Christian faith a hallmark of life of 100-year-old former U.S. president

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 1, 2024 / 11:00 am

A lifelong Baptist, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 years old on Oct. 1, has held views that differ 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, has 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 has 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

In addition, Carter’s humanitarian work building homes for the poor every year for nearly 40 years as a Habitat for Humanity volunteer has been an integral part of his lived faith.

Carter’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, who died in 1983, was herself an evangelist, and the 39th president credited her with having had a major influence in bucking up his faith and practice after his first defeat for the office of Georgia governor in 1966.

That same year, Carter helped lead a Billy Graham evangelistic crusade in his home county. Later, as governor of Georgia, he also served as honorary chairman of Graham’s Atlanta crusade.

For Catholics, Carter is 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.

According to a 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 has 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 has 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.”

Carter’s unabashed articulation of his Christian faith and inspiration was seen as a breath of fresh air and a boon to his presidential candidacy in the wake of the disgrace and corruption of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

“I will never lie to you,” Carter memorably promised during his successful 1976 campaign.

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China breakthrough

Among Carter’s most notable accomplishments to advance religious liberty and reopen space for evangelization were his negotiations with then-Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping leading up to the December 1978 reestablishment of full diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China.

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.”