The Recklessness of Faith

President Jimmy Carter’s ultimate lesson to us might have been his faith in faith itself.

By Chuck Reece

Jan 4, 2025

Since his death a week ago, I’ve been trying to figure out what ultimate lessons I should take from Jimmy Carter the teacher, the preacher, and the leader. Carter was a hero to me (and countless others around the world). I first shook his hand when I was fourteen years old, and I have watched his life closely ever since. (That’s fifty years, if you’re counting. I try not to.)

Jimmy Carter lived a life, I believe, unlike any other person whose time on this planet has intersected with my own. Carter’s life was intensely public. But unlike every other public figure with the power to influence the course of world events, he also put his private life, his inner life, in full view. Every American president who followed him had things to hide. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush hid their arms sales to Iran. Bill Clinton hid his thing for Monica Lewinsky. George W. Bush hid the intelligence (or lack thereof) about weapons of mass destruction (or the lack thereof) in Iraq. Barack Obama hid his decision to authorize Operation Fast and Furious, a failed effort to track gun sales to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Donald Trump hid whatever he felt like hiding, including classified documents he took from the White House. Joe Biden hid the classified documents he kept after his time as vice president.

Jimmy Carter hid nothing, as far as I can tell. This man who was married to his only wife longer than any American president in history (seventy-seven years) was never unfaithful to Rosalynn, but still confessed to Playboy in 1976, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

What can we learn from a man who was that open? What should we learn from a man like that?

The simple answer, I think, was that we need to believe, we need to have faith. Not necessarily the Christian faith Carter professed—and lived—throughout his century on Earth, but the power of looking into our own souls to see what we find there. And then to live—to govern ourselves—based on those essential virtues. That’s what made Carter so different from the presidents who came after his time in office.

Carter’s central motivation was not to accumulate power: it was to accumulate virtue. Not the best strategy for political victory, as we learned from his failure to win reelection. But as proved by his life after that defeat, it is a masterful and visionary strategy for being human.

Jimmy Carter's “spiritual diagnosis” of America, July 15, 1979

After Carter’s death on Sunday, The New York Times published a striking piece by its television critic, James Poniewozik. The headline: “When Jimmy Carter Turned TV Into a Pulpit.” In the piece, Poniewozik dissects a July 1979 televised address from the Oval Office, a speech that would later become known as the “Malaise Speech,” although the president never used that word during the address. After a revolution in Iran, a global energy crisis was raging, and people all over America were waiting in lines to fill up their gas tanks.

What was striking to Poniewozik (and to me, once I watched it online) was how the speech was completely different from what we expect in presidential addresses. Carter did not deliver a prescription for shorter gas lines. He didn’t tell the nation how he alone could fix it. Instead, he asked for the nation’s help.

“I realize more than ever that as president I need your help,” he spoke into the camera, knowing that, in those days before a million channels, every person in the nation who had a TV turned on would be watching. “So I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America. I invited to Camp David people from almost every segment of our society—business and labor, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private citizens. And then I left Camp David to listen to other Americans, men and women like you. It has been an extraordinary ten days, and I want to share with you what I’ve heard….”

For the next five minutes, he read from a stack of cards on which he had written what people had told him. A governor had said,“You’re not leading this nation, you’re just managing the government.” A young woman said she “felt like ordinary people are excluded from political power.” A Mississippi mayor reminded him, “The big shots are not the only ones who are important. Remember, you can’t sell anything on Wall Street unless someone digs it up somewhere else first.”

As he listened to these Americans, Carter said, he heard a dangerous erosion of “our confidence in the future.” That erosion, he warned, was “threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people.”

It was the only time in history when a U.S. president, the most powerful person in the world, looked all of America in the eye and told us he was less worried about our bank accounts than he was about our souls.

He was empathizing with all Americans as they struggled with their loss of optimism, their loss of confidence, their loss of faith.

“But the speech is about more than empathy,” Poniewozik writes. “It’s a kind of spiritual diagnosis.”

