Jimmy Carter would ask about your church. Not because he was recruiting. Because he taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, for over 40 years after leaving the presidency, and the question was reflexive — the way a doctor asks “how are you feeling?” or a teacher asks “what did you learn?”
If you didn’t go to church, he’d nod. No judgment. He’d ask what you did on Sunday mornings instead, and he’d listen with the same quiet attention he gave heads of state and peanut farmers and the thousands of strangers who showed up in Plains hoping to hear a former president explain the Book of Matthew to a room of 35 people in a church with no air conditioning.
He taught those lessons into his late nineties. After brain cancer. After a broken hip. After the death of his wife Rosalynn, to whom he’d been married for 77 years — the longest presidential marriage in American history. He showed up on Sunday mornings because he’d said he would, and Jimmy Carter kept his word with the stubbornness of a man who considered reliability a form of prayer.
How He’d Teach
He wouldn’t lecture. That was the first surprise. People came to the Sunday school class expecting presidential wisdom delivered from behind a podium. What they got was a Georgia farmer in a bolo tie asking questions and waiting — actually waiting, with silence that most people found uncomfortable — for answers.
“What do you think that passage means?” He’d ask this of tourists, of seminary students, of children. The question wasn’t rhetorical. He wanted to hear your interpretation before he offered his. When he did offer his, it was always personal — tied to a specific moment from his life, a decision he’d made or failed to make, a regret that still taught him something.
His speaking voice was soft, Southern, unhurried. Plains, Georgia, accent — the vowels stretched, the consonants gentle, the pace of a man who’d learned that speaking slowly made people lean in. He smiled more than any president before or since, and the smile was genuine in a way that either charmed you or made you suspicious, depending on how much cynicism you brought to the room.
What He’d Notice
Carter was a nuclear engineer. Trained under Admiral Hyman Rickover in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program — one of the most demanding technical programs the military has ever run. Rickover once asked Carter whether he had always done his best at the Naval Academy. Carter started to say yes, then stopped. “No, sir, I didn’t always do my best.” Rickover stared at him and asked: “Why not?” Then turned and walked away.
Carter wrote an autobiography called Why Not the Best? The Rickover question haunted him for the rest of his life. It became the metric against which he measured everything — every policy decision, every Habitat for Humanity house, every international negotiation.
He’d apply it to you. Not aggressively. Jimmy Carter was not aggressive. But somewhere in the conversation, quietly, almost as an afterthought, he’d circle back to something you’d said and ask whether it was your best. Whether the job, the relationship, the excuse you’d offered was the best version of yourself you could manage. And the question would land differently from Carter than from anyone else, because this was a man who spent his post-presidency building houses with his own hands, monitoring elections in countries that didn’t want him there, and negotiating cease-fires that the State Department had given up on.
The Lesson
He lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan in one of the most lopsided defeats in modern presidential history. 489 electoral votes to 49. He was 56. Most presidents who lose like that disappear into consulting firms and speaking circuits. Carter went home to Plains — population 683 — and started the Carter Center.
Over the next four decades, he helped eradicate Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases per year to fewer than 15. He monitored over 100 elections in 39 countries. He personally negotiated the release of political prisoners. He built over 4,300 Habitat for Humanity homes with his own hands — swinging hammers into his nineties, wearing a tool belt, insisting on being treated as a volunteer rather than a dignitary.
The post-presidency was longer than most presidential careers. It was also, by almost any measure, more impactful than his actual presidency. He’d tell you that himself, without bitterness, with the frank self-assessment of a man who’d been asking “why not the best?” since he was a junior officer and had finally figured out where his best work lived.
It wasn’t in the Oval Office. It was in the Sunday school classroom and on the construction site and in the rooms where nobody expected a former president to show up and do the work himself.
The man who lost the presidency built something larger with the decades that came after — one house, one lesson, one Sunday morning at a time.
Talk to Jimmy Carter — he’ll ask you a question you weren’t expecting. Give it your best answer.