Faith Matters: Faith mattered to Jimmy Carter: Mourning the loss of the former president who had the soul of a prophet

Ben Tousley is a retired hospice chaplain who worked for over 20 years in that capacity as well as adjunct professor at Springfield College. He is also well known as a folksinger with seven albums of original songs. Ben lives in Greenfield and attends Mt. Toby Friends Meeting.

Ben Tousley is a retired hospice chaplain who worked for over 20 years in that capacity as well as adjunct professor at Springfield College. He is also well known as a folksinger with seven albums of original songs. Ben lives in Greenfield and attends Mt. Toby Friends Meeting. Staff Photo/Paul Franz

By BEN TOUSLEY, M.DIV

For the Recorder

Published: 01-31-2025 9:40 AM

Listening to Jimmy Carter’s funeral service on Jan. 9, a national day of mourning, I found myself choking up as they brought his casket into the cathedral. My emotion certainly wasn’t because Carter’s life, at 100, had been cut short. He had lived out his calling as peacemaker, house builder, disease preventer and the like.

It was partly that I mourned the passing of a simpler time when he was president — before personal computers, before climate change, following the demoralization of Vietnam and the disillusionment of Watergate — when our country had a chance to find its moral balance. After the deceptions of Richard Nixon and LBJ, Carter represented a quite different character. A plainspoken peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, he was a man of faith seeking to speak truth and to embody a decency that had been eroding in our national life.

To carry out the office of U.S. president and at the same time live out Gospel values was a tall, if not impossible, order for Carter. Compared to the bravado of his successor, Ronald Reagan, Carter could appear to many as weak and indecisive. While Reagan, a charismatic actor, looked more confident as president walking on the world stage, Carter seemed more at home in rural Georgia, surrounded by the ordinary folks of his home town.

Where other countries have believed their kings were ordained by God to lead their people, from its beginning the United States has had a tradition of separating church and state. Beginning with Washington, it was understood that our president would not wield the autocratic power of a king and was chosen for leadership not by God but by the people. And yet, our people have always tended to look to the president for moral and spiritual leadership, especially in times of great peril such as the Civil War, Great Depression and world wars.

In the Book of Isaiah (Chapters 9 and 11), we read the prophecy of a messianic king who will have “the government upon his shoulder and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace … the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” While the prophet is widely seen as invoking a more supernatural being to come, the first kings in ancient Israel were commonly thought to be endowed with charismatic qualities, ordained by God to lead the people.

Such was the case with David, who was not only a great military leader but a shepherd who composed psalms and played the harp. His heir, King Solomon, was seen to be blessed with divine wisdom in addition to being a consummate administrator who ushered in an age of wealth and grandeur in Israel but also levied burdensome taxes on the people and drove free men into labor gangs.

Prophets in ancient Israel such as Isaiah and Jeremiah or in modern times such as Martin Luther King Jr. have not been disposed to be administrators or praisers of kings but rather to be invoking the deeper calling of nations to righteousness and repentance.

Carter had the soul of a prophet and, while seeking to stay within the bounds of his secular office, would at times speak prophetically, as when warning our country of an impending energy crisis or stepping into the breach of warring countries in the Mideast to seek peaceful settlement. He was a wise counselor in many matters but only reached his full embodiment as spiritual leader when he did not hold political office, when he was free to move about the world in the cause of fighting hunger and disease, building homes and seeking peace.

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Carter demonstrated how faith matters not just in how we lead our everyday lives — as he did as a devoted family man and Sunday school teacher back home — but how faith matters in public life. That is, how we treat recent immigrants, how we protect the right of all citizens to vote, how we may choose to give large amounts of tax dollars to weapons of war while cutting back on aid to low-income families with children. Faith matters to whom we give allegiance — to someone who seeks to wield power by putting down individuals and groups of people labeled as enemy or to a higher authority which seeks peace, justice, unity and reconciliation.

So I suppose it was not Jimmy Carter I was mourning on Jan. 9 so much as the common decency he embodied and its diminishment in our national life. Far more than in his era, we have witnessed not only a loss of decorum but a meanness in public discourse on the part of elected officials and citizens alike. I was mourning the increasing number of Americans who seek security with guns, look to a “strong man” rather than a spiritual source for guidance and have become more willing to use the divisive language of hate to vilify neighbors near and far.

Ben Tousley is a retired hospice chaplain who worked for over 20 years in that capacity as well as adjunct professor at Springfield College. He is also well known as a folksinger with seven albums of original songs. Ben lives in Greenfield and attends Mt. Toby Friends Meeting.