After hitting the umpteenth brick wall, my wife had reached the end of her rope.

As a Canadian citizen in America, married to an American, obtaining a green card for work should have been a walk in the park for her. But it wasn't.

After three years of red tape, misinformation, misfiled forms, mistakes and miscues on the part of the federal government, she fired off an indignant letter to President Jimmy Carter.

"Don't you want me?" the letter cried.

"I'm a teacher, I'm a good person, I help people. Does your country have anything against teachers, good people and helpers?"

We mailed the letter that night to "President Jimmy Carter in care of The White House, Washington, DC."

Less than a week later a package arrived on our doorstep—her approved application.

"Wow," exclaimed the official reviewing the application forms, each of them covered with federal stars and rubber-stamped Urgent.

"Someone at the top is really interested in you!"

Jimmy Carter is now about to embark on his own journey, entering hospice for end-of-life care.

He leaves behind a legacy of kindness, tolerance and peace and will likely be remembered first as a person of faith who lived that faith, secondly as a crusader for human rights and religious freedom, and incidentally as someone who happened to be president of the United States.

His quick response to my wife's letter was symptomatic of the kind of person he was: inclusive.

Though raised in the deep South to committed segregationist parents, it was not in Carter's makeup to exclude anyone.

As a child, he made friends with his family's black neighbour children in his poor community.

Later, on becoming Georgia's governor, succeeding arch-bigot Lester Maddox (the New York Times described Maddox as believing "that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, that integration was a Communist plot, that segregation was somewhere justified in scripture and that a federal mandate to integrate [all-white] schools was ‘ungodly, un-Christian and un-American.'")

Carter stunned the inauguration crowd when he declared, "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over…No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice."

As president, he strove for peace, meeting all challenges, as he said, "without launching a missile or dropping a bomb.

My commitment to peace was an aspect of my Christian faith.

Also, basic human rights are compatible with Jesus Christ's teachings, and I made human rights a foundation of foreign policy."

He also made human rights a foundation of his life and work, founding the nonprofit, non-governmental Carter Center in 1982, an organization committed to advancing human rights and easing human suffering.

It has helped to improve life for people in more than 80 countries by resolving conflicts and advancing democracy and human rights.

For his work on equality and inclusion, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

Jimmy Carter tried as best as he could to be the best Christian he could be, setting examples of love and peace while finding commonalities and joining hands with other faiths. Continue reading

Was the world-famous evangelist "the last high-profile bipartisan evangelical," as some eulogized?

Or had America's Preacher started a strain of Gospel-infused white nationalism that still exists today?

But if Graham is either the foil or forefather of current evangelical politics, then Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is the road not taken.

Today it may seem inevitable that evangelicals gravitated to the Republican Party in the 1980s; but Jimmy Carter, the wealthy peanut farmer from Georgia who won the 1976 election as a Jesus-loving Democrat, complicates the story.

Like the evangelical politicians who succeeded him, Carter talked about his "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" (and famously confessed to Playboy magazine, "I've committed adultery in my heart many times").

Yet as other evangelicals drifted to the religious right, Carter advocated universal health care, proposed cuts in military spending and denounced the tax code as "a welfare program for the rich."

Voted out of office after his first term, Carter has dedicated himself to humanitarian work through the Carter Center, the nonpartisan human rights organization he and his wife founded in 1982.

But Carter, now 93, remains adamant about the role of Christians in the political sphere.

"I believe now, more than then, that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world," he writes in Faith: A Journey for All, "and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing."

The goal of Faith: A Journey for All, as Carter states loftily in the Introduction, is "to explore the broader meaning of faith, its far-reaching effect on our lives, and its relationship to past, present, and future events in America and around the world."

Fortunately, the book is far less stuffy than such a description suggests.

Peppered with stories from Carter's political career and quotations from theologians, Faith is the religion-infused appeal of an elder statesman to the country he once governed.

Though Carter's evangelical faith is on full display, his appeal to readers is religiously neutral.

Whether through the Bible, the Quran or the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Carter entreats his fellow citizens to draw on "these visions of improved human interrelationships...to meet the challenges of the present moment."

These challenges weigh heavily on Carter.

Two paragraphs into the Introduction, he resorts to italics to remind readers the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation "still exists."

By the last chapter, Carter's concerns about the United States include its reliance on military might, refusal to outlaw assault weapons, acceptance of oligarchy, inaction on climate change, skyrocketing levels of incarceration and intensified polarization.

Yet his tone—and message—is optimistic.

"I still have faith that the world will avoid self-destruction from nuclear war and environmental degradation," writes Carter, "that we will remember inspirational principles, and that ways will be found to correct our other, even potentially fatal human mistakes."

