What a Peanut Farmer Can Teach Us About Temple Covenants

Jimmy Carter, Malaise, and the Call to Consecration

This is not an essay about the Carter presidency. Over the years, some historians and political commentators have not held Mr. Carter in particularly high regard. Recently, however, multiple experts have suggested that, while Carter may have been overwhelmed by events beyond his control, he did as well as just about anyone could have, given the facts on the ground at the time. In other corners, some have suggested that because he was the final president before the political realignment ushered in by Ronald Reagan, he became the lagging symbol of a senescing political order and was therefore inevitably doomed to be ineffective . 

Which of these is right? I have no idea. Being neither a historian nor a political scientist, I will leave it to others with greater expertise to debate these weighty questions, realizing that, as with all such questions, history will be the final arbiter. 

That all said, however, there is one aspect of Carter’s post-presidential life that I believe deserves our genuine respect, even our admiration. I’m not a believer in heroes, broadly speaking, and I certainly don’t think Carter was perfect. Though his administration notched some notable accomplishments (for example: he oversaw the nation’s first comprehensive energy policy, he appointed an unprecedented number of female judges, he was forward thinking on alternative energy, he signed the nation’s first major mental health bill, and the list goes on), his presidency is also remembered widely as a time of great frustration and discontent in America (we’ll get into some of the reasons below). Furthermore, even in his personal life, he could be aloof and sometimes came off as sanctimonious. That all should be considered alongside what I want to discuss here. 

Still, none of that diminishes the moral weight of the focus of this essay—a weight I believe to be considerable and which I believe we ignore at our peril.

To get a feeling for what we’ll be discussing here, I think it’s meaningful to rewind the clock and review the historical context within which President Carter was operating. We’ll need to start by talking about the 1970s.

I’m not sure anyone in the US looks back fondly on the 1970s. In the decades after World War II, the US had entered a period of post-war boom that saw manufacturing roaring to life, a growing middle class, a sense that we would eventually win the then-nascent Cold War, veterans being educated under the GI Bill, and the rise of the “Baby Boom” generation. It was widely seen as a time of hope and dynamism as the nation and world emerged from the existential threat of Hitler’s regime and moved forward into a brighter future. The popular tableau of a quiet and calm 1950s was, of course, always overly simplistic and dismissive of deeper concerns—such as lingering racism and the persistence of Jim Crow laws that would not begin to be addressed in earnest until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s—but, all of that notwithstanding, the decade still boasted a genuine momentum—a confidence about the future and in the nation’s ability to emerge stronger from the travails of war and depression.

But then things got complicated, as they always do, and, by the late 1970s, the country seemed “stuck in the muck” on multiple fronts and for multiple reasons. Politically, the Watergate scandal—and the refusal of the president to resign until the evidence against him had become both irrefutable and impossible to ignore—had left average citizens disillusioned with the presidency, specifically, and with politics more generally. Socially, the moral thrust of the late 60s, with genuine progress in Civil Rights, had given way to existential concerns about the legacy of that movement and where the country was supposed to go from there. Economically, the country experienced dramatic inflation that seemed inexorable and unyielding, increasingly making even daily household items feel out of reach. Toward the end of the decade, the countries of OPEC suddenly cut the US oil supply, and US citizens found themselves often waiting in interminable lines just to fill up their gas tanks. It seemed like the perfect and bitter symbolic punctuation ending a decade of ineffectiveness and frustration.

In this setting, in the summer of 1979, President Carter, convened at Camp David a host of citizens of many stripes to try to better understand the national mood and to come up with a list of proposed solutions to what increasingly felt like a national crisis. He spent ten days there, listening and conversing, and then emerged from that wide-ranging conversation to give a nationally televised speech that was initially well-received before becoming widely pilloried. In large part, that speech dealt with predictable political themes, outlining steps that the Carter administration planned to take to address the worsening oil crisis and the lurking uncertainties that loomed over the American public. 

The speech was unusual, however, in at least two respects. The first is that the president spent the first quarter of the speech quoting directly from his Camp David conversation partners. In this sense, this speech included an element of what today we might call “crowd-sourced wisdom.” The other unusual element of the speech was that President Carter went beyond the obvious social and economic problems—with their attendant political solutions—to suggest that a deeper spiritual element was also at play: 

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Later in the speech, he calls on the people of America to address the energy crisis, in part, by decreasing their own consumption of energy. To be clear, the majority of this speech is still dedicated to how the government will ensure that this kind of energy scarcity does not happen again. Nonetheless, it is significant that he suggests that part of the solution involves addressing the culture of consumption that he believed had come to define America. Furthermore, he believed that decreasing personal consumption mattered for spiritual—even existential—and not just for economic reasons.

