Jimmy Carter held the highest office in the land. But his faith made him a public servant
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Analysis: Carter navigated the barbed wire of the politics of religion, Eric Garcia reports. In doing so, he ran his race and he kept his faith. Before Vice President Kamala Harris, the last presidential candidate Jimmy Carter voted for, or President Joe Biden, the first senator who endorsed Carter’s bid for president in 1976, could pay tribute to the late president, House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke about his remembering the president being sworn in.
![[Carter worked as a Sunday School teacher and famously lived a modest life after the White House. He was laid to rest on Thursday]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/21/SEI235483005.jpg)
“I’m reminded of his admonition to live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon, and of his amazing personal reflection: ‘If I have one life and one chance, to make it count for something,’ We all agree that he certainly did,” Johnson said in his closing remarks under the Rotunda with Carter’s casket by his side.
On the surface, Carter and Johnson could not be more different. Johnson is a strident conservative and a steadfast supporter of President-elect Donald Trump. Carter was an avowed Democrat. But Johnson’s tribute made a sort of sense given that he and Carter both were brought up in the Southern Baptist tradition.
Indeed, Carter was in many ways the first presidential candidate to bring evangelicals into the fold and Johnson himself served as a trustee of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The 39th president - who died on December 29 and was honored during a funeral at the National Cathedral on Thursday - was always known as a man of faith. A man of service. While he held the most powerful office in the world, Carter was known for his humble life, including serving as a simple Sunday School teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.
