At a campaign rally in Winston-Salem on the eve of the 1976 North Carolina Democratic primary, a voter asked then-candidate Jimmy Carter if he was a “born-again” Christian. Carter, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, responded that he was “born again,” sending a legion of journalists from outside the Bible Belt to their Rolodexes to find out what on earth he was talking about.
Throughout his life, Carter sought to act on the principles of his faith, defined in part by the extraordinary activism of 19th-century evangelical Christians who zealously advocated for those whom Jesus called “the least of these.” They took part in peace campaigns and helped organize public schools so that the children of the less wealthy classes could advance. Northern evangelicals advocated the abolition of slavery. They supported prison reform and women's suffrage.
Carter's progressive evangelicalism was entirely in this tradition. He was sensitive to racial inequalities from a young age and sought to address them – as a school board member, as governor and as president. He supported women's equality, including the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.
As president, Carter sought to move American foreign policy away from its reflexive Cold War dualism toward an emphasis on human rights. He recognized that if the United States wanted to have a meaningful relationship with Latin America, we had to moderate our colonialism, and so he pushed through the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties. He has advanced peace in the Middle East further than any of his predecessors (or successors), and he has appointed more women and people of color to federal office than any previous president. Many environmentalists consider him to be the best president of all time for their cause.
Carter's failure to win re-election in 1980 devastated him. He left Washington at age 56 for Plains, Georgia, the youngest president since William Howard Taft to leave office.
Rosalynn was particularly bitter about the election defeat. In one of our interviews decades after the 1980 election, Carter told me that in the wake of his frequent reassurances to his wife that they still had productive years ahead of them, he began to believe his own rhetoric. He also acknowledged that if he had been president for four more years, this second term would not have been nearly as fruitful as the alternative turned out to be.
Carter's post-presidency began with an idea that came in the middle of the night. In addition to a presidential library, Jimmy told Rosalynn, “We can set up an adjacent facility, something like Camp David, where people caught up in a war can come together.” I can offer to be a mediator in Atlanta or perhaps in their countries act. We could also teach how to resolve or prevent conflict.”
This would be an entirely new model for presidents out of office — a privately funded nonprofit center to advance his goals and allow him to address issues he would have pursued had he remained in the White House.
In a list of the center's core principles, Carter stipulated that it would be nonpartisan and not duplicate the programs of other institutions, such as the United Nations. Most important, Carter wanted an “action agency,” an institution dedicated to change and not just “theoretical or academic analysis.”
The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, along with the Carter Center, were dedicated in Atlanta on October 1, 1986, Carter's 62nd birthday. His faith was undeniably the foundation of all efforts at the Center. Carter told an interviewer in 1988 that the life of Jesus had always been his guide. “I see no disharmony in this life between evangelistic commitment on the one hand and benevolent concern for suffering or needy people on the other,” he said. “I think they are closely connected.”
Understanding the world's problems in part as spiritual challenges, Carter noted that industrialized Western society had failed to adopt Christian principles of care and concern. He believed that privileged people, and especially people of faith, had a special responsibility for the less fortunate, the suffering and the disadvantaged. “That’s where Jesus spent his entire ministry,” Carter said. Piety alone was not enough; Followers of Jesus must live out their beliefs through charitable deeds.
Early on, Carter identified access to health care, including mental health care (one of Rosalynn's causes), as a basic human right, once noting that 40,000 children die every day from preventable diseases. Using education and simple, cost-effective methods, the Carter Center's health initiatives addressed “neglected tropical diseases”: lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis and malaria. Other programs focused on Guinea worm and river blindness (onchocerciasis), extraordinary initiatives that have led to the near eradication of these diseases in the regions where the Carter Center worked.
Peace and conflict resolution, the Carter Center's second focus, built on Carter's success in negotiating the Camp David Accords. “We must treat other people with mutual respect,” Carter told an audience at Messiah College in 1988, “and through such an approach, peaceful resolution of differences can be achieved through the use of diplomacy and negotiation, not through the use of diplomacy and negotiation.” “military power.”
The center ran programs on democracy and human rights and monitored elections in dozens of countries. Carter used his relationships with world leaders to settle various disputes, including in Guyana, Ethiopia and Serbia. In 1994, Carter convinced Kim Il Sung to open North Korea's nuclear reactors to inspectors. In Haiti the following year, U.S. military aircraft flew to the island as Carter, along with Colin Powell and Georgian Senator Sam Nunn, convinced the military junta to give up power.
Carter's persistent conflict resolution efforts, dating back to the 1978 Camp David Accords, were recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Jimmy and Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, also expanded their public service beyond the Carter Center—most notably with Habitat for Humanity, which Carter once described as “the most practical and tangible way of putting Christian principles into action that I have ever seen.” described action.” During one of our conversations, Carter choked up as he recounted the completion of a home for a woman and her family who had been living in an abandoned septic tank.
Carter's alternative “second term” lasted more than four decades. From the ashes of political annihilation, he became not only an elder statesman and world-renowned humanitarian, but also arguably the most consequential of all modern former presidents.
James Laney, former president of Emory University and affiliate of the Carter Center, provided the best and most succinct characterization of the man from Plains. Carter, Laney noted, was “the first president to use the White House as a springboard.”
Randall Balmer, John Phillips Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, is the author of “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.”