Jimmy Carter Celebrates his 100th Birthday

Today Jimmy Carter becomes the longest-lived former US President in history as he celebrates his 100th Birthday. In honor of this we’re traveling back the 39th President’s inauguration on January 20th 1977 with this excerpt from the second edition of Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter by Randall Balmer.

Refreshingly concise…. Balmer presents Carter as an icon of progressive evangelicalism.

New York Times Book Review

Redeemer President

January 20, 1977, in Washington, D.C., dawned sunny and cold. Early in the morning, about five thousand people gathered in twenty-degree temperatures at the Lincoln Memorial for a People’s Prayer Service. Martin Luther King Sr. was there, together with Bruce E. Edwards, Jimmy Carter’s pastor from Plains, Georgia, and Ruth Carter Stapleton, the president-elect’s sister. Leontyne Price, soprano from the Metropolitan Opera, sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

Carter watched the proceedings on television and then headed to First Baptist Church for a Pre-Inaugural Service of Prayer. The congregation, which included Walter Mondale, the vice president–elect, and his family, sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Nelson L. Price, pastor of Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia, and Carter’s “prayer partner” over the previous eight years, preached the sermon.

By noon, the temperature had risen to twenty-eight degrees. On the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, Carter placed his hand on both the Bible that George Washington had used for his inauguration in 1789 and a King James Version of the Bible given to him by his mother, opened to Micah 6:8: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

After taking the oath of office, the new president addressed the nation. In an extraordinary gesture, he thanked his predecessor and erstwhile political adversary, Gerald R. Ford, for “all he has done to heal our land.” Carter then invoked the promise of the United States. “Ours was the first society openly to define itself in terms of both spirituality and of human liberty,” he said, and that unique combination conferred moral duties on Americans, including a commitment to human rights, fairness in laws, and preservation of natural resources. In this society, he continued, “the powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced.”

Balmer narrates the surprising rise of a Georgia peanut farmer with the ease of a natural storyteller.

Wall Street Journal

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural in 1961—“Ask not what your country can do for you”—had set the twentieth-century standard for inaugural addresses, and Carter’s address did not approach the soaring rhetoric of his predecessor. Instead, as befit Carter himself, his speech was earnest and workmanlike with a dash of Baptist piety, the same combination that had propelled him to the presidency.

Carter sought to heal and to reconcile. At the conclusion of his time in office, the new president said, he hoped that people might say “that we had torn down the barriers that separated those of different race and region and religion, and where there had been mistrust, built unity, with a respect for diversity” and that “we had remembered the words of Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy, and justice.”

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, to the chagrin of the Secret Service, then walked down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. “I thought it would be a good demonstration of confidence by the president in the people of our country,” Carter wrote about the decision to walk, “and also would be a tangible indication of some reduction in the imperial status of the president and his family.” Many people along the way, expecting a motorcade, began to weep when they saw the new president and first lady walking hand in hand down Pennsylvania Avenue.