Jimmy Carter Was America’s Evangelical-in-Chief

After issuing a pardon for Vietnam-era draft resisters on his first full day in office in 1977, thereby closing a festering wound in the United States’ recent past, then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter informed his vice president, Walter Mondale, that one of his priorities would be peace in the Middle East. Mondale was surprised to hear this. Their presidential campaign, conducted in the wake of the Watergate scandal and in the context of runaway inflation, had touched only lightly on foreign policy—aside from incumbent Gerald Ford’s gaffe during one of the debates, when he declared that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination.

Carter’s interest in foreign affairs derived in part from his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, where he met and formed an alliance with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became Carter’s national security advisor. A larger influence on the president, however, was his evangelical faith. Carter’s declaration that he was a born-again Christian had provoked incredulity from the national press corps, but the statement resonated with many Americans, including evangelicals themselves, who looked for integrity in the White House following the scandals of former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s administration. Carter, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, fit the bill.

Few voters, however, considered how Carter’s faith would shape his foreign policy. The one-term governor of Georgia had hardly established a track record in diplomatic matters, yet foreign policy would arguably become the hallmark of his presidency.

In his inaugural address, Carter said, “The powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced.” And on Feb. 5, just a couple of weeks into his administration, he assured Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet dissident, that “human rights is a central concern of my Administration.” Carter spelled out his vision more comprehensively in his commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 22, four months into his presidency. The United States, he announced, would move away from the reflexive dualism of the Cold War in favor of an emphasis on human rights. The fixation on communism, he said, had led the nation into alliances with unsavory dictators. “For too many years,” he said, “we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.” The president also called attention to inequality. A peaceful world cannot exist, he added, if it is “one-third rich and two-thirds hungry.”

Carter insisted that his understanding of human rights had been informed by his reading of the Hebrew prophets. “I have been steeped in the Bible since childhood,” he said in a speech to the World Jewish Congress, which emphasized “the idea of the dignity of the individual human being and also of the individual conscience; the idea of service to the poor and to the oppressed.” Brzezinski concurred that the president’s “commitment to human rights reflected Carter’s own religious beliefs.”

The Carter administration pressed Congress for a requirement that the U.S. State Department produce a “full and complete report” on human rights around the world. On the basis of the initial report, Carter denounced human rights violations in the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies, and the administration voted against World Bank loans to nations with poor records on human rights, including Uganda, Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

The results were mixed. Carter faced criticism for being inconsistent in his demands, but his efforts succeeded in winning the release of Argentine dissidents, including journalist Jacobo Timerman and activist Alfredo Bravo. “There is absolutely no doubt that Carter’s policy saved thousands of lives,” the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald wrote. Suharto, then-Indonesia’s strongman and president, responded to the Carter administration’s diplomatic and economic pressures by releasing nearly 30,000 political prisoners during Carter’s time in office, and around 118,000 Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate. “It was the first time—and I fear the last—in this violent and criminal century that a major power has defended human rights all over the world,” Timerman said about Carter’s human rights policy.

Aside from the emphasis on human rights, the issue that most reflected Carter’s morality in foreign policy was his push to revise the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty. The 1903 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty established the Panama Canal Zone in the isthmus of Central America as U.S. territory. The canal itself, completed in 1914, was crucial to both trade and military maneuvers, but it also symbolized U.S. imperialism. U.S. presidents as far back as Lyndon Johnson had worked to revise the treaty to improve relations with Latin America and move away from colonialism.

Carter, recognizing the imperative of renegotiation if the United States was to have any meaningful relationship with Latin America or postcolonial nations generally, took up the cause. “In the peaceful process of negotiating the treaties,” Carter announced at the signing in Panama City, “we have shown the world a spirit which recognizes and respects the rights of others and seeks to help all people to fulfill their legitimate aspirations with confidence and dignity.”

(Left to right) U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General Alejandro Orfila, and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos attend the signing of the Carter-Torrijos Treaty at the OAS in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 7, 1977.JIMMY CARTER LIBRARY/AFP via Getty Images

Carter may have been acting on his moral impulses in renegotiating the Panama Canal treaties, but his political instincts failed him. Although advisors, including his wife, urged the president to delay action on the Panama Canal until later in his term—or even until a second term—Carter forged ahead, expending a great deal of political capital early in his presidency to secure ratification of the treaty in the Senate. One of the treaty’s loudest opponents was the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who called it a “retreat by the United States,” a criticism he would repeat during the 1980 presidential campaign. After leaving office, Carter called the quest for ratification “the most severe political challenge I’ve ever faced.”

Carter also sought to bring peace to the Middle East, a region he sometimes referred to as the “Holy Land.” Carter believed that the formation of the nation of Israel in 1948 represented a fulfillment of biblical prophecies, but he also recognized that peace in the region would be elusive without some semblance of justice among the various parties. The president assiduously courted both then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Following Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977 and Begin’s reciprocal visit to Egypt, Rosalynn Carter suggested to her husband that he invite both leaders to the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland to continue their negotiations.

