Before Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he gave an interview to Playboy magazine (of all places) that’s probably best remembered for Carter’s unprompted confession that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and, thus, according to Jesus’ “almost impossible” standard, had “committed adultery in my heart many times.”
Though his statement provoked some laughter (and some outright derision), the interview revealed Carter — who died Sunday at the age of 100 in Plains, Georgia — as a man of a deep and deeply considered faith. In that interview, he candidly discussed what he believed, why he believed it, how his beliefs would intersect with his presidency and, of course, his unwavering love for his wife, Rosalynn Smith Carter, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96. The couple was married for 77 years.
The faith of the country’s best-known Sunday school teacher was unwavering.
We have reason to believe that the faith of the country’s best-known Sunday school teacher was just as unwavering, even though (or maybe because) he left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 for what he called the denomination’s “increasingly rigid” beliefs about women’s inferior role in the church. In addition to his international efforts promoting fair elections, Carter also used his record-setting length of time as a former president to hammer nails into wood as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. Reports indicate that the home he shared with his wife was recently valued at a mere $167,000.
Despite there being no religious test for political candidates, in many places office seekers know they have to make a show of being Christian to win. But the political necessity of a profession of faith gives us ample reason to doubt its sincerity.
An official in George W. Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives said the goal of the office was to elect Republicans, that the administration used religious conservatives as pawns and that Bush senior adviser Karl Rove called evangelicals “the nuts.” Donald Trump famously said: “Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence. Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind.” Trump would go on to become the person many white evangelicals would eventually hold up as model Christian president. That was bad enough. But it was even worse given that Carter was still on the scene: teaching the Bible, helping the poor, spreading peace, living humbly and, for 77 years, staying married to the same woman. “What Christ taught about most was pride, that one person should never think he was any better than anybody else,” Carter told Playboy in that interview. The idea of a humble American president seems absurd, but it’s even harder to imagine that the 100-year-old’s determination to live up to the “almost impossible” standard of his faith was an act.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
