and he was, after all, elected president of the United States. There are political arguments to be had and historical debates that will go on and on, but Christians understand that the final verdict—and the only verdict that really matters—is before the throne of God, where all of us will one day stand. Sadly, you are not likely to hear that truth in the national ceremonies soon to come.