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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter makes a short speech from the stage during the Billy Graham Library Dedication Service on May 31, 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina. / Credit: Davis Turner/Getty Images
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 29, 2024 / 17:33 pm (CNA).
A lifelong Baptist, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who died at age 100 on Sunday, held views that differed from Catholic teaching on a number of controversial social and doctrinal issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage, and the ordination of female pastors.
Nonetheless, 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.
In a chapter titled “My Traditional Christian Faith” in his 2005 book “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis,” Carter pointed out that “most of the rudiments of my faith in Christ as Savior and the Son of God are still shared without serious question by Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Copts, Seventh-day Adventists, and many other religious people.”
Speaking about his Baptist convictions, in that same book Carter stated that “as evangelicals, we were committed to a strong global mission to share our Christian faith with all other people, without prejudice or discrimination.”
Throughout his adult life, Carter demonstrated a personal commitment to evangelization by witnessing publicly to his faith, participating in missions, and most famously through teaching Sunday school for nearly four decades on most Sundays, year in and year out, at his hometown Baptist church in Plains, Georgia.
Faith and works
En outre, le travail humanitaire de Carter consistant à construire des maisons pour les pauvres chaque année pendant près de 40 ans en tant que volontaire d’Habitat pour l’humanité faisait partie intégrante de sa foi vécue.
La sœur de Carter, Ruth Carter Stapleton, décédée en 1983, était elle-même une évangéliste, et le 39e président lui a attribué une influence majeure pour avoir anéanti sa foi et sa pratique après sa première défaite au poste de gouverneur de Géorgie en 1966.
La même année, Carter a aidé à mener une croisade évangélique de Billy Graham dans son comté natal. Plus tard, en tant que gouverneur de Géorgie, il a également été président honoraire de la croisade de Graham à Atlanta.
For Catholics, Carter was also celebrated as the first American president to welcome a pope to the White House. That milestone came in 1979 during newly elected Pope John Paul II’s first papal trip to the United States.
Selon un National Archives summary of their conversation, the pope and president connected over their shared faith in Christ. The National Archives said that “these two deeply religious men — each at the pinnacle of power in their respective spheres — agreed to speak not as diplomats but as Christian brothers.”
Abortion stance
Although Carter expressed a personal aversion to abortion, as governor of Georgia and then as president he supported legal abortion in accordance with the then-recent Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. He also believed that abortion should be available to victims of rape and incest.
In a 1976 NBC News interview, then-candidate Carter said: “Under the Supreme Court ruling [Roe v. Wade], I will do anything I can as president to minimize the need for abortions. I think abortions are wrong and I think that we ought to have a comprehensive effort made by the president and Congress with a nationwide law perhaps, adequately financed to give sex instruction and access to contraceptives for those who believe in their use, better adoptive procedures.”
As president, in 1977 Carter signed into law the Hyde Amendment, a policy that bans federal tax dollars from being used for abortions, except to save the life of the mother, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape. Since being signed into law, the Hyde Amendment has saved over 2.5 million unborn lives, according to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
In recent years, Carter expressed support for homosexual marriage. In a 2018 Huffington Post interview the then-93-year-old former president said he believed “Jesus would approve of gay marriage” and that “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.”
Steady stream of faith-based books
Carter authored 30 books, many of which have been directly related to his Christian faith, including his 1996 tome “Living Faith, Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith” (1997), “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis” (2005), and “Faith: A Journey for All” (2018).
In this last book, 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 affirmed his belief “that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing.”
L’expression sans vergogne par Carter de sa foi et de son inspiration chrétiennes a été considérée comme une bouffée d’air frais et une aubaine pour sa candidature à la présidence à la suite de la honte et de la corruption du scandale du Watergate qui a conduit à la démission du président Richard Nixon en 1974.
“I will never lie to you,” Carter memorably promised during his successful 1976 campaign.
China breakthrough
Parmi les réalisations les plus remarquables de Carter pour faire progresser la liberté religieuse et rouvrir un espace pour l’évangélisation figurent ses négociations avec le vice-premier ministre chinois de l’époque, Deng Xiaoping, qui ont conduit au rétablissement, en décembre 1978, de relations diplomatiques complètes entre les États-Unis et la Chine.
As Carter later recounted, as part of the deal he pressed for the Chinese government “to let people worship freely, to own Bibles, and for our missionaries to return.” Deng ceded the first two requests but not the third. Carter recalls that when he and his wife, Rosalynn, subsequently visited China in 1981, “there was a new law that guaranteed freedom of worship, Bibles were plentiful, and overcrowded Christian churches were thriving.”
After being defeated in the 1980 presidential election by pro-life candidate Ronald Reagan, Carter and Rosalynn, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, started the Carter Center, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to combating disease and promoting health, peace, and democracy worldwide.
For his efforts in advancing peace and human rights, including the historic 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt, in 2002 Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Core Christian faith
In his 2018 book “Faith: A Journey for All,” Carter recounted that “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 savior and striving to have the human qualities demonstrated by Jesus.”
Carter went on to extol the Lord of his life as “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.”
“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,” Carter wrote in his 1997 book “Sources of Strength.” “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 Savior.”
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