Randall Balmer. Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.

Abstract

In 1976 Playboy magazine conducted its infamous interview of Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. The interview nearly cost Carter the election. Secular pundits mocked his confession of “adultery in my heart.” Conservative Christians not only disagreed with his use of the word screw but also objected that Carter would grant the salacious magazine an interview in the first place. This episode revealed the limits of progressive evangelicalism in the 1970s. It also revealed the inner life of a man trying to articulate Christian theological principles of temptation, sin, redemption, and salvation by grace. In Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, a beautifully written spiritual biography of the 39th president, Randall Balmer recovers the moral gravitas of an oft-maligned politician. Carter, contends Balmer, should be understood as a “progressive evangelical.” His spiritually minded mother pushed racial boundaries in the rural South and identified as a feminist before Betty Friedan. Carter, as a child and then as a young man who left the navy to become a peanut farmer in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, assumed similar stances on spirituality and justice. A hard-working populist who refused to join the White Citizens Council, he entered politics because he felt that he could help “establish justice in a sinful world” (p. 20). Niebuhrian in his realism, he nurtured a warm evangelical piety, a strong conversionism, and a pronounced Baptist belief in the separation of church and state. These religious convictions drove Carter's career as a state senator and governor.