Today Jimmy Carter became the first former US president to reach his 100th birthday. As a former president, Nobel Peace Prize winner, international human rights advocate, and author of dozens of books, Carter is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished and politically influential Americans of the past century.
He is also a man of faith, as several of his books attest. As a Sunday school teacher, Baptist deacon, and self-professed born-again Christian, Carter brought a Christian sensitivity and moral compass to the Oval Office. Some evangelicals welcomed this at the time, but many others expressed concerns about Carter’s theological orientation and policy stances.
In a piece for Christianity Today, I explore this complicated relationship between evangelicals and America’s “born again” president and explain what evangelicals have often misunderstood about Carter’s faith.
To read the full piece, click here for my CT article “The Evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter.”
You quote Ron Boehme, “Perhaps Carter wasn’t really an evangelical at all, Boehme decided, or not even a believer. “When a man promotes or goes along with immorality and ungodliness in his political campaigning and lawmaking, he is not a true follower of Jesus,” he wrote. Appropriating one of Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount, Boehme doubled down: ‘A good tree cannot produce bad fruit.'”
Your last sentence says, “With the perspective of history—thanks to the longest post-presidency in American history—those commonalities are perhaps easier to see now than they were in 1980. Carter’s determination to extend the love of Jesus was a better reflection of the Sermon on the Mount than his evangelical critics realized.”
Indeed, the fruit was good and from the good tree. I find this criticism of such a good man shameful.