Shirley Hanson had little interest in politics. The suburban Minneapolis homemaker was committed to her family, serving in her local community, and, in particular, serving in her evangelical church. Aghast at the excesses of the late 1960s and early ’70s, she voted for Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 but then was disillusioned by the Watergate scandal. As the 1976 presidential election approached, she became intrigued with a relative new-comer to national politics, Jimmy Carter. The manner in which his faith was so much a part of his identity compelled her to think anew about her interest and possible involvement in politics.
When her three children returned to school that fall, Hanson went door-to-door in surrounding neighborhoods to generate votes for Carter. She then watched with considerable satisfaction that November as the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, was elected as the 39th President of the United States.
Fast forward four years. Hanson renounced her support for Carter and cast an impassioned vote for Ronald Reagan. She was not alone in her decision: a grinding recession, gasoline shortages, and a hostage crisis in Iran that deeply wounded American morale left Carter vulnerable.
In Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, Randall Balmer, a noted commentator on America’s religious past and present who serves on the faculty at Dartmouth College, seeks to make sense of this turn of events, situating Carter in the long arc of progressive evangelicalism and in particular its vicissitudes during the ascendancy of the Religious Right, a period detailed so well by David Swartz in his recent Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservativism.
“What made Carter intriguing,” Balmer recalls, “was that he didn’t seem apologetic or abashed about his faith; he talked about it matter-of-factly.”
Balmer’s book has no direct competitors, although his is not the first attempt at capturing Carter’s religious identity and how his contemporaries interpreted it—subjects touched on, albeit inadequately, in a number of biographical accounts and also addressed by Carter himself in autobiographical works such as Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President and An Hour Before Daylight: Memories from a Rural Boyhood. As an accessible yet detailed narrative, Balmer’s contribution reflects the qualities of a number of these previous works while also bringing a distinctive personal perspective to the project, illuminating a conflict he wrestled with for a considerable season of his life. As he detailed in Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father’s Faith, Balmer struggled to embrace the portrait of Christianity painted by his father, a fundamentalist pastor. Realizing the Christian story was also punctuated by struggle, Balmer asked, “What happened to the triumphant Christian life that I was supposed to experience, moving from victory to victory until I tasted sweet union with Jesus?” In contrast, he embraced “the God of liberation, not judgment, of hope in the face of despair,” placing his life in a larger story than the one he learned as a child. In the end, he made peace with his father by learning where the story they both cherished intersected and diverged.
It’s easy to forget how fresh and unexpected Jimmy Carter’s candidacy seemed to many evangelicals in 1976. “What made Carter intriguing,” Balmer recalls, “was that he didn’t seem apologetic or abashed about his faith; he talked about it matter-of-factly … . Here was a man—a politician, no less, who was running for president—who spoke our language. He was one of us!” But that “us,” Balmer suggests, was ambiguous, for Carter was defined by the lineage of progressive evangelicalism, reaching back to the likes of “Charles Grandison Finney and William Jennings Bryan,” a stream of evangelicalism largely missing from many contemporary accounts. When another stream of evangelicalism converged with right-wing politics in the late 1970s, the result was not only a personal defeat for Carter when he ran for a second term but also (and more momentously) a disaster for progressive evangelicalism. In the decades since that turning point, Balmer says, “no politician of national stature has embodied this tradition” as Carter did, for better and for worse.
Drawing judiciously on a wide range of works on Carter as well as on his own expertise in American evangelicalism, Balmer relies primarily on published sources, though he references the archives of the Carter Library for some material, citing a few personal communications and recordings of Carter’s Sunday school lessons. Balmer focuses his account of Carter’s early life on his religious upbringing. Carter was raised as a Southern Baptist, with humble beginnings as a farmer’s son, but he also grew up in a family a step ahead of their peers on issues of race and religion. Carter’s youthful progressive faith carried him on to the Naval Academy and into his career as a naval officer. After granting brief attention to Carter’s attempt to buoy the family farm, Balmer spends the remainder of the book chronicling Carter’s rise, first to the governorship of Georgia, then to the U.S. presidency, and his subsequent fall from political favor.
Redeemer is a biography of Jimmy Carter that has little to do with Jimmy Carter in critical places. As the story advances, it reads at times more like an account of the rise of the Moral Majority in evangelical America, with Carter cast as an almost accidental antagonist. The book’s epigraph sketches its narrative and theological arc and its fundamentally ironic perspective: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not. John 1:11 (King James Version).” But Balmer’s irony isn’t calculated to elicit cheap sneers; it grows out of the tangle of American history. And if his book isn’t entirely satisfying as a biography, he does succeed—in contrast to previous biographers—in rightly portraying Jimmy Carter’s Christianity as the driving force behind his political and personal life.
One truly fascinating episode in Balmer’s narrative involves the details he offers in relation to the rise of abortion as a matter of widespread concern for evangelicals. As a candidate, Carter initially perceived abortion as a distinctly Catholic issue that called upon his attention from the margins of his platform. Balmer notes (as he has elaborated elsewhere) that during Carter’s rise to the presidency evangelicals largely supported a limited legalization of abortion—a view that quickly gave way to demands for de-legalization as a central issue of the Religious Right, but with the suddenness of the shift in perspective suppressed. Carter’s refusal to legislate against abortion (despite his continued insistence that he was personally opposed to the practice), coupled with a controversial interview in Playboy magazine leading up to the 1976 election, stirred an array of sentiments that would coalesce into the Moral Majority.
Balmer is at his best in recounting these political maneuverings. At this point in the book, however, Carter tends to fade into the distance, while the major architects of the Religious Right, Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich chief among them, come to the fore.
Readers seeking a reasonably comprehensive biography of the 39th president should probably go to Peter Bourne’s Jimmy Carter. For the latter-day fortunes and the possible future of progressive evangelicalism, David Swartz’s Moral Minority is the go-to source. But for younger evangelicals looking for a narrative connecting them with a spirit of social consciousness they may sense is presently lacking in their parents’ generation, Redeemer just might be the right book. Shirley Hanson might not appreciate Balmer’s work, but it might well strike a sympathetic chord with her grandchildren.
Todd C. Ream is professor of higher education at Taylor University and a research fellow with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. Drew Moser is the Director of the Calling and Career Office at Taylor University. Together they are writing a cultural biography of Ernest L. Boyer, who served under Jimmy Carter as the United States Commissioner of Education.
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