Jimmy Carter, the 39th U.S. President, died on Sunday at the age of 100. Carter was a prominent advocate of faith and justice, regularly acting from his Baptist faith throughout his career as a politician and a humanitarian.
“Jimmy Carter’s importance to faith and public life was reintroducing into the public square the principles that animated nineteenth-century evangelicals: concern for the poor, racial equality, peacemaking, human rights and equality for women,” Randall Balmer, professor of religion at Dartmouth and author of Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, told Sojourners. “He did so as an avowed and unapologetic Baptist, which means that he respected the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.”
The former president’s death, confirmed by his son Chip Carter, was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Carter was born in 1924 and raised near Plains, Ga. His father farmed peanuts and his mother was a nurse. Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and later helped develop the Navy’s first nuclear submarines. After his graduation, he married Rosalynn Smith. The couple was married 77 years, the longest-married U.S. presidential couple in history. Rosalynn Carter died in November of 2023 at the age of 96.
Following his father’s death in 1953, Carter resigned from the Navy and returned to Sumter County, Ga., where he and Rosalynn revived the family farm. He became active in Georgia politics, serving the Sumter County Board of Education as a member and eventually its chairman. While in that role, Carter gradually became outspoken against segregation in the deep South and was the only prominent white man in Plains that refused to join the local “White Citizens’ Council” that formed to uphold racial hierarchy.
Carter served two terms in the Georgia Senate before serving as governor from 1971-75.
Carter, who was term-limited to four years as Georgia governor, ran for president in 1976. The New York Times described the surprise contender, and eventually winner of the Democratic candidacy, as having a “ready smile and indefatigable energy.” His “centrist political philosophy, with its moralistic, anti‐establishment, anti‐Washington overtones” was described as the surprise of the ’76 campaign.
Carter brought his self-described “born-again” evangelical faith to the forefront of his campaign. For more than 40 years, he taught Sunday school at the church he and Rosalynn attended, Maranatha Bible Church in Plains, Ga.
“To me, Jesus Christ is not an object to be worshipped but a person and a constant companion,” Carter wrote in his 2018 book Faith: A Journey For All. “I have no doubt that Jesus is living now, not simply that Jesus once upon a time existed. I look on him as the epitome of love, and of all that is good.”
While in office, Carter attended church services over 80 times (not including house meetings or worship services at the presidential retreat center Camp David). On his second day in office, Carter pardoned all Vietnam War draft evaders. In 1979, he installed solar panels at the White House as part of his efforts for clean energy.
Carter lost reelection to Ronald Reagan in 1980. In his post-presidential career, Carter was dedicated to human rights. He and Rosalynn founded the nonpartisan Carter Center in 1982, a global organization focused on peaceful conflict resolution, strengthening global democracy, and eliminating disease. The couple often volunteered to build homes with the Habitat for Humanity. According to Habitat, the Carters personally helped build, renovate, or repair 4,390 homes.
“I have learned that our greatest blessings come when we are able to improve the lives of others, and this is especially true when those others are desperately poor or in need,” Carter said of his volunteering at Habitat.
The political writer Gary Wills once referred to Carter as the “exception” to the rule that religion and politics are “mutually debasing.”
“His politics were informed by his theological insights: a regard for the poor and despised (he was the first U.S. president to take the Third World seriously); a sense of human limit (he did not take it for granted that Americans have a right to consume a disproportionate share of the world's goods); and a recognition of the humanity of others, even of enemies,” Wills wrote for Sojourners in 1988.
Carter often utilized his status as a religious figure to bolster his advocacy in the church and political life, lending his support — and belief in Jesus’ support — to women’s ordination and gay marriage. In 2000, Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention over their refusal of women pastors. In 2015, he told HuffPost that Jesus would have supported gay marriage.
“I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage, but that's just my own personal belief,” Carter said. “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.”
Carter, who opposed overturning the Roe ruling as president but was personally opposed to abortion, called his opposition to abortion the “only conflict” between his faith and politics.
“I have never believed that Jesus would be in favor of abortion, unless it was the result of rape or incest, or the mother’s life was in danger,” Carter told the Times in 2015. “That’s been the only conflict I’ve had in my career between political duties and Christian faith.”
Carter campaigned on nuclear nonproliferation and continued to warn against nuclear weapons after leaving office. Carter warned against nuclear weapons and in 2006 criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid.
“When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa,” Carter said.
In 2019, after a fall that fractured his pelvis, Carter taught a Sunday school class on the book of Job. USA Today reported that Carter shared in the class his perspective on death and discussed his 2015 diagnosis of brain cancer.
“I didn’t ask God to let me live, but I just asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death. And I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death,” Carter said, according to USA Today. “It didn’t really matter to me whether I died or lived, except I was going to miss my family and miss the work at the Carter Center, and miss teaching Sunday school sometimes.”
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