Jimmy Carter on Adultery

The Catholic Thing

By Daniel Gallagher.
The year 1976 was a good one to be a six-year-old boy from Pittsburgh. I wasn't too young to realize that Watergate had shaken our confidence in Washington and that inflation was pinching our pocketbooks, but I was old enough to celebrate the bicentennial with great pride. Snug in my Steelers helmet, I sped around the neighborhood on a Huffy, Stars and Stripes flapping high over my banana seat. That helmet was still squeezing my ears as I watched Jimmy Carter accept the Democratic presidential nomination one balmy July evening. We had No cellphones, no tablets, no laptops. Just a TV and an oven-heated TV dinner.
Such memories swirled in my head as the 39th president was laid to rest in Plains, Georgia on Thursday. My parents, steeped in the pro-life movement, didn't vote for him, of course. Our candidate went on to lose the Republican primary in August but would come roaring back to defeat Carter in 1980. Still, we had enormous respect for the peanut farmer from Georgia. However much we disagreed with his politics and were aghast at the increasingly pro-abortion platform of his party, he seemed to take his Christian faith seriously.
That became quite clear in an interview Carter gave to Playboy's Robert Scheer later in 1976. Though it received far too much attention at the time, the interview is well worth revisiting today for it shows the uncompromising fidelity expected of all of us when it comes to Gospel teaching.
Though Hugh Hefner's monthly was better known for its centerfolds, it did include some serious journalism. In fact, Carter was neither the first presidential figure Scheer interviewed nor the last. But what caught the nation's attention in Carter's interview was a confession that he had committed "lust" in his "heart" on many occasions. The ensuing media frenzy made us completely lose sight of his understanding of Scripture and himself. He was, in fact, unpacking the meaning both of serious sin and of God's forgiveness:
Committing adultery, according to the Bible - which I believe in - is a sin. For us to hate one another, for us to have sexual intercourse outside marriage, for us to engage in homosexual activities, for us to steal, for us to lie - all these are sins. But Jesus teaches us not to judge other people. We don't assume the role of judge and say to another human being, "You're condemned because you commit sins." All Christians, all of us, acknowledge that we are sinful and the judgment comes from God, not from another human being.
He got even more personal: "I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, 'I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.' I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do - and I have done it - and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock."
The most impressive thing about Carter's exegesis is the seriousness with which he took Matthew 5:27-28. He practically equated adultery of the heart with adultery of the flesh. The irony, of course, is that his explanation appeared in a publication whose very purpose is to lure men into committing adultery in their hearts.
But in 1976, you had to make a serious effort to access that publication, and, in many quarters, it was still taboo. Most barbers wouldn't be caught dead with a copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in their shops, let alone a Playboy. So, what Carter evidently had in mind was the way he looked at women fully clothed on the street. Neither he nor anyone else could have imagined the ease of accessibility to nudity and much worse in the years to follow.
We might be surprised to lear...