‘In Every Way’: Baptist Layman Jimmy Carter Became U.S. President and Much More

“In every way, the opportunities of a Christian are unlimited in giving us a better, more enjoyable and productive life,” said Jimmy Carter in a 2003 interview with Baptists Today (now Good Faith Media’s Good Faith Magazine).

The 39th U.S. President, who died on December 29, 2024, in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, lived out those opportunities with faithfulness and fullness for 100 years.

While reaching the White House, brokering international goodwill, and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter, at his core, was a relentless follower of Jesus and a devoted churchman who didn’t let even the highest of demands distract him from those defining commitments.

“Christ taught us repeatedly and in the most vividly possible terms that the proper role of a follower of his is to reach out in an unselfish and humble way to those who are different from us and in real need,” said Carter in that interview.

At his death, he was surrounded by his family — along with the prayerful presence of multitudes who witnessed the compassionate worldwide leadership of a humble man from humble beginnings.

Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, died in 2023 at 96.

GUIDING PRINCIPLE

“Love for God and others was the guiding principle behind President Carter’s life,” said Jeremy Shoulta. “Whether he was lending his voice to human rights movements, welcoming guests to his Sunday School class or visiting sick individuals in Plains, President Carter left no doubt that a deep sense of compassion was at the core of his being.”

Shoulda, now pastor of First Baptist Church of Gainesville, Georgia, served as the Carters’ pastor at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains from 2014-2016.

Nelle Ariail, whose late husband Dan served as Maranatha’s pastor for 23 years, recalled their family moving to Plains on Oct. 1, 1982‚ which happened to be President Carter’s 58th birthday.

“From the first day to the last, we were blessed in so many ways by the Carters,” she said recently.

Ariail was impressed that the Carters — whose influence was worldwide — were so devoted to the small congregation and sensitive to community needs.

“About a month after we moved into our house, there was a snow and ice storm that took down a huge pecan tree in our yard,” Ariail recalled. “The next morning, I looked out and there was President Carter on his bike, in his jeans, checking things out.”

She witnessed the same compassion when participating with the Carters in Habitat for Humanity projects in New York, Chicago, Charlotte, Atlanta and Tijuana. 

“In Mexico, we stayed in pup tents — and the Carters were next to me and his secretary,” she recalled. “President Carter found something to put under my sleeping bag, so I didn’t have to sleep on the ground.”

“He and Rosalynn read a chapter from the Bible in Spanish every night,” recalled Ariail. “I could hear them reading by lantern light.”

After 9-11, President Carter asked his pastor to fly with him to New York City for a memorial service. They were picked up by an Airforce One plane at the airport in Americus where Charles Lindbergh took his first solo flight in 1923.

The Ariails joined the Carters as well for their trip to Oslo, Norway, for the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Carter in 2002.

“It’s about time!” Dan Ariail told Baptists Today (now Good Faith Magazine) just hours after the Nobel Prize was announced. “He’s been nominated seven times and passed over six.”

Ariail noted that Carter had each time graciously stated that other recipients were more deserving, surmising: “There is no end to my admiration for that guy.”

FIRSTHAND

The long-lasting marriage of Jimmy and Rosalynn Smith Carter began on July 7, 1946. Ed Timmerman was among those gathered for the ceremony at the Methodist church in Plains.

“As a native of Plains, Georgia, born in 1932, I have known Jimmy Carter and the Carter family my entire life,” said Timmerman. “Before Jimmy’s Christian example was evident on the world stage, I witnessed it firsthand in our little church and town,”

The Timmermans attended Plains Baptist Church, along with the Carter family, where Ed’s mother was pianist for 57 years.

As a Christian layman, Carter was involved in mission efforts within and beyond his own community. He was part of the 12-member board of the Southern Baptist Brotherhood Commission seeking, as Carter described it, “to increase the participation of men in church affairs.”

“During the 1960s, for several summers, I went to different places on what were called ‘pioneer mission efforts,’” Carter recalled in his interview with then-Baptists Today.

“One year I went to Pennsylvania. One year to Massachusetts. One year to a transitional area in Atlanta that was changing from a white into a mixed and then an African American community.”

Timmerman, who lives in Cairo, Georgia, with his wife, Sarah, recalled sharing in one of those experiences.

“In 1968, prior to his campaign for Governor of Georgia, Jimmy and I, along with three others, traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts, on a Georgia Baptist Brotherhood mission trip,” he said. “This weeklong stay resulted in the establishment of a Spanish-speaking Baptist Church there.”

Timmerman added: “Of the five of us, Jimmy was the only one who spoke any Spanish, so he naturally took the lead.”

Unlike many campaigning politicians — who awkwardly seek to emulate the practices of churchgoing voters — Carter was as comfortable in a pew or a prayer meeting as he was in his blue jeans at home or in a peanut field.

He boldly but naturally spoke of how his faith called him to emulate the life and teachings of Jesus while admitting his shortcomings.

Carter taught Sunday School — something his father had done — throughout his life. He did so as much as possible at Atlanta’s Northside Drive Baptist Church during his governorship and at First Baptist Church in the City of Washington during his presidency.

