Jimmy Carter was an evangelical. A liberal evangelical. A liberal evangelical in the age before the Christian Right supported a conservative revolution that swept Republican Ronald Reagan into power. The story has old roots. As Jimmy Carter campaigned for the presidency on his way to the White House in November, Newsweek magazine declared 1976, “The Year of the Evangelical.” But then, as now, the application of the “evangelical” label to Jimmy Carter misleads more than it illuminates.
There are essentially two reasons the narrative of an evangelical Carter has persisted for half a century. The first is a fairly convincing one: self-identification. Carter generally referred to himself as a Baptist. Sometimes he referred to himself as a “born-again” Christian—a correlate of evangelicalism but by no means the synonym the media to this day often consider it. Still, Carter did sometimes refer to himself as evangelical. Moreover, he didn’t push back when the media identified him as such. So, there’s a clear and defensible case for calling Carter an evangelical Christian.
But the case against doing so is stronger. If we examine the ways in which 20th century evangelicals defined their movement amongst themselves, the picture looks very different. The defining doctrine of organized evangelicalism in the 20th century was biblical inerrancy (often known colloquially as biblical literalism), which was the idea that, in addition to being a perfect guide to Christian faith and morality, the Bible was equally unassailable when it came to history, science, and absolute truth.
When the National Association of Evangelicals formed as an alternative to the liberal Federal Council of Churches in 1942, the very first doctrine listed in its constitution was a commitment to biblical inerrancy. The same was true for the academic Evangelical Theological Society (the alternative to the mainstream Society for Biblical Literature), and for Christianity Today magazine, the evangelical alternative to the mainline Christian Century. And, of course, America’s most famous evangelical, revivalist Billy Graham, preached the inerrancy of the Bible.
In 1976, as the presidential race heated up, Christianity Today editor and Southern Baptist Harold Lindsell’s bestselling The Battle for the Bible argued that biblical inerrancy was the defining doctrine of evangelical Christianity—and that evangelical Christianity was the only true Christianity. He dedicated a full chapter to his own denomination. Members of the Southern Baptist Convention who believed in inerrancy, he argued, were real evangelicals who needed to wrest full control of their denomination from the nonevangelical Southern Baptists who rejected the doctrine, a group that included Jimmy Carter.
Twentieth century evangelicalism emerged from American fundamentalism which defined itself against the rising tide of modernist or liberal theology. Modernists accepted the findings of contemporary biology, archaeology, history, and literary criticism as applied to the Bible. Evangelicals organized on the basis of biblical inerrancy and continued to define themselves against liberal Protestantism, both theologically and politically.
Not so for Jimmy Carter. Instead, Carter cited his reliance on the theology of mainline Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr for his ideas of justice, morality, and law that influenced both his faith and his politics. As Carter, then Georgia governor, explained to the students at the University of Georgia Law School in 1974, he adopted from Niebuhr the belief that “laws are constantly changing to stabilize the social equilibrium of the forces and counterforces of a dynamic society.” Where evangelicals insisted on the fixity of absolute truth rooted in biblical literalism, Carter embraced Niebuhrian theology as well as the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A-Changin’,” which taught him “to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.”
Yet there is still another way to define evangelicalism—as the cultural movement that emerged from fundamentalism bent on a conservative recovery of an imagined Christian American past. By 1976, conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals had for decades fought against the expansion of the New Deal welfare state, the extension of civil and political rights to minorities, and the secularization of American public schools. In years leading up to the election, opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment proposed by second wave feminists had joined the list. Under this definition as well, Carter was no evangelical.
Carter seemed well aware of this disjuncture and highlighted it in his infamous 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. The very fact of the interview infuriated some evangelicals, but the content was equally telling. In the interview, Carter claimed his distinctive Baptist identity. “The reason the Baptist Church was formed in this country was because of our belief in absolute and total separation of church and state,” he explained.
Carter distinguished himself from the rising conservative evangelical chorus when he declared that this separation would be reflected in his judicial appointments. His Baptist faith, Carter informed Playboy, did not make him want to enforce his beliefs on others, but rather made him fight for racial justice, for the Equal Rights Amendment, and for less punitive criminal penalties for victimless criminal offenses like marijuana use and homosexuality. In a time of growing evangelical opposition, Carter declared Roe v. Wade “suits me alright.”
Shortly before the 1976 election a Christianity Today editorial sharply critiqued Carter’s opposition to an anti-abortion constitutional amendment on theological grounds, asking, “In Carter’s case, does this remarkably irrational position stem from his having had his head melted by the dialectic influence of his avowedly favorite (neo-orthodox and ontological) theologians—Niebuhr, Barth, Tillich, and Kierkegaard?”
Once elected, Carter proved himself even more at odds with the broader evangelical political project. Where evangelicals sought conservative judges to roll back Roe v. Wade and the 1960s decisions declaring public school prayer and Bible reading unconstitutional, Carter insisted on the “separation of church and state,” a distinctive hallmark of Baptist politics that dated back to the nation’s earliest years. (Ironically, in 1979 while Carter was in the White House the SBC experienced a “fundamentalist takeover” that pushed the SBC into much greater alignment with conservative inerrantist evangelicalism and away from its traditional view of the First Amendment.)
Rather than appointing reliable conservative Christian judges, Carter appointed a liberal slate that included more women and non-White judges than all of his predecessors combined. Carter supported the Equal Rights Amendment. He invited gay activists to the White House. And he signed into existence a Federal Department of Education that evangelicals had long opposed. When evangelicals voted for Reagan overwhelmingly in 1980, they had turned against a liberal old-guard Baptist—not “one of their own,” as so many have insisted over the nearly half century since.
Until his death, Carter attended Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. His Sunday School lessons inspired congregants and those who made the pilgrimage to learn from the former President. But he left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2009, citing the church’s refusal to accept the equality of women and allow women in pastoral leadership. He continued to cite liberal theologians like Niebuhr and added Paul Tillich—the Lutheran theologian who rejected traditional theism. He became accepting and affirming of marriage equality—both legally and theologically—telling the Huffington Post in 2015: “I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage. That’s just my own personal opinion.” He continued to write about faith in ways that increasingly diverged from an already distant evangelical movement.
Which brings us to the second reason the narrative of an evangelical Carter has persisted so long. For those opposed to the politicized theology of the Religious Right of the 1980s or the Trumpian evangelicals of today—particularly those within or adjacent to evangelical communities—’evangelical Jimmy Carter’ is a story of contingency, a story of hope, a story of what evangelicalism could be once again if it only returned to the model of a man who talked openly about his faith, served with personal integrity, and worked for Habitat for Humanity into his 90s.
But a closer look at the unique life and presidency of Jimmy Carter and the evangelical criticism engendered by his beliefs and politics calls such a story into question. The theological strictures of evangelicalism had tightened around inerrancy and been channeled into conservative American politics well before the peanut farmer Governor of Georgia became a household name. You can call him born again. Better yet call him Baptist. But as we remember the historical legacy of Jimmy Carter and his faith…maybe don’t call him evangelical.
