By Greg Sterling, Dean of Yale Divinity School
As you are well aware, Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States, died recently. I will leave it to historians to judge his presidency, but I would like to reflect on President Carter as a human being and a Christian.
At a 2014 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, President Carter was interviewed in a large auditorium by two academics. One was Mary Evelyn Tucker, founder of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, who represented herself and Yale quite well. The other was Steven Kepnes, a world religions scholar and Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Colgate University. Dr. Kepnes pressed the former president about key biblical passages, such as Genesis 1:28, that appear to give humans the right to use the environment as they wish, for their own gain. Kepnes asked with a gentle but unmistakably edgy tone: “Would you recognize that our religions can in some ways be an obstacle toward addressing issues of climate change.”
President Carter responded with a memory from his boyhood: “Every year in our church in Plains, Georgia, they had a special week of stewardship. The pastors, no matter what their basic theology or philosophy was, would preach a special sermon that every human being is a steward of God’s beautiful world.”
That commitment, Carter continued, had profoundly influenced the way his father cared for the farmland that had been in the family since 1833—and for the way that he himself carried on the family tradition. “I still have that built into me,” he said. “This is an obligation I have not only to my family and descendants but also to God. I feel I have been entrusted by God with the duty of taking care of the beautiful land and air and water he gave me.”
Warm, spontaneous applause broke out in the audience of 3,000 to 4,000 people. President Carter had given one of the most poignant articulations of ecotheology that I have heard. I have told this story many times when introducing people to the Living Village—the regenerative student residence hall we are opening at YDS next year.
During his Yale presidency, Peter Salovey invited President Carter to the university and held a lunch in his honor. I was privileged to attend and had an opportunity to visit with President Carter privately for a few minutes. I said to him that I had told many people three things that I most appreciated about him and wanted to share them with him.
First, in my judgment he was the finest human being who occupied the White House in the twentieth century. He was a person of principle who had real moral integrity. He came to office in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, in which the presidency’s credibility had been severely damaged by Richard Nixon. President Carter promised he would not lie and to my knowledge did not (I think that his [in]famous interview with Playboy magazine made this point). I am appalled at how quickly we have dismissed integrity as a quality that is desirable in a president.
Second, President Carter made a serious effort to infuse moral considerations into the formation of American policy. He tried to make human rights a basic principle in foreign policy; for example, giving the Panama Canal back to the people of Panama. He negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt in the Camp David Accords, an agreement that won Nobel Prizes for Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat—and, sadly, led to Sadat’s assassination at the hands of his own citizens. The three did what we still struggle to do: bring peace to the Middle East. They were all courageous.
Finally, President Carter set the standard for the role of a former president. No other president has lived as long or done as much for peace and for the underprivileged as Jimmy Carter. His work for Habitat for Humanity is exemplary. He knew this and told the joke of a young child who once said to him: “President Carter, when I grow up, I want to be an ex-president just like you!” He set the bar and set it high.
U.S. presidents have used religion, Christianity in particular, throughout our history. President Carter did not simply use Christianity as a political tool but lived it personally and as president.