President Jimmy Carter has died today, December 29, after receiving more than a year of hospice care at his home in Plains, Ga. President Carter will be remembered for living out his devout Baptist faith through his pursuit of peace and support for human rights as well as acts of service, such as building homes for Habitat for Humanity. When it came to following Jesus, Carter walked the walk.
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Lesser known, and particularly relevant for American politics today, is our 39th president’s commitment to the Baptist value of religious liberty. The United States’ most religious president in recent memory was also the most committed to the separation of church and state.
“I think that prayer should be a private matter between a person and God,” then-President Carter told a group of news editors in 1979 concerning Supreme Court rulings against mandatory government-sponsored prayers in public schools in 1962 and 1963. “I think the Government ought to stay out of the prayer business and let it be between a person and God and not let it be part of a school program under any tangible constraints, either a direct order to a child to pray or an embarrassing situation where the child would feel constrained to pray.” He told the editors that he agreed with the Supreme Court’s rulings “as a Baptist.”
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Here’s how Carter described his commitment in his 2010 autobiography A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety: “My religious faith had become a minor issue during the [1976] campaign, when I responded ‘yes’ to a reporter’s question ‘are you a born-again Christian?’ Some reporters implied that I was having visions or thought I received daily instructions from Heaven. My traditional Baptist belief was that there should be strict separation between church and state. I ended the longstanding practice of inviting Billy Graham and other prominent pastors to have services in the White House and our family assumed the role of normal worshippers in a church of our choice.”
Before I moved back to my home state of Texas, I was a member of the church the Carters chose, The First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., and I currently lead the organization – BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) – that continues to advocate for religious freedom for all in the same spirit as Carter did. BJC awarded Carter our J.M. Dawson Religious Liberty Award in 1996. We continue to strive to see a country where Americans like Carter, who have deep theological convictions, can bring their full selves to their public lives, while never imposing their religious beliefs on others or using the government to promote religion.
“I just look at death as not a threat,” Carter said during an interview in 1976. “It’s inevitable, and I have an assurance of eternal life.” As we remember his life and mourn with his family, we are also concerned about the threats to the separation of church and state—an American ideal that Carter championed throughout his life. Sadly, people who seem inclined toward a theocracy instead—like many who were part of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021—continue to organize and gain political power. The ultra-conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is eroding the line between government and religion in case after case.
Carter was also concerned about the growing alliance of right-wing politics and conservative Christianity. “There’s no doubt that the Christian right has gone to bed with the more conservative elements of the Republican Party,” he said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997. “And there’s been a melding in their goals when it comes to the separation of church and state.”
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In addition to his work at the Carter Center, Carter continued to play an active role in Baptist life. While he publicly broke from the Southern Baptist Convention following the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination, Carter remained a deacon and taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, well into his 90s. In 2007, he brought Baptist leaders from across racial and theological divisions in Baptist life together, culminating in the New Baptist Covenant.
In a time of growing Christian nationalism reinforced and manipulated by officeholders and candidates, more government entanglement with religion as a result of misguided decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, and the rapid decline in church attendance, I hope we can pause for a moment as we remember the life of Jimmy Carter to consider how different the relationship between religion and government would look in the United States if our political leaders would follow Carter’s example.
Not only would our nation’s commitment to religious freedom for all—including those who want to be free from religion—be strengthened, but I also believe Christianity would flourish. Baptists believe that faith should be freely chosen, not imposed on people by the government. “We believe in separation of church and state, that there should be no unwarranted influence on the church or religion by the state, and vice versa,” Carter said at a press conference as president in 1977.
We don’t need theocracy to revive American Christianity; we need people to act like Jesus.
Thank you, my dear brother in Christ, for being the epitome of a faithful Christian in American public life. May we remember and be inspired by your life during these challenging days for our country and our faith.
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