Strangely, this speech came to be seen in many quarters as a defining low point of the Carter presidency. Indeed, it was eventually dubbed the “malaise” speech, and the president was blasted politically for questioning the character of the nation and for suggesting that part of the solution to the nation's problems was for people to change their own habits and behavior. In one sense, this is not surprising: after all, the partisan rejoinders almost write themselves. It was easy enough to claim that the president was trying to evade responsibility for problems that had happened on his watch by claiming that average citizens had responsibility for fixing national and international problems. 

On the other hand, looking at the president's paragraph quoted above, it’s hard not to sense an important truth lurking amid all the political rhetoric. There is something profound and prescient in the president’s identification of a tendency toward defining ourselves by what we own and what we consume. It is hard not to imagine that we would be better off if we had heeded his warning rather than believing he was trying to avoid responsibility, especially given that the rest of his speech makes clear that that was not the case. 

Perhaps part of the reason the paragraph I quote above resonates with me is because it echoes so closely words by the leaders of my own faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Indeed, just five months before the president’s speech, Jeffrey R Holland, who was then the church commissioner of education, delivered a speech at BYU entitled “’Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall’: A Look Back at the Me Decade.” In that speech, he made an observation strikingly similar to the one that President Carter would make just months later. After largely contextualizing a litany of then-current concerns in a way that made them seem less frightening or novel, Commissioner Holland then articulated one area that he felt was of deep and legitimate concern. He said: 

The threat I fear, in a month when we remember two who did not suffer from it, is the threat of self-centeredness gone amuck, or psychic insistence upon everyone doing his own thing, of everyone getting in touch with himself at the expense of getting in touch with anyone else. It is the threat of a culture which has in some ways carried accentuated individualism to the extreme and now has the pursuit of happiness standing paralyzed in front of a mirror, pleading, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” We live in a time in which there has been almost transcendent self-attention, in which the conquest of nature and search for new frontiers, social and otherwise, has given way to neonarcissism. The greatest of all tasks in the 1970s appears to be “self-realization.”

I am not claiming that Carter and Holland would have been in accord politically. And Holland's point here is not exactly the same as Carter’s point in his speech given shortly thereafter, but the themes certainly rhyme. Both leaders share a concern for the ways in which narcissism and a culture of consumption are warping the timber of the American public.

Even more striking, however, is the similarity between the remarks of President Carter and remarks made by President Spencer W. Kimball, then president of the church, in an Ensign article published just three years earlier, in June of 1976. At that time, in an essay entitled “The False Gods We Worship,” President Kimball wrote:

The Lord has blessed us as a people with a prosperity unequaled in times past. The resources that have been placed in our power are good, and necessary to our work here on the earth. But I am afraid that many of us have been surfeited with flocks and herds and acres and barns and wealth and have begun to worship them as false gods, and they have power over us. Do we have more of these good things than our faith can stand? Many people spend most of their time working in the service of a self-image that includes sufficient money, stocks, bonds, investment portfolios, property, credit cards, furnishings, automobiles, and the like to guarantee carnal security throughout, it is hoped, a long and happy life. Forgotten is the fact that our assignment is to use these many resources in our families and quorums to build up the kingdom of God—to further the missionary effort and the genealogical and temple work; to raise our children up as fruitful servants unto the Lord; to bless others in every way, that they may also be fruitful. Instead, we expend these blessings on our own desires, and as Moroni said, “Ye adorn yourselves with that which hath no life, and yet suffer the hungry, and the needy, and the naked, and the sick and the afflicted to pass by you, and notice them not.”

Without implying political similarity between the two men, it is striking that these two leaders offer such similar diagnoses for what ails the citizens of the country and the members of the community of Saints. The words seem, in retrospect, prophetic.

As much as I love these words from President Carter—and as much as I find that they speak to our current moral moment—they are just words, and words spoken forty-five years ago, no less. But the moral power these words carry lies in this: President Carter and his wife Rosalynn threw the weight of the rest of their lives behind the themes he articulates in that paragraph. Entirely unlike every other person who has held the presidency in the last half century, when President Carter finished his time in office—when he again became simply Jimmy Carter, private citizen—he went back to the house he had lived in as a peanut farmer before he ascended to office. He never entered the high-paid speaking circuit, and he did not take advantage of the trappings of wealth in the way that other ex-presidents have. Indeed, he lived in the same home he built together with his wife sixty years ago until the time of his death. (As a point of comparison: Barack Obama, the last ex-president who has not returned to office, also came from modest means but is now estimated to have a “net worth” of 70 million dollars and recently purchased a third home in Martha’s Vineyard rumored to cost around 12 million dollars). 

