Jimmy Carter certainly wasn’t our best President, but he’s clearly one of the best human beings to be President. At the core of his goodness is a powerful Christian faith that has sustained him throughout his life, even as it complicated his political life.

My then-N&O colleague Ferrel Guillory was one of the first reporters to highlight how Carter talked about his faith in the 1976 presidential campaign. In a front-page story on March 20, 1976, the Saturday before the presidential primary that year, Ferrel wrote about Carter’s two-day swing through the state, including a press conference in Raleigh, for the Democratic primary:

Jimmy Carter demonstrated here Friday a willingness to talk about his personal religious feelings in a way no other presidential candidate has.

While campaigning for next Tuesday’s North Carolina Democratic presidential primary, Carter said that in 1967 he had a “profound religious experience that changed my life dramatically” and that he prays before making important decisions.

“I spent more time on my knees the four years I was governor in the seclusion of a little private room off the governor’s office than I did in all the rest of my life because I felt so heavily on my shoulders that the decisions I made might very well affect many, many people,” said Carter, who was governor of Georgia from 1970 to 1974.

As he sought support in a state with more than one million Baptists, Carter, who is a Baptist, has gone into detail on his own concept of the role of religion in his life as a politician.

Voters liked it. The next Tuesday, Carter defeated George Wallace in the North Carolina primary. He also carried North Carolina against Gerald Ford in the fall, giving a huge boost to Jim Hunt’s first campaign for Governor. Four years earlier, Wallace had beaten Terry Sanford in the North Carolina primary.

Today, Ferrel recalls:

“I remember the day writing the story because it was such a vivid moment in that campaign. You have to remember 1976 came before the dramatic emergence of the religious right as a key Republican constituency; it was in 1980 that Ronald Reagan, not much of a church-goer, associated his candidacy with the forces of conservative Christianity. Did Carter open the door, even inadvertently? Good question, open to debate. In retrospect, you can see Carter as a Democrat, scrambling as did Jim Hunt and others at the time, to assemble a coalition that included newly enfranchised black voters as well as moderate to conservative white voters. Aside from political strategy, Carter’s appeal to voters, in the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, had to do with his personal story of rootedness in a Southern place and his sense of rectitude.”

Carter’s outer show of his inner faith didn’t always play well in a Democratic Party that was torn between Southern moderates and Northern liberals. In fact, many Democrats were uncomfortable with Carter’s religiousness, his accent and his conservative instincts. We Southern Democrats saw – and felt – that wariness and even hostility during Carter’s term and, especially, during Ted Kennedy’s challenge to Carter in 1980.

In his press conference last week, talking about his cancer and his life, Carter said he would have been reelected if he had sent one more helicopter on the hostage mission. He also might have won if Kennedy hadn’t challenged him, or if Carter – like JFK with LBJ and President Obama with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – had brought a potential rival into his administration.

Today, though, you have to marvel at Carter’s grace and strength as he faces the end of his long and remarkable life. Especially these words:

“I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve had thousands of friends, I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence. So I was surprisingly at ease, much more so than my wife was. But now I feel it’s in the hands of God who I worship, and I’ll be prepared for anything that comes.”