The source of his optimism is faith, including his "broader" faith in the American people as well as his religious faith in God.

To a degree some will find surprising, Carter's religious faith is deeply relational: "To me, Jesus Christ is not an object to be worshipped but a person and a constant companion," he writes.

Through this relationship with God, Carter feels known, understood and loved.

And this loving relationship with God has given Carter a "pleasant feeling of responsibility" to share that love with others, including his work on behalf of human rights.

When people from different parts of the world work together "as equals," explains Carter, they experience "an instant and overwhelming melding of cultures, languages, and interests into a spirit of friendship and love." Continue reading

• Betsy Shirley, of Washington, D.C., is managing editor of sojo.net.

But if Graham is either the foil or forefather of current evangelical politics, then Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is the road not taken.

Today it may seem inevitable that evangelicals gravitated to the Republican Party in the 1980s; but Carter, the wealthy peanut farmer from Georgia who won the 1976 election as a Jesus-loving Democrat, complicates the story.

Like the evangelical politicians who succeeded him, Carter talked about his "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" (and famously confessed to Playboy magazine, "I've committed adultery in my heart many times").

Yet as other evangelicals drifted to the religious right, Carter advocated universal health care, proposed cuts in military spending and denounced the tax code as "a welfare program for the rich."

Voted out of office after his first term, Carter has dedicated himself to humanitarian work through the Carter Center, the nonpartisan human rights organization he and his wife founded in 1982.

But Carter, now 93, remains adamant about the role of Christians in the political sphere. "I believe now, more than then, that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world," he writes in Faith: A Journey for All, "and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing."

The goal of Faith: A Journey for All, as Carter states loftily in the Introduction, is "to explore the broader meaning of faith, its far-reaching effect on our lives, and its relationship to past, present, and future events in America and around the world."

Fortunately, the book is far less stuffy than such a description suggests.

Peppered with stories from Carter's political career and quotations from theologians, Faith is the religion-infused appeal of an elder statesman to the country he once governed.

Though Carter's evangelical faith is on full display, his appeal to readers is religiously neutral.

Whether through the Bible, the Quran or the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Carter entreats his fellow citizens to draw on "these visions of improved human interrelationships...to meet the challenges of the present moment."

These challenges weigh heavily on Carter. Two paragraphs into the Introduction, he resorts to italics to remind readers the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation "still exists."

By the last chapter, Carter's concerns about the United States include its reliance on military might, refusal to outlaw assault weapons, acceptance of oligarchy, inaction on climate change, skyrocketing levels of incarceration and intensified polarization.

Yet his tone—and message—is optimistic. "I still have faith that the world will avoid self-destruction from nuclear war and environmental degradation," writes Carter, "that we will remember inspirational principles, and that ways will be found to correct our other, even potentially fatal human mistakes."

The source of his optimism is faith, including his "broader" faith in the American people as well as his religious faith in God. To a degree some will find surprising, Carter's religious faith is deeply relational: "To me, Jesus Christ is not an object to be worshipped but a person and a constant companion," he writes. Continue reading

• Image: America

Mr Carter said this during an interview with National Public Radio in the United States ahead of publication of his latest book.

" . . . [T]he fact that the Catholic Church, for instance, prohibits women from serving as priests or even deacons gives a kind of a permission to male people all over the world, that well, if God thinks that women are inferior, I'll treat them as inferiors," Mr Carter said.

"If she's my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I'm an employer, I can pay my female employees less salary," he said.

Mr Carter said it is very difficult to get the Catholic Church to change its policies.

"I've written to the Pope, by the way, and I got an encouraging letter back from him saying that he believes that the status of women and the activity of women within the Church need to be increased."

"But there are some specific and very difficult things to overcome if the Catholic Church made that an ordained and official commitment."

"But at least the new Pope is aware of it and is much more amenable, I think, to some changes than maybe most of his predecessors."

Mr Carter also criticised the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States, of which he used to be a member, for alleged anti-woman policies.

In "A Call to Action", his latest book, Mr Carter wrote of how some selected scriptures are interpreted, "almost exclusively by powerful male leaders within the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other faiths, to proclaim the lower status of women and girls".

"This claim that women are inferior before God spreads to the secular world to justify gross and sustained acts of discrimination and violence against them," he wrote.

In 1988, in Mulieris Dignitatem, Pope John Paul II wrote that Christ upheld the dignity of women, but freely acted to choose only males as his apostles.

Sources:

• The Guardian
• National Public Radio
• Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
• Image: The Guardian

In a Time magazine interview, Carter said "the major religions have discriminated against women in a very abusive fashion and set an example for the rest of society to treat women as secondary citizens".

He said the Catholic Church had done this with ordination "ever since the third century".

Continue reading