When Jimmy Carter ran for president, his campaign advisers worried his Christian faith would be a political liability.

On a draft copy of the speech announcing his candidacy, they urged him to soften his claim to being a Christian to avoid offending those who did not identify with his brand of religion. By leading with a reference to his religion, Carter was coming across “a little too much as ‘Old South,’” one adviser told him.

Carter insisted on keeping the phrase. Later in the campaign he even used the potentially more polarizing phrase “born again” to describe his Christian experience.

To the relief of Carter’s campaign strategists who worried that a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher and church deacon might need to tone down his religiosity to win the presidency, Carter’s refusal to go along with their admonitions worked.

In the 1976 election, he carried every Southern state except Virginia, winning the votes of both Black Protestants and white evangelicals, as well as majorities among Catholics and Jews.

Four years later, a majority of White evangelicals turned against Carter, leaving historians and pundits to spend the next four decades asking what the born-again president had done to lose the votes of his fellow evangelicals.

Was Carter too evangelical for some of his campaign advisers but not evangelical enough for the Southern Baptists who started the Christian right?

In fact, Carter was the wrong type of evangelical for the evangelicals of the Christian right — but an evangelical nevertheless, and one whose faith pervaded his entire life.

Carter combined the fervor of an evangelical with the social justice consciousness and acceptance of religious pluralism that characterizes many mainline (or ecumenical) Protestants.

A faithful churchgoer throughout his life, Carter was never a fundamentalist. He embraced modern scientific accounts of the world’s origins and accepted modern biblical scholarship’s views of the Bible’s composition. Unlike the conservatives who wrested control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s, he was not a biblical inerrantist.

Carter had firsthand experience of God’s presence and saving power. Although he had long been active in church, he believed he was “born again” in 1966, when he fully surrendered himself to God after losing the Georgia gubernatorial election to the segregationist Lester Maddox.

Carter also became a supporter of civil rights for Black Americans, a cause that many Southern Baptists — including most of the leaders of his home congregation in Plains — were not willing to embrace.

His views on race, politics and theology were shaped by his reading of Reinhold Niebuhr and other 20th-century theologians, but also by his encounters with social justice-minded Georgia Christians such as Koinonia Farm founder Clarence Jordan and Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller. Carter learned from their examples that following Jesus led to interracial alliances and poverty relief, not conservative evangelical politics.

When Carter ran for president, he sounded to the press like a devout evangelical. He and his wife, Rosalynn, read the Bible together every night. He prayed throughout the day. He asked his campaign staff to schedule time for him to attend church each Sunday. On trips to his home congregation, he frequently taught an adult Sunday school class, often in full view of the reporters who began attending.

But some conservative evangelicals questioned his piety. His willingness to drink alcoholic beverages in moderation raised eyebrows among a few teetotaling Baptists.

In the end, Carter won the presidency with the support of approximately half of the nation’s white evangelical voters and a majority of Southern Baptists.

The evangelicals who voted for Carter in 1976 were not motivated by Carter’s position on the issues, but his personal character. After the Watergate scandal, they wanted an honest, ethically minded president, and they trusted Carter because he was a born-again Christian.

But some of those evangelicals soured on Carter after they decided he was on the wrong side of the emerging culture wars. Carter was a moderate centrist on abortion and gay rights. He believed strongly in the Equal Rights Amendment and in the historic Baptist value of church-state separation. In his view, he could best apply his Christian values in politics by being honest and ethical and by promoting human rights, not by fighting the culture war battles.

Carter became estranged from many White evangelicals after they largely deserted his candidacy in 1980. After conservatives won control of the Southern Baptist Convention, he followed the moderates out of the convention and joined the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which ordained women and eschewed conservative culture war stances.

By the end of his life, it was clear that Carter’s social justice-oriented Christian faith was more akin to ecumenical Protestantism than to conservative evangelicalism. He devoted most of his post-presidency to poverty relief and the promotion of democracy and human rights (including the rights of women and non-Christians) — causes that tended to appeal more to progressive Christians than to most White conservative evangelicals.

By the turn of the century, it was clear that his attempt to combine an experientially based, deeply held evangelical faith with progressive social justice views had not gained much traction among White evangelicals, though it earned the respect of many Christians from a wide variety of theological traditions.

But regardless of how unpopular some of his views might be or how dim the prospects might appear to be for the type of social justice Carter favored, he had faith that justice and the power of love would ultimately triumph.

“As a Christian, I believe that the ultimate fate of mankind will be good,” he wrote in 2018. “I believe that the love of God will prevail.”