That diagnosis was this: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Carter said. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Here we are, forty-five years later, but those words feel like a description of our country’s culture at this very moment. Historians have written and debated hundreds of interpretations of that speech and how or whether it foretold Carter’s defeat by Reagan a year and a half later.

Jimmy Carter on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, 2017

From 1975 through 2018, Jimmy Carter wrote and published thirty-two books. There were memoirs from many perspectives, political books, fiction, a children’s book with illustrations by his daughter, the Atlanta artist Amy Carter, and even a through-the-year book of daily meditations. But I do not believe it was an accident that his final book was called Faith: A Journey for All.

The title alone is striking. Carter never made a secret of his devout Christianity, but that “journey for all” makes clear this final book isn’t a prescription that all who read it make the path of Jesus their own.

When Faith was published in 2018, Carter went on a media tour to promote the book, and one of his stops was The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. I stumbled upon the segment earlier this week and more than just a little uplifting. First, to see Carter, at age ninety-three—“going on ninety-four!” he tells Colbert—in such good humor, so optimistic, is striking. Even more striking is when Carter lays out the central premise of the book—that faith is a requirement of human life, a given.

“We can’t avoid having faith,” Carter tells Colbert. “You know, when we are babies, all of us have faith in our mothers. And we have some degree of faith in ourselves, right? And we have to have faith in our close friends or things that we cherish, like the truth, or faith in education, or faith in America, or faith in whatever country we live in, faith in freedom. So we have faith in different things that we can't avoid.”

Stumbling across that exchange on YouTube sent me to the bookstore for a copy of Faith. It’s a fascinating little book. It reads as if Carter the teacher is delivering a lesson, in language as simple as possible. Faith, he tells us, is a human need as fundamental as food or water.

“We need to have something unshakable in which to have faith, like a mother’s love—something that can’t be changed or destroyed by war, political events, the loss of a loved one, lack of success in business, a serious illness, or failure to realize our own ambitions,” Carter writes in the introduction. “We need some foundation on which we can build a predictable and dependable existence.”

I grew up in a tiny Baptist church that offered only one answer when I had questions like “Why do we do this?” or “Why do we believe that?” The answer was always “So you won’t go to hell.”

In Oslo in 2002, as Carter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, he recalled the words of a favorite teacher from his school days in Plains, Julia Coleman. Miss Coleman, he said, consistently told her classes, “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

In Faith, Carter tries to name those unchanging principles.

“I would like to say as an American who has been president that the cherished values of our country are constant, but they are not,” he writes. “There are always powerful forces that work against the idealistic principles of peace, truthfulness, equality, justice, and even hospitality, freedom, and friendship.”

But that list, to me, feels solid as a rock: peace, truthfulness, equality, justice, hospitality, freedom, friendship. I can imagine President Lincoln thinking about those very qualities as he uttered that famous phrase “the better angels of our nature” in 1861.

Those principles, Carter argues in Faith, are common not just to nations, but to individuals themselves and the institutions they create.

“What are the goals of a person or a denomination or a country?” he writes. “They are all remarkably the same: a desire for peace; a need for humility, for examining one’s faults and turning away from them; a commitment to human rights in the broadest sense of the words, based on a moral society concerned with the alleviation of suffering because of deprivation or hatred or hunger or physical affliction; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to share one’s ideals, one’s faith with others, to translate love in a person to justice.”

And the basic human need to hold to such goals and principles, he posits, is made manifest in religions or similar systems. He writes: “Most people are influenced by religious faith, with statistics showing that about three-fourths of the earth’s inhabitants profess to follow the teachings of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism, and most of the other believers worship ancestors, heavenly bodies, or some other aspect of nature. We submit to our deities out of longing for something or someone on whom to rely for meaning, or to perpetuate or strengthen an ideal set of morals or principles, such as peace, justice, equality, truth, kindness, compassion, or love.”

