Religion & the American Presidency: Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States and served from 1977 to 1981, which term included the Iranian hostage crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David Accords, finalization of the Panama Canal Treaties, and the 1979 energy crisis. His post-presidency work is considered the most influential and significant of any American president, channeled through the Carter Center, which idea came to him in the middle of the night not long after he left office.

He was also the first “born again” Christian elected to office.

In order to better understand how religion influenced Jimmy Carter, we have with us today Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth and a prize-winning historian, Emmy Award nominee, and author of Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, a religious biography of the former president. Dr. Balmer earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before coming to Dartmouth in 2012. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. Dr. Balmer is also an ordained Episcopal priest.