When the truth is being obscured, one may make an exception to the nil nisi bonum rule.
Joe Biden sold his soul to the Progressives, but Jimmy Carter began his public life as one. The peanut farmer’s folksy demeanor masked his support for the Left’s agenda, arguably more scandalous than “Scranton Joe’s” scam because of Carter’s Christian credentials.
Still, it surprised me to learn that in planning his funeral, Carter specifically asked Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood to “Imagine,” John Lennon’s godless communist lullaby.[1]
Like Martin Luther King, “born again evangelical”[2] Carter admired the ethics of socialist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), if not his pacifism. More often than not, the consequence of such influence is that those downstream to it rarely almost never Jesus’ view of Scripture.
And so if Jesus said He came to fulfill every jot and tittle of the Mosaic Law (Matthew 5:17-19), including the necessary conditions of marriage (Genesis 5:2), well, that only shows what a product of a benighted time He was.[3] Had the Logos of God been incarnated in our enlightened day, He would have given Obergefell a thumbs-up.[4] Mario Cuomo-like, he was “personally opposed” to medical pretexts for procured abortions, but he was okay with Roe—and not with Dobbs.[5]
Carter was a Bible-teaching Protestant; Biden, a Rosary-fingering Catholic.[6] The latter was, as the former is, a globalist. Those with more sensitive spiritual antennae than mine might be able to judge Jimmy’s sincerity and then assure us that he could not have knowingly provided an internationally televised platform for that Lennonist paean to communism and nihilism.
Compared to Biden, Carter might strike the casual observer as a Russell Kirk-style conservative. In fact, however, he enabled every later step in that decline.
Notes
[1] “Brooks and Yearwood began singing a tender version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine,’ a song that Carter asked Brooks to perform at his funeral, CBS reported.” Audrey Gibbs, “Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sing ‘Imagine’ to honor Jimmy Carter,” The Tennessean, January 9, 2025. See also Francis P. Sempa, “Jimmy Carter’s Favorite Song ‘Imagine’ Sung at His Funeral: A Christian funeral held in a Christian church closed with a secular humanist hymn,” The American Spectator, January 20, 2025. Link to performance on YouTube.
[2] Carter identified himself as such in an interview, not for Christianity Today, but for Playboy Magazine, published in the November 1976 issue. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “Jimmy Carter, Interview with Playboy Magazine, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/347738 The “Battle for the Bible” (i.e., the affirmation of its divine inspiration and therefore its inerrancy) in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had just wound down with victory for the inerrantists—in that communion, if nowhere else. In 2000 Carter resigned from the SBC on globalist, feminist, and “social justice” grounds.
[3] Or, who knows what Matthew wrote? Or, who “Matthew” was? And, who still believes that Matthew’s account is God-breathed (θεόπνευστος) and therefore true? And so forth. “. . . [L]aws are constantly changing to stabilize the social equilibrium of the forces and counterforces of a dynamic society.” That’s what Jimmy Carter, then Georgia’s Governor, told students of the University of Georgia Law School in 1974. Quoted in Austin Lee Steelman, “Don’t Call Him Evangelical — How to Remember Jimmy Carter’s Faith, And How Not To,” Religion Dispatches, January 8, 2025. The whole article is valuable.
[4] “Jimmy Carter Says Jesus Would Approve of Gay Marriage,” Huffington Post, July 7, 2015.
[5] “Taking medical care out of the hands of women and their doctors will undermine the health and well-being of half the nation’s population.” Statement from The Carter Center on the Overturning of Roe v. Wade, June 24, 2022.
[6] Yesterday Biden awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, the only one of his presidency, to a third bird of a feather, José Bergoglio, the globalist-environmentalist liberation theologian pope a.k.a Francis. Zeke Miller, “Biden honors Pope Francis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” AP, January 11, 2025.