For decades of my life, I would not have accepted such ideas. The reason was simple. I grew up in a tiny Baptist church that offered only one answer when I had questions like “Why do we do this?” or “Why do we believe that?”

“So you won’t go to hell” was always the answer.

It was a simplistic system of punishment and reward. I could find no room for study, for consideration, or discussion. So I left it all behind. I made it out of the mountains and into college, where music and literature and other arts became my gods, the places where I could tap into holy spirits. But as I grew deeper into middle age, I began to feel art was not enough. Then, I could not have said precisely what the problem was. It turns out that Jimmy Carter provided the exact right words when he wrote Faith. As much as I loved the music and the dancing, the literature and the discussions of it, they were not, by themselves, enough to give me a foundation on which to “build a predictable and dependable existence.”

You will probably laugh when I tell you who put me on a journey to see if I could build such a foundation.

His name was Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

The first time I walked into a church out of desire and not obligation came nearly forty years after my decision to leave the church of my youth. It was in May of 2018. A month earlier, on April 6, Sessions, who was then the U.S. Attorney General in the first Trump administration, had announced a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that directed U.S. attorneys along the Mexican border to prosecute every case of illegal entry. Between then and the end of May, the U.S. Government took almost 2,000 children away from parents who had been arrested for illegal entry.

I remember watching one of the news channels one Saturday afternoon that May, disgusted by the images of weeping children in cages and behind fences. I felt a need to be around other people who believed the separations were as deeply morally wrong as I did. I almost surprised myself when I asked Stacy, my wife, “Could we go to church somewhere tomorrow?”

I walked to my computer and typed in this search phrase: “Episcopal churches near me.” Like me, Stacy had left the Baptist church. Unlike me, she had not chosen to abandon it altogether, but had become an Episcopalian. The next morning, we went to the Episcopal church nearest us, and in the sermon, the priest condemned the child separations.

We kept going back, and I kept hearing things I liked. Plus, they always had strong coffee and fresh doughnuts after every service. That fall, I decided to jump in. I signed up for a six-week series of classes that would lead to me becoming a confirmed member. In one of the early classes, the rector and associate rector explained some basics about how services run in the church. After class, I asked the associate rector a question about one of the practices.

She looked me in the eye and asked, “Why do you think we do it?” No mention of eternal damnation. Instead, an invitation into a discussion.

“Why do we do that?” I asked Mother Jenna Strizak.

It was a question like the ones I’d asked when I was a child—the ones always answered with a binary, heaven vs. hell choice.

She smiled and asked, “Why do you think we do it?”

No mention of any requirement. No mention of eternal damnation. Instead, an invitation into a discussion.

In the years since, I’ve found myself in classes where we study the Bible or works of theologians—some dead for centuries and others still living—and then discuss what we’ve read. Different folks have different opinions. Some have few questions. Others, like me, have many.

I have no grand conversion story to share with you. I can only say that the study, the discussion, and the debates have been good for me. They seem to be providing a foundation for “a dependable and predictable existence.” I used to be anxious most of the time. Anxiety rarely knocks on my door anymore. I used to be unhappy most of the time. Now, I’m not.

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin’s sermons, books, and personal friendship had a big influence on the thinking of Jimmy Carter, he writes in Faith. Coffin was a vocal supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and the peace movement during the Vietnam War, and he vocally challenged Christians to accept LGBTQ+ people. When he died in 2006 at age eighty-one, he was senior minister at Riverside Church, the 200-year-old interdenominational church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Carter begins the second chapter of Faith with a quote from Coffin:

“I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.”

The essence of faith, at least as I’ve come to understand it, is to accept the idea that there is some higher power, some force in the universe, call it God if you want to, that will not change and will always serve as a reliable foundation for the life of any human being who wishes to acknowledge it. I used to think of “faith” as it was presented to me in childhood: “truth” you either accepted or did not. Now, I usually see it as Coffin describes it. It’s the thing that ensures your safety when you inquire into the very nature of human life. Questioning shouldn’t threaten one’s faith. Questioning should increase it.