Most far-reaching, in his post-presidency Carter faithfully taught Sunday morning Bible classes for decades to his home congregation and hordes of visitors from around the world at Maranatha Baptist Church.

The congregation was formed in 1977 after Plains Baptist Church invoked a 1965 resolution barring African Americans from membership.

“As a result, some 50 members left to form what would later become Maranatha Baptist Church,” recalled Timmerman. “Among those who left was my 86-year-old mother, Ida Lee Pritchard Timmerman.”

The Carters joined Maranatha upon returning to Plains after his presidency. A part of Jimmy’s service as a deacon, said Timmerman, was to minister to Ed’s elderly mother.

“He gave her his personal phone number and insisted that she call him any time if she needed him,” said Timmerman. “He checked in and visited with her regularly.”

Timmerman recalled Carter’s 1986 visit to Central America after which he stopped by to gift Ed’s mother with a hand-carved wooden box from Costa Rica.

“Though his trip had been to call for the peaceful solution to the Nicaraguan war with U.S.-backed guerrillas, Jimmy was also keeping his church friends back home in mind,” said Timmerman. “Not long after Jimmy’s final visit with my mother, she passed away and he served as an honorary pallbearer at her funeral.”

For decades the former president would be seen mowing the grass and tending to the shrubs at the small but tidy church nestled among pecan trees just out from downtown Plains — or rolling up his sleeves for a workday at the local cemetery.

He would use his Sunday School hour to recruit help — announcing one Sunday that he needed extra hands to build a wheelchair ramp for someone in Plains. He described the location in a classic cryptic Southern way — like “where the Johnsons used to live” — adding: “You’ll see my car there at 8:30 tomorrow morning.”

SERVICE

The Carters were widely known for their involvement in building homes in partnership with homeowners, locally and globally.

Linda Fuller, who, along with her late husband Millard, was co-founder of Habitat for Humanity International, recalled the day in 1984 when the Carters were recruited to that ministry effort based in Americus, Georgia, just a few miles from Plains.

“We were told that President Carter enjoyed carpentry and was in the process of converting his garage into a study and building himself a desk,” Fuller told this publication recently. “We saw this as an opportunity to invite him to help build a Habitat house.”

She and Millard secured an appointment and were greeted warmly by President and Mrs. Carter, she said.

“After a few moments of friendly conversation, Millard posed a question that would change the course of Habitat for Humanity: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Carter, Linda and I have come here as neighbors to invite you to join in our work of building houses in partnership with poor families.’”

Millard continued: “What I would like to know is if you are interested — or very interested?”

“To our surprise, they responded ‘very interested,’” said Linda. “President Carter even suggested that Millard go back to his office and make a list of some ways he and Rosalynn could be helpful.”

The impact was immeasurable, she said. The Carters not only helped attract donors and volunteers, but they invited about 40 of their closest friends to participate in the first Carter Work Project, held in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

“They continued every year for more than 30 years to give a week of their time to lead Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Projects, enlisting thousands of other volunteers to build hundreds of houses,” said Fuller.

The Carters were far more than spokespersons who showed up for photo opportunities. Fuller described the former president as “an exceptional achiever, competitive, and packed with super intelligence and fierce determination, yet he was also humble and compassionate.”

“I have seen him on his hands and knees laying tile flooring at midnight because he refused to leave it undone,” she added. “He was always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone in need, regardless of who they were.”

Fuller continued: “I have witnessed his acts of kindness on numerous occasions, from pulling a mint from his pocket for a coughing lady in church to giving his own jacket to someone suffering from the cold.”

“Millard and I were grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him and witness his unwavering commitment by being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ in our needy world,” she said.

IMPACT

Carter’s post-presidency years exceed all others in terms of both longevity and impact. The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn founded in 1982, is not a monument to the past but an active effort to promote peace, justice, freedom, and healing in the world.

“The Carter Center in Atlanta has been his major vehicle for implementing the admonitions from Jesus,” said Bob Maddox, a Baptist pastor who joined the Carter White House as a speechwriter and religious advisor.

“The Center has wrestled with the world’s hurts and dreams,” said Maddox. “Nasty endemic, health scourges have received skillful and long-lasting alleviation under the watchful eye and often-times physical presence of Mr. Carter. Whereas other presidential libraries may fade in public attraction, the Carter Center will live on.”

The Carter Center has led international efforts resulting in the near elimination of the ancient and deadly Guinea worm disease. Tens of millions of people, mostly in Africa and Asia, have suffered from this dreaded disease caused by infected stagnant water.

Only 13 human cases worldwide were reported in 2022, according to the Carter Center.

“Jesus urged his followers to provide shelter, food, clothing, justice, and emotional security for ‘the least of these,’” said Maddox, who, along with his wife Linda, lives in Bethesda, Maryland. “Jimmy Carter has marched around the world heeding the pull of these benchmarks from Jesus, whom he loves and serves.”

INCLUSIVE FAITH

During his pursuit of the presidency, Carter brought the term “born again” from the subculture of American evangelicalism into popular nomenclature.

