Remembering Jimmy Carter

Ever since his passing on Sunday, the media has lionised–and social media denigrated–Jimmy Carter. One statement in Al Mohler’s piece on Carter caught my attention:

Time does seem to mellow powerful memories—even powerful political memories. That is especially true when most Americans alive today were not yet born when Carter left the White House, overwhelmingly rejected by voters in the 1980 presidential election.

I frequently find myself the “old guy” on social media, especially when dealing with issues in the Anglican/Episcopal world when people say “this is the way it’s always been done” and my response is “no, it wasn’t.” I’m going to try to put into concise form what it was like to live through his administration and the era is general.

When he was inaugurated I was starting my first job out of Texas A&M working for Texas Instruments on the HARM (AGM-88A) missile project. One of the first impacts of his accession was a “hold” on the project. It wasn’t cancelled but some people lost their jobs while the new administration figured out whether they wanted this weapon–which was to replace ones like it used in Vietnam–or not. It was ultimately finished, but it strung out the development of a useful piece of ordnance which was, thanks in part to the military’s ponderous acquisition process, too long to start with. He had his detractors amongst the team working on the project. One put in his cubicle one of those plastic peanut models with Carter’s grinning teeth at the top. He was told to take it down, but the model probably came from his campaign!

The following year I moved on to the family business. If there was a group of business people that benefited from the economic chaos of the Carter years, it was those of us in the oil industry. Between the embargoes and other supply issues that plagued the energy industry, elevated prices were a spark for exploration and development, and Vulcan certainly benefited from the latter. It was a wild ride, with supply issues, inflation and an industrial base unprepared to respond at the speed the industry liked. (Unlike the grenade that the COVID inflation chucked into everyone’s foxhole, inflation had plagued the U.S. throughout the 1970’s, and the wage system was better prepared to compensate for it.) Carter’s normalisation of relations with the People’s Republic of China facilitated our own foray into business with the PRC, but by then he was gone from the White House.

I spent most of the Carter years as a member of the First Baptist Church of Chattanooga. By the time I moved here I had been through one unsuccessful process of joining a covenant community, which (coupled with an uninspiring parish in Richardson) convinced me that I needed a church which had a better life at the local church level, and Baptist churches promise that. That promise was not delivered on, not for me at least. Although FBC was progressive with its singles’ ministry, Baptist churches like it at the time were conformity- and respectability-obsessed institutions whose theology of perseverance underpinned a fault-intolerant style of mind. The conservative revolt–one which ultimately inspired Carter to leave the Southern Baptist Convention–went against the “get with the program” mentality but was ultimately successful. I was not.

Mohler reminds us that the voters turned Carter out in 1980. With all the adulation he gets now, it’s easy to wonder why the voters at the time–who had for the most part experienced his time in office–would do such a thing. That’s a simple question to answer, for me at least. 1980 was the first election I ever voted in, and I voted for Ronald Reagan. I think many of us at time, regaled by the economic chaos and the disgraceful hostage situation in Tehran, decided the country wasn’t going to make it through another Carter term. (His pulling the rug out from under the Shah and allowing the Ayatollah Khomeini to take power has been an expensive foreign policy mistake we’re still paying for.) It may have been the first election I had to make that decision, but unfortunately it’s not been the last.

Since that debacle–for Carter at least–his reputation has been restored through his humanitarian work. Ever since prep school humanitarian work has been set forth before me as the way Christians should express their love of neighbour, followed by social activism. While humanitarian work is important, ultimately someone who turns to politics must take a different path to make a country great both for its place in the world and its people. In spite of his early successes such as the Camp David accord (which was the “low hanging fruit” in the Arab-Israeli conflict) Carter basically failed in that mission.

Evangelicals for the most part have been busy disowning Jimmy Carter and pursuing their own agenda to “bring America back to God.” Today they are content (well, most of them) with being clients to their patron Donald Trump. While I’m sure the partisan hacks have their opinion of the matter, I think that evangelicalism is by nature unsuited to the task of taking political power and exercising it in a meaningful way. Carter was the first evangelical since World War II to find this out the hard way, but those who thought they could do better have not.