{"id":98760,"date":"2023-02-20T17:29:05","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T00:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=98760"},"modified":"2023-03-02T22:19:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T05:19:00","slug":"jimmy-carter-and-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2023\/02\/jimmy-carter-and-i.html","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Carter and I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"James<\/a>
The official public portrait of President Jimmy Carter<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States, has entered hospice care.\u00a0 As I understand the definition and requirements of hospice care, this means that he has, at most, six months left to live, and possibly significantly less time than that.<\/p>\n

I never voted for Mr. Carter.\u00a0 I did not and do not consider him an effective president.\u00a0 I think that he was probably, at least a bit, in over his head.\u00a0 (An anecdote that I once heard from a White House insider related that, while president, he devoted attention to working out the schedule for staff play on the White House tennis court \u2013 perhaps not the best use of time for the leader of the free world.)\u00a0 My opinion of him appears to have been shared by many if not most foreign leaders, most notably perhaps by the Soviets and the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who treated him with conspicuous contempt.<\/p>\n

On the night that he defeated President Gerald R. Ford in the 1976 presidential election, several of us \u2014 all politically conservative Brigham Young University undergraduates at the time \u2014 gathered to watch the vote come in on television.\u00a0 When the election was called for Mr. Carter, one of my friends, a very straight-arrow Latter-day Saint, said \u201cLet\u2019s all go out and get drunk.\u201d\u00a0 We didn\u2019t do it, of course, but we weren\u2019t exactly ecstatic about his election.<\/p>\n

On one occasion, I actually participated in a tiny demonstration against Mr. Carter \u2014 something that I\u2019ve remembered ever since with mortification and regret. \u00a0Here\u2019s the story:<\/p>\n

At, I think, the Democratic national convention that nominated him, some delegates on the convention floor were shown brandishing placards bearing Mr. Carter\u2019s photograph accompanied by the slogan \u201cJC can save America!\u201d<\/p>\n

Some time thereafter, Mr. Carter came to Salt Lake City on a campaign stop.\u00a0 Among other things, he stopped in at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> for the de rigueur<\/em> candidate visit with the Church\u2019s First Presidency.\u00a0 Knowing that he was coming, a friend of mine (the very same one who had suggested that we go out and get drunk on election night) proposed going up to Salt Lake City to confront Mr. Carter about that \u201cJC can save America!\u201d convention placard.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t overly enthusiastic, but I agreed to go up with him and with another friend who had been there with us watching the election results.\u00a0 Our friend the organizer had produced three replicas of the placard for us to hold up.\u00a0 We stood across the street from the north side of the Church\u2019s high-rise office building.\u00a0 That\u2019s where the First Presidency had its offices at the time, during a period in which, if I\u2019m not misremembering, the older, grey granite Church Administration Building was under renovation.\u00a0 (It was also in the high-rise office building where, shortly after Mr. Carter\u2019s election, some friends and I took the conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., at the Church\u2019s request, to visit with the First Presidency \u2014 which, at the time, consisted of President Spencer W. Kimball and his counselors N. Eldon Tanner and Marion G. Romney.)<\/p>\n

When Mr. Carter emerged from the building after his meeting with the First Presidency, my two friends and I waved our placards and yelled something like \u201cWhat do you think of this<\/em>?\u201d\u00a0 He walked around to the door of his black limousine that was nearest us and then paused, looking at us and our signs.\u00a0 \u201cI didn\u2019t like that, either!\u201d he shouted over to us, and then he got into the car.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I didn\u2019t feel good about the confrontation, slight and brief as it was.\u00a0 I never really imagined that Jimmy Carter, a seriously devout evangelical Protestant Christian, had endorsed the offensive placard, let alone that he had been behind it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like confrontation and, anyway, our deployment of the placard against him seemed to me more than slightly demagogic and disingenuous.<\/p>\n

So far as I can recall, I\u2019ve never participated in a political demonstration since then and, if all goes well, I never will.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like slogan-thought.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like sensationalism, or the deployment of decontextualized and misrepresentative quotations designed to inflame.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like demonizing people simply for holding different opinions than mine.\u00a0 I vastly prefer civil debate and reasoned discussion.<\/p>\n

In any case, back to Jimmy Carter:\u00a0 He has been out of office for forty-three years now, the better part of half a century.\u00a0 He\u2019s had a very long ex-presidency and, at ninety-eight, he is now the longest-living of all American presidents.\u00a0 And, although I haven\u2019t agreed with everything he\u2019s done, it\u2019s been a very good<\/em> ex-presidency, too.\u00a0 Some of our recent ex-presidents have gone on to live, at taxpayer expense, in almost imperial splendor once they\u2019ve left the White House, in elegant and elite digs.\u00a0 By contrast, Jimmy Carter returned to his people and his roots in Plains, Georgia.\u00a0 And he\u2019s devoted himself to humanitarian efforts and to peacemaking (in the latter case, signalized by a Nobel Prize).\u00a0 There are many photographs of President Carter in a carpenter\u2019s garb helping to build homes for Habitat for Humanity.\u00a0 And that\u2019s just one of his many hands-on activities.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also, for decades, been a Sunday school teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church.\u00a0 I like<\/em> that.\u00a0 I like the return of a president to more or less ordinary life, among more or less ordinary people.\u00a0 Specifically, I like the implicit acknowledgement, in his being a Sunday school teacher, that there is a Lord who reigns as sovereign even over presidents and celebrities and who is to be served with humble submission.<\/p>\n

So I have to say, in closing, that \u2014 based on his public record, at least \u2014 I honor Jimmy Carter as a good man, a sincere man.\u00a0 He has had his flaws, of course.\u00a0 (Out of all of humankind, only the Savior has been wholly without flaws, perhaps along with one or two of my fiercest critics.)\u00a0 Many of Mr. Carter\u2019s political and economic views were, from my perspective, quite wrong-headed.\u00a0 Some writers have even accused him of being, occasionally, petty and vindictive.\u00a0 Whether such accusations are true or not, I\u2019m in no position to say.\u00a0 Mr. Carter and I exchanged shouts on that one occasion in Salt Lake City; I was in the audience for one of his public speeches; and, once, he spoke to a group of about twenty or thirty of us at the Carter Center in Atlanta.\u00a0 We\u2019re not exactly intimate friends.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m grateful for his service, and not only during his presidency.\u00a0 And I hope that, on a day that appears to be not far off for him, he will be warmly received into the eternal worlds as a man who sought to do right and who, in fact, did much good.\u00a0 God bless Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Posted from Hurricane, Utah<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States, has entered hospice care.\u00a0 As I understand the definition and requirements of hospice care, this means that he has, at most, six months left to live, and possibly significantly less time than that. I never voted for Mr. Carter.\u00a0 I did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":94819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8874,4799,34593,12517,34590,34596,34587,34584,34599,34602,5286,4820],"class_list":["post-98760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-carter","tag-evangelical","tag-ford","tag-georgia","tag-gerald-ford","tag-gerry-ford","tag-james-earl-carter","tag-jimmy-carter","tag-maranatha-baptist-church","tag-plains","tag-president","tag-protestant"],"yoast_head":"\nJimmy Carter and I<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States, has entered hospice care.\u00a0 As I understand the definition and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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