In the course of the 13-day summit in 1978, Carter shuttled between the cabins of the two men, trying to broker an agreement. At one point, when an impasse threatened to derail the talks, Carter appealed to both men, Begin especially, to think about their grandchildren and the world they would inherit.

In announcing the historic and hard-won agreement, which ended the state of war between the two nations, Carter recalled that “the first thing upon which we agreed was to ask the people of the world to pray that our negotiations would be successful.” Sadat and Begin nodded in agreement. “Those prayers have been answered,” Carter added, “beyond any expectations.” Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, praised Carter as “a true reconciler, willing to take risks in pursuit of a settlement based on principle.”

For Carter, morality in foreign policy also demanded an attenuation of the threat of nuclear warfare. In Vienna, on June 18, 1979, Carter and then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), aimed at curtailing the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In the final negotiations, Brezhnev laid his hand on Carter’s shoulder and said, “If we do not succeed, God will not forgive us.”

Carter’s critics—and he seldom lacked for critics—charged that he was too placatory, especially in light of the fact that in December 1978, he announced he would extend full diplomatic recognition to China, thereby completing the process Nixon had set in motion. The accusation that Carter was soft on communism, however, does not square with the facts. Despite his successor’s attempts to portray U.S. defenses as having diminished during the Carter presidency, Carter had pressed NATO to rearm early in his term. And when the Soviet Union deployed SS-20 missiles, Carter provided Pershing and cruise missiles to Western Europe. He also dispatched an additional 35,000 soldiers to boost U.S. forces in Europe, which more than restored the cuts made under his predecessors.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan only six months after the signing of SALT II rendered the treaty moot, and the president withdrew it from Senate consideration on Jan. 3, 1980. By then, Carter was enmeshed in another foreign entanglement that would, in many ways, define his presidency and doom his chances for reelection.

Responding to overtures from banker David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Carter permitted the then-ailing shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to seek medical treatment in the United States. Within days of the shah’s arrival, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, taking Americans hostage. Carter’s failure to free the hostages, despite undertaking an abortive rescue attempt in April 1980, sealed his fate in the 1980 presidential election, especially because Election Day coincided with the one-year anniversary of the storming of the embassy in Tehran.

Although Carter’s resolve that human rights would trump Cold War confrontation in U.S. foreign policy came to be seen as naive once the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the new emphasis succeeded both in calling attention to the issue and also in ameliorating the plight of many political prisoners. Carter’s success in renegotiating and ratifying the Panama Canal treaties set the stage for better relations with Latin America, even if his successors did not fully capitalize on that opening, and the Camp David Accords stand as a singular diplomatic achievement, even though his successors failed to seize the opportunity to press for a more comprehensive peace.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (right) listens to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (left) as U.S. President Jimmy Carter looks on at Camp David in Maryland on Sept. 6, 1978.CONSOLIDATED NEWS/AFP via Getty Images

In the course of his long post-presidency, Carter was proud of the fact that no U.S. soldier died in combat during his administration. (Although eight soldiers perished in the failed rescue attempt.) Through his nonprofit, the Carter Center, and by means of personal diplomacy, Carter sought to capitalize on his status as president and his personal relationships with world leaders to forestall conflict, ensure democratic elections, and eradicate diseases.

Freed from the constraints of elective politics, Carter operated as a kind of ambassador-at-large—even though his successors as president did not always appreciate his efforts because they often complicated, and at times contradicted, their own diplomatic initiatives. Carter, in turn, was especially critical of his successors for their failure to follow up on the Camp David Accords, which he so painstakingly brokered; he viewed their negligence almost as a personal affront. At various times, he spared no criticism of his successors, both Republican and Democrat.

On the morning of Oct. 11, 2002, Carter received a phone call from Oslo, Norway, informing him that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Many of Carter’s supporters believed that the president should have been awarded the prize years earlier when it was shared by Begin and Sadat, but the paperwork for Carter’s nomination had arrived too late. Carter, who had orchestrated the accords, had been excluded.

During the awards ceremony, the head of the selection committee noted that the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s failure to honor Carter earlier constituted “one of the real sins of omission in Peace Prize history.” The awarding of the prize in 2002, just as the administration of then-U.S. President George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq, was meant to send a message; the Nobel committee hailed Carter “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Carter’s acceptance speech reaffirmed the religious values that undergirded his approach to governing and foreign policy. “I worship Jesus Christ, whom we Christians consider to be the Prince of Peace,” he said, adding that “Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others can embrace each other in a common effort to alleviate human suffering and to espouse peace.” War may be necessary at times, Carter said, but it is invariably evil. “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”