The remembrances of Jimmy Carter after his death in December 2024 widely hailed him as a humanitarian for his decades-long work with the Carter Center, Habitat for Humanity, and other organizations and for his presidential administration’s prioritization of human rights. He was, as the New York Times obituary called him, a world-famous “global humanitarian” over his long post-presidential career. 

Less often mentioned, though no less significant, is that Jimmy Carter was a humanist, and a Christian humanist at that. Comment’s manifesto defines Christian humanists as “those who believe that Jesus Christ—God become man—is the ultimate measure of what it means to be human.” Carter’s Baptist faith and endless fascination with the life and ethics of Jesus, which he credited time and again with grounding his personal and political views, is just such a Christian humanism. 

Even in profane settings Carter held to this type of Christian humanism. In his infamous 1976 Playboy interview, which is almost exclusively cited for Carter’s admission that he “committed adultery in my heart many times,” what is often lost is the context of the quote. The memorable line comes during his monologue about the nature of his faith, which he describes as based on the example and teachings of Jesus. He explained that “constant reassessment, searching in one’s heart”—the practice of comparing his inner self to the standard of Jesus—was what “gives me a feeling of confidence.” As biographer Randall Balmer recounts, Carter would spend many of his Sunday-school classes at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, hammering the same theme: the duty of the Christian is “to emulate, or copy, the life of our savior.” In one of his last books Carter wrote that “people in my Bible class often ask what it means to be a Christian. My best explanation is that a Christian is a person professing Jesus Christ as personal savior, and striving to have the human qualities demonstrated by Jesus.” 

It might be expected, then, that Christians who seek to effect change in the world would look to Carter, a humanitarian and a humanist, as a model. Christian outlets ranging from Christianity Today to the Catholic National Register echoed what was written in The Atlantic, that Carter had the unique ability “to speak to Americans not just as an abstract and disembodied whole, as ‘Americans,’ but in existential and individual terms, as the small and seeking human beings we are.” What higher standard could a humanist with immense power be measured against? 

And yet one of the mantras echoed across the obituaries was that Carter was a good man but a bad president. The Guardian described Carter as “not cut out for the White House” but stated that “he eventually retrieved his reputation” with later humanitarian work. Whatever humanistic insights he brought to the office in the wake of Watergate and amid the challenges of stagflation and energy rationing, so this line of thinking goes, seemed to shrink in the performance of day-to-day leadership. 

My interest in this assessment has less to do with partisan wrangling or even the legacy of Carter as such. If Carter is emblematic of a much wider tradition of Christian humanism, at least one expressed in modern America, his shortcomings might well be the shortcomings of Christian humanism as a tradition. 

One such shortcoming, which commentators railed on during his presidency, was Carter’s tendency to “moralize,” which, more neutrally, might be described as his tendency to prioritize, almost to the exclusion of other factors, the moral, spiritual, and didactic dimensions of social and political problems. This critique often came from his political opponents. In accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan declared that he found “nothing wrong with the American people,” implying that Carter did. But the critique came from other sectors as well, including and especially another humanist, though not Christian: the historian and public intellectual Christopher Lasch. In the president’s famous-turned-infamous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July 1979, Carter and Lasch would be forever linked—unhappily in Lasch’s view—for just such a moralizing tone. 

The Carter-Lasch relationship is instructive for rethinking the scope and depth of Christian humanism as practiced by Carter. What Lasch says, in effect, is that a humanism without a deep critical understanding of society and psychology is ineffective and even destructive to its own stated intentions. 

