The Tragic Legacy of Jimmy Carter

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday at age 100, a beloved figure for many on the evangelical and secular left. I wish Carter’s family comfort as they grieve, and I think Carter can be lauded for his humanitarian efforts, his efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East, and for what I take was his sincere (if liberal) faith.

But some of the retrospectives in the Christian community have bordered on hagiography. Chief among them are a piece written by Asbury University historian David R. Swartz in Christianity Today (CT) and another essay written by CT Editor-in-Chief Russell Moore for The Atlantic. Both articles elide the serious problems with Carter’s record, problems that faithful Christians need to face if we don’t want to keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

Both Swartz and Moore seem intent on chiding evangelical voters for abandoning their support of Carter after his first term as president, trading in the devout Carter for “a twice-divorced Hollywood actor” (Swartz) who “didn’t go to church—much less teach Sunday school” (Moore). The negative comparison between the ultra-devout and saintly Carter and the supposedly undevout Reagan is a common trope voiced by left-wing evangelicals as secularists, but it happens to be false. Thanks to the meticulous work of scholars like Paul Kengor, we now know that Reagan was a serious evangelical Christian in his personal life who even worried about the salvation of his youngest son. 

Contrary to Moore, Reagan attended church for most of his life, although rarely while president, especially after his attempted assassination. Kengor explains: “Reagan rarely went to church as president because he thought it was a giant burden to the entire congregation, which it was, an enormous burden. The SWAT team would have to be on the roof with sniper rifles. All of the side entrances to the church would be closed, and when you walked in, the Secret Service guys would frisk you.”

Contrary to Swartz, Reagan was divorced once, not twice, a pretty basic fact that would have been easy to verify (after I pointed out the error on Twitter, Swartz’s article was silently updated by CT). By the way, the divorce was demanded by Wyman, not Reagan, after Wyman apparently had an affair. Reagan didn’t want the divorce and was brokenhearted by it.

Not that I think Christians should pick politicians mainly because of their personal devoutness. In my view, they should pick politicians primarily because of their policies and public actions. 

That’s a truth many evangelicals came to realize after Carter’s first term. Swartz’s article alludes to some of the differences of opinion between orthodox evangelicals and Carter, but more as throwaways. For example, he glancingly mentions the White House Conference on Families initiated by Carter, but doesn’t do much at all to help people understand why evangelicals were so upset about this event. Many involved with the Conference pushed to redefine “family” in a way that was incompatible with Christian teaching. According to Christian pro-family activist Beverly LaHaye, “We came to realize that this White House Conference was really geared up toward changing the definition of the family. It wanted to include any two people who chose to live together, regardless of their sexual orientation.” (Quoted in William Martin, With God on Our Side, p. 178) The effort to redefine the family was thwarted, but the Conference still approved recommendations promoting abortion and the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment,” whose language was so broad that traditional evangelicals feared (rightly) that it would require same-sex marriages and much more. 

Meanwhile, according to the Conference final report (pp. 158-159) one of the experts tapped “to help create a factual framework” for the Conference pooh-poohed as a myth that America was facing “a period of decline and family breakdown” because of the rise of single-parent households. She likewise debunked the idea that “the increase in divorce” was “proof of family breakdown.” These efforts to deny reality provided plenty of legitimate reasons for evangelicals to be skeptical of this initiative by Carter.

During his presidency, Carter also appointed a number of extreme cultural progressives to the federal courts. He tapped ACLU activist Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and he appointed Stephen Reinhardt, later known as the “liberal lion” of federal appellate courts. Reinhardt tried to create a constitutional right for assisted suicide and struck down a ban on partial birth abortions.

Swartz describes Carter as “theologically conservative” early in his article.  Yet not one word is spent by either Swartz or Moore discussing Carter’s advocacy of gay marriage in more recent years. “Jesus would approve of gay marriage,” Carter insisted in 2018. By the end of his life, Carter definitely did not embrace a conservative theology. But exposing that truth apparently didn’t fit the narrative that CT wanted to offer. So it was suppressed. 

Finally, it ought to be noted how hard the CT piece goes to excuse Carter’s well-recognized failures as a president. Swartz suggests that Carter’s disastrous presidency was foisted on him by outside events over which he could do nothing: “Events beyond his control—notably a stagnant economy, high inflation, and diplomatic crises in Afghanistan and Iran—limited his effectiveness in office and sabotaged his campaign for reelection.” This is another standard talking point by progressives. But it’s highly debatable. Anyone who knows how Carter facilitated the Islamists’ takeover of Iran, or how his weak foreign policy emboldened Soviet aggression, will realize that his disastrous presidency had a lot to do with his own policies. 

It’s appropriate to laud Carter for the good things he did at the time of his passing. But a serious Christian assessment of Carter’s legacy would offer something more than hagiography. One reason it’s important to talk about Carter’s real record is because his rise to fame and power is symptomatic of an unhealthy tendency in evangelical Christianity even today. 

Many evangelicals still embrace public figures who wear their faith on their sleeve, paying almost no attention to their actual policy views and actions. When Christians do that, they get politicians and public officials like Jimmy Carter... or, more recently, Francis Collins. In my upcoming book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity (out Feb. 3), I will discuss how damaging this has been for our culture and for Christianity. But it won’t stop unless people recognize it is a problem.