Yet, he resisted the authoritarianism, sexism and judgmentalism of the rising religious right that sought to define Christianity as a narrow political ideology of discrimination and exclusion.

“It is a natural human inclination to encapsulate ourselves in a superior fashion with people who are just like us — and to assume that we are fulfilling the mandate of our lives if we just confine our love to our own family or people who are just like us,” said Carter in the 2003 interview.

When the Southern Baptist Convention was steered in that same fundamentalist direction, Carter aligned himself with the newer Cooperative Baptist Fellowship that affirmed religious liberty for all persons and congregational autonomy that allowed for the full and equal inclusion of women.

“One point I often make [when teaching Sunday School] is how Christ reached out on an equal basis to women, and that there should be no distinction between men and women’s service in the church,” said Carter. “Some dominant male leaders, in all aspects of life, will use different means to discriminate against women.”

Noting how the Bible is used to justify gender discrimination, Carter added: “You can selectively use certain texts to prove your point — which people did when I was a child to prove that racial discrimination is God’s preference.”

As a result of Carter’s refusal to take up the Christian nationalist agenda promoted by the religious right — with a narrow and often self-serving political ideology — religious-political operatives like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson placed their full weight behind other candidates who would promise them their desired political outcomes.

Carter, however, was unwilling to trade his valued principles of full religious liberty and human equality for their political support.

“When a group of Christians tries to implant through government their beliefs on others as superior, that subverts the basic constitutional prohibition concerning separation of church and state,” said Carter. “And when we try to use the federal government to intercede in religious affairs, it inherently weakens the unique character of Christ’s kingdom.”

RECONCILER

A gifted peacemaker, Carter was disappointed that he could not bring all Baptists together around common faith commitments despite existing secondary and tertiary differences. But he tried.

However, he did bring together a large variety of Baptist groups — crossing denominational, doctrinal and racial lines. A Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant drew 15,000 participants to Atlanta in the winter of 2008 for a time of worship, confession and cooperation. 

“I have never been to a Baptist meeting where there was the equality as well as the presence of [multi-racial, multi-gender participation],” said church historian Walter Shurden at the time. “It bears the marks of the ministry of Jesus.”

Carter was uniquely influential enough to draw together the varied Baptist leaders and participants — and to recruit a range of Baptist-bred speakers including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Marian Wright Edelman, Tony Campolo, William Shaw, Julie Pennington-Russell, Chuck Grassley and novelist John Grisham.

Carter told reporters at the event: “People stop me and say, ‘We don’t want this to be a meeting, but a movement.’”

Through the years, Carter repeatedly sought to bring together diverse persons to find ways to rally around centrally shared commitments to human equality and service to those in need. His role as reconciler, however, never came at the expense of a lowered commitment to human rights.

In 2008, when speaking at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, where he served as a trustee, the former president reiterated his commitment to human rights.

When a student noted that in 1920 the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “gave women the right to vote,” Carter corrected him: “It gave white women the right to vote.”

Carter, who served longer in the military than any president other than Dwight Eisenhower, said his “life was transformed” when President Harry Truman in July 1948 called for the elimination of racial discrimination in the U.S. military.

Carter was a Navy submarine officer at the time. Yet, he noted that upon returning to South Georgia after his presidency, he sadly “found the racial situation unchanged.”

Despite boycotts of his farming operations and the KKK showing up at the Georgia governor’s mansion in 1971 when he proclaimed, “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter never backed down from his efforts at racial justice.

He saw human rights — as reflected in his Christian convictions — to be essential to the American experience. Quoting from one of his own presidential addresses, he told the Mercer community: “America didn’t invent human rights. Human rights invented America.”

AT PEACE

Jimmy Carter modeled aging with grace — accepting each chapter of life with the same rigor and curiosity he explored in the multitude of books he penned. 

In his 2015 book A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, Carter recalled an inquisitive childhood in rural Sumter County, Georgia, that included a variety of farm chores and reading as much as possible.  

“There was an intimate and almost constant interrelationship between what we were learning in school and what we were doing on the farm,” he wrote.

Except for one railroad worker, the Carters were the only white family in the tiny Archery community, he said. Therefore, his playmates were all Black.

The depths of racism all around were not reflected by his mother, Lillian Carter, who, as a nurse, served the larger community and later became a Peace Corps volunteer. 

“Even when I was a child, my mother was known within our community for her refusal to accept any restraints on her treatment of Black citizens as equal,” he wrote.

Carter said his earliest ambition was to be strong enough to plow the soil with mules and do other chores he watched his father and other older workers perform. 

Of his father, he said: “Whenever possible, I followed him around, and wanted to emulate everything he did.”

Carter’s emulation didn’t stop there, however. The stories he heard and read about Jesus found their way deep into his heart. 

“I have a feeling that all people are the same in God’s eyes,” said Carter in his 2003 interview. 

In God’s eyes and in the hearts of others, Jimmy Carter will live on as a shining example of what it means to follow Jesus with faithfulness, kindness, humility and sacrificial service.