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R.I.P. Jimmy Carter

R.I.P. Jimmy Carter

Last updated on: December 31, 2024 at 10:43 am by Roger E. Olson

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R.I.P. Jimmy Carter 2024-12-31T10:43:20-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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R.I.P. Jimmy Carter

James Earl Carter Jr.

Former US president Jimmy Carter passed away at age 100. Unlike most Americans, I was alive and old enough to vote when he ran for president and won in 1976. I voted for his rival, President Gerald Ford. I don’t remember why. There was a lot of talk about Carter among family members and church friends. (I was in seminary and served as assistant pastor at an independent evangelical church.) People admired his evangelical faith and sincerity, but many thought he was not qualified to be president. And, even then, most evangelicals in America were suspicious of the Democratic Party. However, four years later, I voted for Carter rather than for Reagan. I thought Reagan was a shallow celebrity who was also a war hawk and could lead America into a war with the Soviet Union.

Carter was the first US president to openly call himself a “born-again Christian” and his life supported the claim. However, by allowing himself to be interviewed by Playboy Magazine and by admitting that he had sometimes lusted in his heart, he shot himself in the foot for many conservative Christians.

My thought about Carter is that he failed as president of the US because he really tried to lead as a Christian. I am not sure that a true Christian can serve as president of the US successfully. Among other things, Carter declared that the US would no longer support dictatorships that used torture to eliminate dissent and he abolished the infamous “School of the Americas” that trained Latin American dictators’ police and military (and probably death squads).

He opposed capital punishment and showed genuine compassion for the poor and oppressed. He was labeled “weak” by critics for not practicing “Realpolitik.”

All that is terribly wrong with America began with the Reagan “revolution” in the 1980s and “trickle-down economics” that even George H. W. Bush called “voodoo economics.”

Goodbye, Jimmy Carter. You are one of my very few political heroes.

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