Jimmy Carter: The Sunday-School Years

As president, Jimmy Carter considered himself uniquely destined to address the issue of Israel and the Middle East: not because of his political skill or diplomatic experience, but because of the time that he spent teaching Sunday school. “I had taught the Bible ever since I was eighteen years old,” he explained. “And exactly half of all my lessons have been from the Hebrew text, and the other half from the New Testament. So I knew history; I knew the background; and I had a strong religious motivation to try to bring peace to what I call the Holy Land.”

So reports Stuart Eizenstat in his book President Carter: The White House Years. The memoir is by a former senior White House aide who admires the administration that he served, which is why his criticisms of Carter are all the more remarkable. Eizenstat particularly targets Carter’s decision to continue to teach Sunday school after assuming office. In these classes, in the presence of reporters, Carter made public statements about the Bible that revealed, for Eisenstat, a “lack of political sensitivity [that] was sometimes breathtaking.”

Yet the tale of Carter’s Sunday-school lessons reveal more than political ineptitude. The subject of his first class was the tale of Jesus driving the moneylenders from the temple. The press soon reported that the president had informed his students that this story was “a turning point” in Christ’s life. “He had directly challenged in a fatal way the existing church, and there was no possible way for the Jewish leaders to avoid the challenge. So they decided to kill Jesus.” Anguished religious leaders involved in interfaith engagement wrote the White House to object to this simplistic gloss on a subject that has inspired persecution, and murder, of Jews for centuries.