Jimmy the Baptist: Carter redefined ‘evangelical,’ from campaigns to race and women’s rights

PLAINS, Ga. — Before reaching the 1978 peace deal between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter managed months of intense preparation, high-stakes negotiations at Camp David and a field trip to the Gettysburg battlefield to demonstrate the consequences of war. “We saw ourselves as being very much cultural outcasts” as evangelicals in the mid-1970s, said Dartmouth College professor Randall Balmer, who has written extensively on Carter’s faith. Into his 90s, Carter criticized American militarism and noted one of Jesus’s Biblical monikers: “Prince of Peace.” “He carried his faith with him every minute of every day, and he put it to use every single minute of every single day,” said Jill Stuckey, a Plains resident and longtime friend of Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, who died in November at 96. He once described feeling shocked when a “high official” in the Southern Baptist Convention told him in the Oval Office that “we are praying, Mr. President, that you will abandon your secular humanism as your religion.” By his later years, Carter “was happy with the label of ‘progressive evangelical,’” Balmer said. “I don’t have any opposition it,” he told AP, declaring himself “very liberal” on any issue “that relates to human rights.” Sexuality “will continue to be divisive” within Christianity, he predicted, “but the church is evolving.” Buttigieg, an Episcopalian whose same-sex marriage is recognized by his church, said Carter’s willingness to be open about his faith, in all its complexity, provides a “tremendous example” for “a generation of Christians who don’t believe that God belongs to any political party.” The Rev.