Opinion: Jimmy Carter had a second term. It just wasn’t in the White House

At a campaign event in Winston-Salem on the eve of the 1976 North Carolina Democratic primary, a voter asked then-candidate Jimmy Carter whether he was a “born again” Christian. Carter, a Southern Baptist Sunday-school teacher, replied that, yes, he was “born again,” thereby sending a legion of journalists from outside the Bible belt to their Rolodexes to figure out what in the world he was talking about.

Carter sought throughout his life to act on the principles of his faith, which was defined in part by the extraordinary activism of 19th century evangelical Christians who worked assiduously on behalf of those Jesus called “the least of these.” They were involved in peace crusades and helped to organize public schools so that the children of those less affluent could become upwardly mobile. Northern evangelicals worked for the abolition of slavery. They supported prison reform and women’s suffrage.

Carter’s progressive evangelicalism was very much in that tradition. He was sensitive to racial inequalities from a young age and tried to address them — as school board member, as governor and as president. He supported women’s equality, including the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

As president, Carter tried to nudge American foreign policy away from its reflexive Cold War dualism toward an emphasis on human rights. He recognized that if the United States were to have any meaningful relationship with Latin America, we needed to attenuate our colonialism, so he pushed through the ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. He advanced peace in the Middle East farther than any of his predecessors (or successors), and he appointed more women and people of color to federal office than any previous president. Many environmentalists consider him the best president ever for their cause.

Carter’s failure to win reelection in 1980 devastated him. He departed Washington for Plains, Ga., at 56, the youngest president to leave office since William Howard Taft.

Rosalynn was especially embittered by the election loss. In one of our interviews decades after the 1980 election, Carter told me that in the course of his frequent reassurances to his wife that they still had productive years ahead of them, he began to believe his own rhetoric. He also conceded that if he had been president for four more years, that second term would not have been nearly so fruitful as the alternative turned out to be.

Carter’s post-presidency began with a middle-of-the-night idea. In addition to a presidential library, Jimmy told Rosalynn, “We can start an adjacent institution, something like Camp David, where people can come who are involved in a war. I can offer to serve as a mediator, in Atlanta or perhaps in their countries. We might also teach how to resolve or prevent conflict.”

This would be an entirely new model for out-of-office presidents — a privately funded nonprofit center to advance his goals and allow him to address issues he would have pursued if he’d stayed in the White House.

In a list of basic principles for the center, Carter stipulated that it would be nonpartisan and that it would not duplicate the programs of other institutions, such as the United Nations. Most important, Carter wanted an “action agency,” an institution devoted to change rather than simply “theoretical or academic analysis.”

The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, along with the Carter Center, was dedicated in Atlanta on Oct. 1, 1986, Carter’s 62nd birthday. His faith undeniably informed every effort at the center. Carter told an interviewer in 1988 that the life of Jesus had always been his guide. “I don’t see any disharmony in this life between evangelistic effort on the one hand and benevolent care of people who suffer or who are in need on the other,” he said. “I think they are intimately tied together.”

Carter understood problems afflicting the world as spiritual challenges in part, noting that industrialized Western society had failed to adopt Christian principles of concern and caring. He believed that people of privilege, and especially people of faith, bore a special responsibility for those less fortunate, for those who suffer and are deprived. “That’s where Jesus spent all his ministry,” Carter said. Piety alone wasn’t sufficient; followers of Jesus must live out their convictions with acts of charity.

Early on, Carter identified access to healthcare, including mental healthcare (one of Rosalynn’s concerns), as a fundamental human right, noting at one point that 40,000 children die every day from preventable diseases. Using education and simple, low-cost methods, the Carter Center’s health initiatives addressed “neglected tropical diseases”: lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis and malaria. Other programs targeted guinea worm and river blindness (onchocerciasis), extraordinary initiatives that have achieved near eradication of those diseases in regions where the Carter Center has been active.

Peace and conflict resolution, the second focus of the Carter Center, built on Carter’s success in negotiating the Camp David accords. “We need to deal with other people with mutual respect,” Carter told an audience at Messiah College in 1988, “and through that kind of approach there can be peaceful resolution of differences through the use of diplomacy and negotiation, not through the use of military power.”

The center conducted programs on democracy and human rights and monitored elections in dozens of countries. Carter leveraged his relationships with world leaders to mediate various disputes, including those in Guyana, Ethiopia and Serbia. In 1994, Carter convinced Kim Il Sung to open North Korea’s nuclear reactors to inspectors. In Haiti the following year, U.S. military planes were headed toward the island when Carter, together with Colin Powell and Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, persuaded the military junta to abandon power.

Carter’s persistent efforts at conflict resolution, dating back to the Camp David accords of 1978, were recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Jimmy and Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, extended their public service beyond the Carter Center, too — most notably with Habitat for Humanity, which Carter once described as “the most practical, tangible way I’ve ever seen to put Christian principles into action.” During one of our conversations, Carter choked up when he told of completing a house for a woman and her family who had been living in an abandoned septic tank.

Carter’s alternative “second term” lasted for more than four decades. Out of the ashes of political annihilation, he became not just an elder statesman and world-renowned humanitarian but arguably the most consequential of modern former presidents.

James Laney, former president of Emory University, partner of the Carter Center, offered the best and most succinct characterization of the man from Plains. Carter, Laney remarked, was “the first president to use the White House as a stepping stone.”

Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, is the author of “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.”