My guess is that many people look at Jimmy Carter’s often-professed Christianity and believe it’s something he held unquestioningly since childhood. A reading of Faith belies that assumption. In his ultimate book, he scrupulously details all the questions he’s wrestled with to maintain his ability to believe in something bigger than himself. Perhaps more importantly, he outlines his struggles to maintain the integrity of his faith as he watched many of his fellow “believers” warp it to their own ends.

In Faith, he details how skeptical he became of the religion he’d been taught, not only as a teenager, but also through his years in the U.S. Navy. The way the community of Plains rallied around Carter in 1953, after his father died from pancreatic cancer, actually increased his faith, Carter writes.

“During the days before and after my father’s death, my immersion in the Christian community of Plains was an overwhelming experience for me,” Carter writes. “I felt that I had a family with several hundred people in it instead of just five.”

“I have learned that the best way to deal with a complex theological issue or a difficult Bible passage is to involve the class in a give-and-take discussion, which keeps us all awake and helps us understand the subject,” Carter writes. “We have lively debates but few injured feelings.”

But that feeling lasted only a little while, because the future president grew resentful: James Earl Carter Sr. had been was only fifty-eight years old when he died.

“I found my father’s death hard to understand. How could a good man, not nearly as old as many others in Plains, be deprived by God of his productive life?” the younger Carter writes. “It seemed to me a harsh act, one I could only attribute to what I thought of as the God of the Old Testament, a stern, judgmental figure, very different from the loving, forgiving Jesus I knew from the Gospels.”

All those questions sent him searching beyond the Old and New Testaments and into other books. He began studying the work of theologians and philosophers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the influential German theologian who spoke and wrote against the Nazis and was executed by them for his trouble, Paul Tillich, who was known for bridging the gap between Christian theology and existential philosophy, and even Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century philosopher who wrote of the essential dignity and equality of all human beings.

“My reading of theology, which helped open new ideas about faith for me, was an illuminating experience in which I began to feel at ease with my religion for the first time since I was a small child,” Carter writes. “I explored more deeply the relationship between religion and my scientific knowledge, my continuing doubts about the biblical accounts of miracles, and my impression of a conflict between a harsh and punitive God and a gentle and loving Jesus. I came to realize that it was a mistake not to face my doubts boldly and with an open mind.”

Carter’s multiple acts of inquiry and questioning always lead him back to the essential value of having, as he writes, “something or someone on whom to rely for meaning.” Reading Faith, it is abundantly clear that Carter’s faith is Christian, but there is never a condemnation of any other faith or those with none. The fun Carter had teaching Sunday school to the busloads of visitors who came to Maranatha Baptist in Plains is evident in his writing. He describes his students as a mix of “atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers”; “representatives from a dozen or so Christian denominations, sometimes including Quakers, Mormons, Mennonites, and Amish”; plus people from “most of the American states…and a number of foreign countries.”

“Because of this diversity, I’ve had to consider other people’s questions and concerns, some of which have never been raised in my own life,” Carter writes. “I have learned that the best way to deal with a complex theological issue or a difficult Bible passage is to involve the class in a give-and-take discussion, which keeps us all awake and helps us understand the subject. We have lively debates but few injured feelings.”

Lively debates but few injured feelings. On its face, that statement feels like an impossibility in our country’s current public discourse. But I find it holds true in the Sunday school classes at my own church, even though I know they include people with wildly divergent political views.

This, I believe, is Jimmy Carter’s ultimate lesson to us (or, at least, to me): that if you can be reckless enough to talk with other people openly about the very nature of life—and our foundational commitments to each other—then your faith will be rewarded. Fear of other people will lessen. Anxiety will fall away. Finding a little peace will come easier—not some uncertain peace that might come after, but peace right here on Earth, standing where you are standing right now.

“My general attitude toward life is that of thanksgiving and joy, not anxiety or fear,” Carter writes in Faith.

Acts of faith, I have found, can do that to you.

Chuck Reece

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Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.