On February 18, the Carter Center released a short announcement titled “Statement on President Carter’s Health.”
“After a series of short hospital stays,” it began, “former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”
After serving as president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, the former Georgia governor founded the Carter Center as a nonprofit organization that “seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health” based on “a fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering.”
Those goals and that commitment have been the driving force behind much of the work Carter himself has done since leaving office over four decades ago.
President Jimmy Carter, St. Simons Island, Georgia (c. 1977) [Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress]
Probably the best-known of his public projects is the work he has done since 1984 with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit “[s]eeking to put God’s love into action” by “bring[ing] people together to build homes, communities and hope.”
A comment by Carter that addresses this connection between faith and action has often been quoted:
I have one life and one chance to make it count for something… I’m free to choose what that something is, and the something I’ve chosen is my faith. Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort. My faith demands – this is not optional – my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.
After seeing the quotation pop up on Twitter following the release of the Carter Center announcement, I planned on writing a column about how well it can be applied to a life in Ásatrú, Heathenry, and other forms of modern Paganism.
Carter’s Christian faith moves him, he says, to positive action in this world. This perspective readily resonates with those of us who believe that we are our deeds, that living our faith means acting for beneficial change.
But did Carter really say this quote that so many say he said?
I’ve now found it endlessly quoted online, on social media, on websites, in newspapers, in books, and in lists of inspirational quotations. What I haven’t found is any source for it. A few media outlets merely link to websites collecting inspirational quotations without sources attached.
Our knowledgeable and experienced editors at The Wild Hunt gave me their blessings to use the quote as “attributed to Jimmy Carter,” but the lack of documented attribution bothered me and drove me to start reading more of what Carter is actually documented on-record saying about the intersection of faith and action in his life.
As it turns out, he has long history of statements that can be meaningful to today’s Pagans.
“Crisis of Confidence”
On July 15, 1979, then-president Carter delivered a televised speech titled “Crisis of Confidence.” In it, he raised the issue of losing faith.
We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.
This could have been written yesterday. Just how long have we been struggling with our American faith in progress, government, democracy, and ourselves?
For some, the answer is as long as there has been an America. For others, there’s been an awakening over the past decade to the deep conflicts and contradictions at the heart of the American experiment.
This nation has long sacralized multiple elements of its own public life, from the gleaming civic temples and cyclopean monuments of Washington DC to the reverent singing of the anthem before baseball games and orchestra concerts. Treating our secular experiences like religious ones would always inevitably lead to crises of faith.
In the same speech, Carter asks, “What can we do?” in the face of “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” He begins his answer:
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.
One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: “We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.”
Here is a secular faith that speaks to where we were then and certainly are now. Rather than focusing on declarations of allegiance to or demands for freedom from, it focuses on community with and responsibility towards. If we want change to happen, we must be the ones to manifest the change.
Jimmy Carter comforts a young patient in Ghana being treated for a worm wound (2007) [Carter Center]
I believe that many Pagans would agree with these sentiments. At least, I hope they would. There’s much to love in Carter’s words – and many points of intersection with Pagan approaches to living in the world.
Beards and biology
In his 1996 book Living Faith, Carter writes of conceptions of divinity in a way that resonates with Pagan worldviews.
Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.
I often tell my Norse religion students that Odin is not an elderly wizard with a long white beard. That manifestation is a form that he takes so that we can conceive of and communicate with a power that is fury and passion, sense and soul, magic and inspiration.
As the warrior Arujna discovered when his charioteer Krishna revealed his ultimate divine cosmic form, and as George Harrison sang, “it’s all too much.” In order to hold them in our minds, we tell tales of the divinities as anthropomorphic characters, as symbols that interact in narrative form (per Ricœur).
Of course, the gods and goddesses of Ásatrú and other Pagan traditions are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. On that point, there are clear differences with Carter’s Christian theology.
However, his brushing aside of divine gender seems in line with Pagan theologies.
Odin and Freyja share similar domains and associations. The old Icelanders tell us that half the war-dead go to Odin, the other half to Freyja. The surviving Freyja poem centers on her aid for a dedicated male follower. Northern tribesmen in Roman legions left altars to the Germanic Mothers wherever they went. Our mythologies and theologies are multiple and multivalent.
In a faith with one god, Carter chooses to conceive of a being beyond gender. We have more choices in Paganism, but I feel that there is an underlying commonality with his concept.
I also feel a strong sympathetic sense with statements Carter made in 2004 in a public response to the Georgia Department of Education’s proposal to cut the word evolution from the official state curriculum. After self-identifying as “a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University,” he writes:
The existing and long-standing use of the word ‘evolution’ in our state’s textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians’ belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe. There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy.
There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.
In the first year of The Norse Mythology Blog, the very first article I ever wrote on public issues addressed the compatibility of modern scientific thought with ancient mythology. In “Stephen Hawking; The Myths and the Critics,” I addressed media pearl-clutching over the English physicist writing that
the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists… It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.
My response to the overdriven media response was that “[m]odern physics may be incompatible with the Christian creation myth, but it works nicely with the Norse one.”
Back in 2010, I was still in the Heathen closet and more guarded about my path. Now, I would openly say that my faith in the Old Way and my belief in science are fully compatible. On this issue, I think that the majority of modern Pagans would agree with me and with Carter’s statement on evolution, geology, biology, and astronomy.
Final chapter
I didn’t belong to or practice any religious tradition before coming to Ásatrú as an adult. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel the same hostility towards the idea of interfaith dialogue and learning from other religions as do some Pagans who escaped bad situations raised in some other faith.
That’s not to say I haven’t had bad experiences in supposedly welcoming interfaith situations or faced open hostility from American adherents of various monotheisms. It’s just that even those gross encounters haven’t soured me on devouring insights from other faith traditions and considering how they interface with my own.
At this point in my life, as I approach a half-century on the planet, I care far less about what religion a person practices than whether they are fundamentally of positive intent, whether they are a speaker of words that move the needle towards progress, and whether they are a doer of deeds that make the world even the most minute amount better than it has been.
Jimmy Carter has long been all of this and more. He life has been one of intention materializing as action. May his faith comfort him in his final chapter.
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