When Prophecy Gets Too Personal

Dear Remembering Ones:

A few months ago, a clergy colleague of mine told me to go back and listen to Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech given from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979. (If you wish to listen to it too, I’ve linked it here.) This speech, delivered by a president seated at his desk with riveting eye contact, is credited by some as the beginning of the end of his one-term presidency.

In his nationally televised address President Carter outlined what he felt were failures in his administration. He quoted both other politicians and ordinary people who were critical of his leadership’s shortcomings, for which Carter did the unthinkable: he apologized to the American people. When oil producing countries embargoed exports to the US because of our support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, American dependence on OPEC oil was devastating the US economy, inflation was over 13% and lines to fill gas tanks were sometimes blocks long. In response, Carter invited his listeners to do serious soul searching. He claimed there was a subject “even more serious than energy or inflation,” a “fundamental threat to American democracy” that was a crisis of confidence, a loss of meaning and purpose in the lives of the American people. Carter hearkened back to the ‘can-do’ attitude of the first half of the 20th century and noted that a sense of faith in our progress was deteriorating.

The initial response to his words was laudatory. People expressed gratitude for a leader who expressed humility and asked people for moral courage. But over time, as people realized Carter was serious about people changing their attitudes, opinions soured and approval ratings plummeted. President Carter’s choice to lead by example, turning down the thermostat in the White House in winter and installing solar panels on its roof, together with his decision to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow after Russia's invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Hostage Crisis, left a wide opening for the avuncular Ronald Reagan to portray Carter as brooding and indecisive. (President Reagan’s had the solar panels removed during his second term because he thought they made his presidency look weak in its committment to fossil fuel expansion.*) For Reagan’s second term candidacy, “it’s morning in America” replaced Carter’s call for “moral courage and sacrifice,” a theme which lost Carter’s shot at a second term.

With Jimmy Carter’s death on Sunday, December 29, at the age of 100, we will hear and read lots of words about Carter’s good character, his commitment to human rights, his hands-on volunteerism with Habitat for Humanity, his work against debilitating diseases in Third World countries and the Carter Center’s mission to preserve democratic process around the world. 

The 39th president will be remembered as a great humanitarian and a man of deep faith, but little of that has rubbed off on the characteristics Americans admire most in their leaders. We much prefer politicians who rhetorically defend religious ideals, not live them. We’re funny that way; we love to co-opt prophetic words just so long as they come from people who are not currently in positions of real power.

Remembering a president who was very nice to me the one time we met, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor

*In an earlier version of this essay I mistakenly said Reagan removed the panels during the beginning of his first term. Apologies for my faulty memory of this detail.