The infamy of the Playboy interview aside, Carter’s Christian humanism was perhaps nowhere more on public display than in his most famous presidential speech, the above-mentioned “Crisis of Confidence” speech, soon dubbed the “malaise” speech (though Carter never used the word), delivered on television on July 15, 1979. Taking place during an energy crisis, the speech addressed the practicalities of ballooning postwar energy consumption and a more competitive global energy economy. But Carter wanted to prompt a deeper, spiritual searching by Americans too. One famous passage illustrates: 

Less noted is that Carter’s speech was indebted, in part, to Lasch, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, who earlier that year had published his surprise bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. It remains an excellent, if dated, analysis of social, psychological, and political trends in post–World War II American society. The book cemented Lasch’s reputation as a nationally recognized public intellectual, due in no small part to its association with Carter and his speech. In its essence, Culture of Narcissism retains a powerful punch. A famous early passage sets the scene: “After the political turmoil of the sixties, Americans have retreated to purely personal preoccupations. Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement.” Lasch lists new practices like “eating health food” and “learning how to ‘relate’” as, though harmless in themselves, signifying a “retreat from politics and a repudiation of the past.” 

Here we might conclude that Carter successfully distilled, in his own way for his own political purposes, Lasch’s critique of American culture. Indeed, much was made of the connection in the lead-up to Carter’s speech. In May 1979 Lasch and other public intellectuals, including Bill Moyers and Jesse Jackson, were invited to a White House dinner to talk to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter about the state of the country. At the dinner Carter divulged to Lasch that he had speed-read Culture of Narcissism, among other recent commentaries, as part of his data-gathering process. 

In a surface-level version of this story, then, there is a scene of two humanists—one Christian, one not—able to find agreement on at least part of the reason for the malaise of American society in the late 1970s. 

Except it wasn’t that straightforward. 

In fact, it turned out that in Lasch’s view Carter had butchered his analysis in his speech to the nation. To understand the limits of Carter’s Christian humanism (and perhaps the limits of a more academic form of humanism embodied by Lasch), it’s instructive to understand what Lasch thought Carter got wrong. 

Here are some of the classic lines of Carter’s speech that reveal his intent to address the cynical, pessimistic mood of Americans by way of a chastening televised lecture: 

As Eric Miller’s award-winning biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time, expertly tells the story, Lasch didn’t like this tack. Unlike Carter, Lasch understood the nation’s mood to be less about the failure of confidence as such and more about a postwar political and economic system that had depleted the capacity of Americans to resist the corrupting influences of consumption. In one letter about his meeting with Carter, quoted by Miller, Lasch explained the consequences of consumer capitalism as a “historic compromise in which people accepted a lower standard of work in exchange for a higher standard of consumption—too often confused with a higher standard of ‘living.’” This unparalleled level of consumption was “now threatened by interlocking economic crises that have called into question the underlying assumption of unlimited growth.” It was this historical development, surfacing in dramatic fashion in the seventies, that accounted for the crisis he and Carter both saw. 

This historically informed assessment flowed into the heart of Lasch’s social criticism, which Carter entirely missed or ignored in his speech. As a creature of the political left, Lasch had helped popularize in Culture of Narcissism and elsewhere the “new class” or “professional managerial class” analysis of capitalist society. Lasch ended Culture of Narcissism with an entire chapter on the new class, quipping that its newfangled dominance amounted to “paternalism without Father” for the rest of America. More pointedly, he wrote to Carter’s pollster Patrick Caddell that America’s culture crisis was the responsibility of a new culture. Again, Miller tells the story: 

Lasch’s primary prescription was on this point of participatory democracy—toward “a society composed of citizens rather than clients and consumers” who would “insist that the distribution of scarce resources, the distribution of sacrifices, and the nature of the discipline imposed by economic diversity are all collective decisions that should be made not by elites but by the people as a whole, who have to bear their costs.” Miller concludes, “This was Lasch at his apocalyptic-socialist best, distilling the critique that had won him acclaim.” 

We need to drill down even more to fully appreciate what was missing from Carter’s Christian humanism. What does a framework of social and psychological criticism add to the core Christian-humanistic commitments of human dignity, interdependence, fallenness, and wonder? Here we can follow the development of Lasch’s thinking, which after July 1979 remained inflected with disappointment in Carter’s diagnosis of American culture. Lasch saw Carter’s failure as the failure more broadly of liberal humanism, and he continued to struggle with the public’s interpretation of his ideas, which he believed had worsened in the months and years after the “malaise” speech. 

