Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, for decades — long after his presidency, long after the Secret Service logistics became absurd, into his late nineties. The lines of visitors who queued before dawn for a seat in that small sanctuary understood something essential about him: for Carter, who died Sunday at 100, his evangelical faith was not a political accessory. It was the operating system of his life, and it changed American politics in ways he never intended.
When Carter, a Southern Baptist deacon and peanut farmer, announced in 1976 that he had been “born again,” the phrase startled the national press. Newsweek declared 1976 “the Year of the Evangelical.” Carter spoke of his faith so plainly — and, fatefully, confessed in a Playboy interview that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and committed adultery “in my heart” — that evangelical voters, long disengaged from politics, turned out for one of their own.
Key Points
- Carter’s 1976 campaign brought evangelical Christianity into mainstream presidential politics for the first time.
- By 1980, white evangelical leaders had largely defected to Ronald Reagan, launching the religious right as a durable Republican force.
- Carter’s own evangelical faith leaned the other way: racial equality, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a 2000 break with the Southern Baptist Convention over the role of women.
An evangelical faith that cut against his coalition
Carter’s Christianity was demanding and, on the questions that would come to define the culture wars, often at odds with the movement forming around him. As Georgia’s governor in 1971, he declared that “the time for racial discrimination is over” — a statement rooted, he said, in his belief in human equality before God. In the White House he backed the Equal Rights Amendment and a human-rights-centred foreign policy. He also defended the separation of church and state, resisted making abortion a test of faith, and refused to organize his politics around the grievances then mobilizing conservative Christians over school prayer, the IRS and segregated academies.
The break came quickly. By 1980, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded just the year before, was registering evangelical voters in droves — for Ronald Reagan, a divorced former actor who rarely attended church. Historians note that Carter’s loss of his own tribe owed less to theology than to organization and to a dawning realization among conservative activists that evangelical identity could be fused with Republican politics. Carter never stopped identifying as an evangelical; the word simply came, in public life, to mean people who voted against everything he stood for.
Background: from the White House to the Sunday school room
His post-presidency was where the faith became unmistakable. Carter taught at Maranatha nearly every Sunday he was in Plains, wrote books on faith and aging, and funnelled his convictions through the Carter Center — monitoring elections in fragile democracies, mediating conflicts, and nearly eradicating Guinea worm disease, which fell from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986 to the edge of extinction. In 2000, he formally severed ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, saying its turn toward rigid doctrine — including the subordination of women — violated the basic premises of his faith.
What happens next
Carter’s death closes the last chapter of the first evangelical presidency. The evangelical faith he awakened now sits at the centre of American politics, largely in the service of causes he opposed — a paradox he regarded with sadness rather than bitterness. What remains uncontested is the witness of Plains: a former president in a small-town classroom, Bible open, teaching strangers. In his final years he told the congregation he was “absolutely and completely at ease with death.” The line outside Maranatha will be the last one he ever draws.
There is a theological thread worth naming. Carter’s faith was formed in the Baptist tradition of the rural South — personal conversion, believer’s baptism, the authority of scripture and of individual conscience — but it was tempered by a Sunday-school teacher’s insistence on the social teachings of the Gospels: the poor, the prisoner, the stranger. He described himself at various times as a liberal on social questions and a conservative on fiscal ones, and he baffled every constituency that tried to claim him whole. That refusal to be filed is part of why ‘evangelical,’ a word he wore proudly, came to describe a politics he spent his last decades gently arguing with.
Sources: Maranatha Baptist Church, Plains, Georgia; The Carter Center; Newsweek, “The Year of the Evangelical,” 1976; Carter’s 2000 statement on the Southern Baptist Convention.
