Working On Salvation

Reviewing Randall Balmer’s new faith-focused biography of our 39th president, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, John G. Turner places Carter’s work ethic at the center of his distinctive approach to life and politics:

Balmer ends his book with the “impression that Carter was driven—almost obsessed—by a kind of works righteousness.” He observes quite rightly that too many Christians seek “to prove by their good works that they are among the elect.” From his days on his family farm to his years in the Navy to his many years on the campaign trail, Carter was an incessant worker.

Most of the time, his hard work paid off, but Carter’s work ethic could not solve the Iranian hostage crisis, his nation’s economic malaise, or the electoral threat of Ronald Reagan. Balmer observes, however, that after his defeat to Reagan “Carter reaffirmed his commitment to works righteousness as a way to redeem his loss,” and his ceaseless activism and philanthropy bolstered his reputation in the United States and abroad. … He went door to door trying to “share Christ” with strangers. He devoted one week each year to Habitat for Humanity projects. Through the Carter Center, he attempted to eradicate disease, poverty, and dictatorship around the world.

Although he could not redeem his nation from the sins he believed had imprisoned it, Carter was always an ambassador for his Savior in a way that made nearly everyone around him uncomfortable, whether his unmarried staff members when he encouraged them to stop “living in sin” and get married, feminists who bristled at his staunch personal opposition to abortion, or politically conservative evangelicals who just could not believe that a follower of Jesus Christ would affiliate with donkeys instead of elephants. As Balmer laments, by the time of his presidency, Carter was already a rare breed.

Jonathan Yardley, also reviewing Balmer’s book, finds Carter’s approach to religion and politics a cautionary tale:

Religion is a tricky business, never more so than when it gets mixed up with government. Although Balmer pays due respect to the argument that “religion functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power,” that “once a religious group panders after political influence, it loses its prophetic voice,” he does not convince me that Carter, either as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s or as president in the second half of that decade, really “understood that the Christian faith had flourished in the United States precisely because the government had stayed out of the religion business.”

To the contrary, Carter brought religion (religiosity, too) into the national government more directly and intensely than any president before him in the 20th century. He campaigned as a religious man, speaking repeatedly, openly and almost boastfully about his religious convictions, about the centrality of prayer to his daily life, about the joy he took in being “born again.” Balmer sees this as a redemptive response to the cynicism and venality of the Nixon years, and unquestionably there is some truth to that. But Carter made religion a campaign weapon as well as a private belief, which was not appreciably less calculating than Nixon’s disregard for the Constitution and the common decencies.

(Photo: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter works on the 1,000th home to be built by Habitat for Humanity on the Gulf Coast May 21, 2007 in Violet, Louisiana. Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)