Carter Jimmy - Redeemer : the life of Jimmy Carter

More Advance Praise for Redeemer

It would be hard to imagine a better account of a presidents life, faith, and politics. Randall Balmer is an accomplished historian who combines accuracy, insight, and archival diligence with the narrative skills of a novelist. The result is a compelling story of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, of conflicting evangelical traditions, and of a great reversal that saw religious conservatives helping to elect one of their own as president and then organizing to bring him down. Randall Balmer gives us an incisive analysis of idealism and realism in the White House, duplicity in unexpected places, and hardball politics in the back rooms of right-wing churches. The book vividly captures the tone and atmosphere of presidential politics in the late 1970san era that still resonates in twenty-first-century religious and political battles.

E. Brooks Holifield, Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus, Emory University

Randall Balmers Redeemer deftly reveals modern Americas most misunderstood president. Randall Balmer melds Carters famous evangelical sensibilities into a story of cascading successes and failures, the world ultimately indifferent to a man who hoped politics could be religion realized and redeemed more in retirement than in his frustrated presidencya compelling, wistful tale briskly rendered.

Jon Butler, Yale University

This is religion and politics at its finest. With wit, insight, and narrative freshness, Randall Balmer recalls that dynamic moment in the 1970s before evangelicalism became a handmaiden to political conservatism. Jimmy Carter was the born again president who would redeem the nation from the sins of Watergate and Vietnam. How he tried, how many failed, and the evangelical-conservative knot that rose after his presidency is a tragic and beautiful story, and none explains it better than Randall Balmer. Grab a cup of tea or coffee, for Redeemer is one of those books not to skim, but to savor.

Edward J. Blum, coauthor of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

Randall Balmer provides an insightful summary and analysis of Jimmy Carters life and work as farmer, politician, president, humanitarian and born-again Baptist. His study moves beyond biography to place Carter within the larger context of an American evangelicalism that continues to struggle with its role in the political sphere and the impact of personal faith on the lives of elected officials. Randall Balmer knows the issues well and explores them creatively.

Bill Leonard, James and Marilyn Dunn Professor of Baptist Studies and Professor of Church History, Wake Forest University

REDEEMER

ALSO BY RANDALL BALMER

First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty

The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond

God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America

Religion in American Life: A Short History [with Jon Butler and Grant Wacker]

Protestantism in America [with Lauren F. Winner]

Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism

Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Fathers Faith

Religion in Twentieth Century America

Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America

Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism

The Presbyterians [with John R. Fitzmier]

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America

A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies

REDEEMER

The LIFE of

JIMMY CARTER

RANDALL BALMER

BASIC BOOKS

NEW YORK

Copyright 2014 by Randall Balmer

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-465-02958-7

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-465-05695-8

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Catharine
again, and always

CONTENTS

He came unto his own,
and his own received him not .

John 1:11 (King James Version)

I honestly dont recall when I first heard of Jimmy Carter. But I do remember that by the time I arrived in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1975 to work as an intern on Capitol Hill, I was more than a little intrigued by the former governor of Georgia. I was a rising senior at an evangelical liberal arts college and for years had been something of a political junkie. I recall watching the 1964 Republican and Democratic national conventions on the new black-and-white television set my father had purchased when we moved from rural southern Minnesota to Bay City, Michigan.

My interest in politics, however, cut against the grain of my white, northern, evangelical world. Cold War anxieties and an enduring fondness for Billy Graham generally predisposed us toward the Republican Party, but we faced other, more pressing matterslike the end of the world. Convinced as we were that Jesus would return imminently, politics rarely entered into our thinking or conversationsinfrequently at home and almost never at church. The only exception to the latter that I can recall occurred during a Sunday-evening service in the church basement, where my fathers congregation was meeting while the church raised funds to complete construction on the sanctuary overhead. The Sunday-evening services were a tad less formal than those on Sunday morning, and my father casually let it slip before the assembled faithfulnot much more than a couple of dozenthat he still hadnt decided how to cast his ballot. The organist blurted out Goldwater, and my father, clearly embarrassed, quickly changed the subject.

Our belief that Jesus would soon return to gather the faithful effectively absolved us of the task of social amelioration. Why worry, after all, about this world when we were about to be translated to another? Somewhat unusually for evangelicals at the time, my parents voted, but I never had a sense that they thought there was much at stake. This world was doomed and transitory. Better to concentrate on winning souls to Christ than worry about who sat on the city council or in the Oval Office.

Politics, I suppose, represented something of an adolescent rebellion. I remember being fascinated by the pictures of the two Johns in the Streleckis living room next door on South DeWitt Street, John XXIII and John F. Kennedy, along with the yellowed fronds from the previous Palm Sunday. I recall asking my mother about Nelson Rockefeller in the mid-1960s, but she informed me that we could never support him for president because he was divorced. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy distressed me deeply. I watched the implosion of the Democratic Party in Chicago during the summer of 1968, the election of Richard Nixon, and the woeful, quixotic candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, the year I started college.