Opinion | An Open Letter to Jimmy Carter, on His 100th Birthday

Dear President Carter,

I was in my second quarter of college when you returned to Plains, Ga., in January 1981. Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated, and you came back to your hometown soundly defeated. You woke after the election, you later wrote, to “an altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life.”

All of 18 at the time, I felt some of the same things. I was raised in a conservative family, but my religious beliefs and political values had become very different from my parents’ and from those of almost everyone else I knew. To have arrived at a fundamentally different understanding of the world, with diametrically opposed views about what this country should be and what role religion and government should play in it, deeply unsettled me. I had not left home, but I was a stranger in a strange land.

No one but a teenager in the midst of a convulsive shift in world views would call us two peas in a pod, Mr. Carter, but with the hubris of youth, I felt we were. You in Georgia and me in Alabama — at home but belonging nowhere.

Sometimes I still feel that way.

But when I think about the childhood you describe in your memoir “An Hour Before Daylight,” I know that this is our homeland as much as anyone’s. I know that it’s possible to see our world clearly and to love it anyway.

You are a child of the Jim Crow South who grew up on a farm at a time when Black sharecroppers were hardly more than slaves. But even raised in that world, you understood the injustice of it. “The time for racial discrimination is over,” you said at your gubernatorial inauguration in 1971. Your audience audibly gasped, but for the rest of your political career, you worked to even the playing field for Black Americans.

As president, you saw all the ways government could improve the lives of Americans. You appointed more women and attorneys of color to the federal bench than all the earlier presidents combined. You pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers. You brokered an unlikely peace deal in the Middle East. And when it was time to leave Washington, you went home to Plains.

I hope you know what it means to white Southerners like me, then and now, to have had your example at a time when there were vanishingly few role models among white Southerners. Or what it means to white Christians like me, then and now, to have had your example of what living by the Gospels really means.

That interview with Playboy in which you confessed to the sin of lust — “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” — nearly cost you the 1976 election, but it was the admission of a good man who gives serious consideration to the moral and ethical requirements of his faith. So different from a later president, who bragged that he could grab any woman he cared to because “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Your presidency was doomed by wars and unrest in the Middle East that led to oil and gas shortages here and to a hostage crisis in Iran that broke your heart and ours. But you recognized the looming threat of climate change even then, understanding that reliance on foreign oil was not the real danger we faced. I can’t help but wonder where the world would be now if Americans had embraced the environmental policies you initiated nearly 50 years ago.

Much of what you worked to do for the environment during your presidency was nothing less than visionary. Using executive powers, you protected a vast swath of the Alaskan wilderness, in the process doubling the size of the national parks system. You directed federal funds toward the development of renewable energy and installed solar panels on the White House. You began an enormous federal effort to bring the country to energy independence and tried to lead us by calling on our own better angels to make it through the crisis in the meantime.

“I’m asking you, for your good and for your nation’s security, to take no unnecessary trips, to use car pools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit and to set your thermostats to save fuel,” you said. “Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense. I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”

As it turns out, we weren’t the patriotic citizens you believed us to be then, and we’ve become less so in the decades since. But your example remains a shining monument to what it means to be a good American and a good citizen of the earth.

Through the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity, you have had the longest and most influential postpresidency in American history. Your efforts to promote peace, eliminate suffering and address the worst effects of poverty have occupied you for the better part of 50 years. In 2019, still in treatment for metastatic cancer, you came to Nashville for Habitat for Humanity and gave a speech while sporting a black eye you’d gained in a fall. “They took 14 stitches in my forehead,” you said to raucous cheers, “but I had a No. 1 priority, and that was to come to Nashville to build houses.” You were 95 when you picked up a hammer to help us build those homes.

Auburn University, my alma mater, is less than 90 miles down Highway 280, the road that leads to Plains. During my college years, I always hoped to make it to your Sunday school class. But I didn’t own a car in those days, and when you’re young, you believe there will always be another chance. By the grace of God, you have lived so long that I actually got that other chance: In 2018 I finally made it to Plains to hear you teach Sunday school.

Happy birthday, Mr. Carter. You have made the most of a long life, serving in nearly every way imaginable as an example of moral seriousness and service to others — not just to that college student whose worldview was shifting profoundly in 1981 but to all of us. At a time when it has become almost impossible to imagine our elected officials as true public servants or in any way concerned with questions of true justice or true morality, your life will always be a beacon of hope. Even, on good days, of faith in the country you love.

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.