By Michael Woyton

I’ve long said that Jimmy Carter was the greatest ex-president this country has ever had.

There’s not a whole lot I can add to the tributes pouring in about the former president who died Sunday at the age of 100.

I voted for him twice for president, and after the second time, I was truly disappointed he was not re-elected.

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I was staying at a friend’s house in Brooklyn watching the election returns, and when Ronald Reagan was declared the winner, my friend said she couldn’t believe it. 

“What are we going to do?” she lamented. 

I replied, “We survived Nixon.”

To say Carter made the most of his time post-presidency would be an understatement.

During his term in office, he brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, established diplomatic relations with China and turned over control of the Panama Canal to Panama, the New York Times reported.

He was, however, beset with problems during his four years — not that other presidents weren’t. Those setbacks included people waiting in lines stretching around the block for gas, a “malaise” in American society, rampant inflation and, his ultimate undoing, the Iran hostage crisis, which was not solved until Reagan was sworn in to office.

Carter was a little more than 56 years old when he left the White House. He lived just shy of 44 more years as a former president.

What he did during those four decades was remarkable.

We know about his tireless efforts with Habitat for Humanity — not running things behind the scenes from a seat on the board, but actually building houses. Rosalynn Carter, his wife who died in 2023 at the age of 96, helped build houses alongside him.

Also, “his post-presidential work on human rights, conflict resolution, election monitoring and disease control … reminded Americans of what they admired about him rather than what they did not,” the New York Times’s Peter Baker wrote.

Carter ran for president while he was a practicing Southern Baptist. (I too was a Southern Baptist while growing up in Texas but, frankly, there wasn’t much practicing then and there’s nothing now.)

Carter was a man of faith who believed that that faith could also encourage social justice and human rights.

After taking office in 1976, he quickly fell out of favor with the Southern Baptist Convention as it was becoming more and more influenced by Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority and the religious right movement, according to reporting in Baptist News.

“From 1980 forward, the evangelical vote began merging with the Republican Party,” Baptist News wrote, “ostensibly over the issue of abortion but also due to white Southerners’ fears about racial equality.”

Throughout his life, Carter called himself an evangelical Christian.

He set the standard for being an evangelical and a Christian and continued to do good things to help others.

During his governorship in Georgia, he supported prison reform and equal rights for women, The Tennessean wrote. He was also concerned about poverty, education, the environment and the Vietnam War.

Those topics were bridges too far for the Falwells of the times.

Progressive evangelism, which defined Carter, was then and is now a far cry from those in Washington, D.C, and elsewhere who want to take religious freedom and other rights away the American people.

Christian or not, Jimmy Carter was an example for us all. It’s a pity that not enough people who say they are Christians today are paying attention. 

Lead art: Screen grab from CNN.com