Jimmy Carter was a Renaissance man: a prolific author, compassionate humanitarian, amateur painter, skilled carpenter, nuclear engineer, Nobel Prize winner, tireless peacemaker, peanut farmer, Navy lieutenant, former president of the United States, and an evangelical.

This essay is about Carter the evangelical; I don’t mean any disrespect by calling him a religious slur. He was a liberal evangelical before the Christian Right went on a crusade to elect Ronald Reagan, a B-movie actor, to the White House. He was an evangelical before an amoral Donald Trump and his army of racist and homophobic evangelicals made “evangelical” one of the most despised words in the American lexicon.

Jimmy Carter was a down-to-earth Christian who taught Sunday school not in the ornate National Cathedral in D.C. but in the humble Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.

The former president expressed his faith by eradicating diseases in Africa, monitoring elections all over the world, and building houses for the homeless. He didn’t need to stage any photo-ops holding a Bible in front of a house of worship, we could see that his faith was real by his lifetime commitment to doing unto others as you would have them done to you.

In the aftermath of Watergate, Carter made the following campaign promise:

“I’ll never tell a lie.”

No man is perfect, and no man, especially a politician, can survive in the ruthless world of politics without telling a lie. But no man came closest to living a life free from guile than Carter.