Instead, he spent a great deal of time literally building homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity and then worked internationally—quietly but relentlessly—to eradicate guinea worm, a very “unsexy”  illness that causes untold suffering to millions without access to clean water (guinea worms nest in the body, still alive, and then leave the body by way of a painful ulcer; they literally have to be pulled out, millimeter by millimeter, and wrapped around a stick over the course of weeks or months). In all of this, he stayed at home. He taught Sunday school. He loved his wife and was faithful to her. In at least these aspects of his life, he suggested a sort of modern American Cinncinatus.

But why do I bring all of this up in an essay that will mostly be read by members of the LDS church? Mr. Carter was, to be clear, a dedicated evangelical Christian and likely therefore espoused a very different theology than members of my church. In my view, Jimmy Carter lived with integrity. He consecrated his life to his highest ideals. I think I can learn something about my covenant of consecration from him. 

The way of consecration differs dramatically from the way of acquisitiveness and consumption that defined the 1970s and that still haunts us today. The modern American way too often involves, as Presidents Kimball and Carter warned and as Commissioner Holland also decried, an ethic of “me first,” in which the defining question of life is “How much can I get?” But the way of consecration asks instead, “How much is enough?” and then, once that is established, asks, likewise, “What must I do with the excess?” In a consecrated life, it is not that we can never become rich, but, rather, that we will never stay rich. Indeed, in a theme articulated so movingly in the latter half of Doctrine and Covenants 121, in the consecrated life, it is not only wealth—but also power—that are meant to devolve away from us. Again, this is not to say that the consecrated will never become powerful but, rather, that power can never be its own end for the consecrated. Power cannot be collected for one’s own good but, instead, is meant to be seen as a gift given to be consecrated to the blessing of the world and the healing of others.

In a lifeway that reminds us of the provision of manna, in a life of consecration, we cannot keep more than we need, because we realize that just as extra manna would become spoiled, extra material wealth will corrupt us just as surely.

I was reminded of the decisions needed to live a consecrated life when I listened to a recent Faith Matters interview with Grant Hardy, a prolific and consequential scriptural historian. As part of that interview, while discussing the hard truths the Book of Mormon asks us to accept and live, Professor Hardy said this:

But as Americans, as Latter-day Saints, and as a church, we love money. I'm also condemned by that. Like, I live in a house that is 1,300 square feet, and now that Heather and I are empty nesters, not a week goes by that I don't think, “I actually don't need this space.” We have two cars. They're twenty-year-old cars, . . . and when we were ferrying kids back and forth like that mattered a lot, but, you know, do we need two cars now? 

How can I enjoy good food and a warm, comfortable home and decent childcare when my neighbors are struggling? I think those are the kinds of moral issues that are much harder to skirt than to say, well, I'm not racist. 

What is so striking in reading this quote by Professor Hardy is that he seems haunted by the prospect of keeping too much for himself. He is, if I can interpolate just a bit, convinced that our scripture demands that we understand what is “enough” and that we keep that—and nothing more—for ourselves. Opposite of the ethic of enrichment and acquisitiveness, Professor Hardy is asking that we take seriously our covenant to consecrate all that we have to making the world a better place—and he suggests and shows that that must begin by making the hard choices not to keep for ourselves too much of that with which we have been blessed.

The temptation to lionize the “great men” of history will always be with us. Mr. Carter was, undoubtedly, just a man. He surely had his own imperfections and seems, as president, often to have been at the mercy of events beyond his control. As a president, he is not generally viewed in the company of the greats. Indeed, in the Latter-day-Saint imagination, Mr. Carter largely seems to be remembered for creating the vacuum of failure that opened the way for Ronald Reagan, who many church members view with great affection and admiration. But, as I said at the outset, my aim here is not to weigh his presidency in the balance.

But all of Carter’s flaws and shortcomings notwithstanding, the following is nonetheless true: after he left the presidency, Jimmy Carter could have used the influence he gained as president to enrich himself and his friends. He could have lived in a mansion. He could have jet-setted around the world and created for himself a life of ostentatious apparent philanthropy and “big ideas.” He could have profited richly and then kept as much as he got for himself. But he largely chose a different path—or at least did so to a greater degree than other recent former presidents. He did not choose to flaunt wealth. He spent his time building homes for the poor, teaching Sunday school, and working to eradicate a disease that none but the poorest in the world even know exists.

And in this, I honor him on the day of his death and will look to him—in at least this one respect—as an exemplar of how to be a better member of my church, a better keeper of my covenants, and a better Christian.

To receive each new Tyler Johnson column by email, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select "On the Road to Jericho."

All photos used with permission from The Carter Center.