Jimmy Carter’s Baptist faith was one of his calling cards in the 1976 presidential campaign. But it landed him in political trouble when he tried to explain his religious beliefs to Playboy m…
By Bill Barrow | Associated Press
“Jimmy Carter was a thoughtful guy,” Scheer, now 87, told The Associated Press. “But that got lost here. I’ve never seen a story like it. It was worldwide. … It just never went away.” The Baptist deacon responded with an 823-word soliloquy on human imperfection, pride and God’s forgiveness. He said he believed in “absolute and total separation of church and state” and explained his faith as rooted in humility, not judgment of others.
The magazine decided to send the full Q&A text to about 1,000 media outlets in late September, ahead of the usual October publication date for the November edition. “Hamilton Jordan had always called Carter’s faith ‘the weirdo factor,’” said media historian Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor who has written extensively on Carter. “Talking to Playboy was their way to prove he wasn’t some kind of prude.”
“The only lust I worried about was that of the press,” she wrote in 1984, recounting how her discipline finally cracked when a reporter asked whether she ever committed adultery.Ford, who had been gaining on Carter but still trailed badly, leveraged the story. The Republican president was an Episcopalian, soft-spoken about religion, but he invited leading evangelical pastors to the White House the day after the interview’s release, including the Rev. W.S. Criswell of Dallas First Baptist Church.
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