In the wake of national attention, Lasch confronted a changing public image, or rather his interpretation of his own public image. He accepted the May 1979 dinner invitation to the White House, writes Miller, “gingerly, and not without considerable reservations.” The dinner “was at least mildly ironic for Lasch, who had launched his career by denouncing intellectuals who spurn critical detachment for direct political influence.” More than a decade later Lasch recalled in an interview “feeling a little uncomfortable” at the dinner “because of having written so much about the perils of intellectuals as advisers to people in power. I wasn’t sure whether I should even be there in the first place.” Lasch’s capacious letter writing to debrief the events in the middle of 1979—to his parents, to his fellow dinner guests, and to Carter’s pollster—seemed to be, at least in part, an effort to repair the breach in his longer-standing persona as an “apocalyptic-socialist,” a prophet who, if truly prophetic, should be without honour among his own country’s elite. 

Alongside his public persona, Lasch contended with the misinterpretations of his criticism—confusions that often reflected the (admittedly predictable) superior influence of President Carter than of Lasch in defining Lasch’s own terms. The follow-up book to Culture of Narcissism was The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, released in 1984, well past Carter’s term in office. Yet the book’s purpose was to “make clear what The Culture of Narcissism seems to have left obscure or ambiguous: that the concern with the self, which seems so characteristic of our time, takes the form of a concern with its psychic survival.” Though subtle, this clarification had significant ramifications for what “narcissism” and “narcissistic” meant as descriptors for American society. While most Americans confused narcissism with “egoism and selfishness”—with “self-seeking,” “hedonism,” and “indifference to the general good”—this was not what Lasch had in mind. Instead, the threat (to recall the original myth of Narcissus) was not of solipsism but of confusing “the self and the non-self,” of staring deep into one’s own reflection and thinking that it is you, that you are it. “The minimal or narcissistic self,” Lasch summarized, “is, above all, uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union.” 

From this vantage, Lasch’s social and psychological priorities fell into place. The encroaching threat of military and industrial technology, he argued, “originates—insofar as we trace it to psychological roots—in the attempt to restore narcissistic illusions of omnipotence.” Uncertainty about political and economic stability stokes a culture that idealizes minimal “survival” above all else. The decline of participatory democracy and the disintegration of the family are attributable to “a more fundamental social transformation”: “the replacement of a reliable world of durable objects by a world of flickering images that make it harder and harder to distinguish reality from fantasy.” Lasch, for my money, is in tip-top prophetic shape in just these criticisms. 

Carter’s speech, Lasch reflected, “attributed the national ‘malaise’ to the spirit of self-seeking and the pursuit of ‘things.’” This was the “conventional” humanist’s approach that regarded the underlying social problem as “selfishness,” as seeing “consumerism as a kind of moral lapse that can be corrected by exhortations about the value of hard work and family life.” But this “moralistic indictment of ‘consumerism’” that Carter typified by his “obsession with [Americans] ‘owning things, consuming things’” missed the deeper reality: that the rise of mass consumption was itself dependent on “a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and a loss of control” that was psychological, not moral. The upshot according to Lasch was that, contra Carter, consumption and labour are not antitheses—as if, were we to work harder and commit to family values, we would successfully combat our urge to consume. Rather, consumption and labour are 

Humanists like Carter could articulate the importance of mass consumption to American culture but could not grasp how the structure of American society undermined its curtailment. This was the limitation of Carter’s desire to speak to Americans “in existential and individual terms, as the small and seeking human beings we are.” The emphasis on both human responsibility and smallness over against other factors might describe something of the experience of “moralizing” from the Oval Office. 

For all of Carter’s good intentions (and we might here remember that he is a stand-in for a tradition of Christian humanism), Lasch had deep concerns. What lessons can Lasch teach aspiring Christian humanists? At least two come to mind. 

First, Christian humanism is only as good as its comprehension of the world around it. Carter’s prescription of the enduring and perhaps timeless values of hard work and commitment to family, which sounds a lot like advice to love God and love your neighbour (or perhaps a more contemporary gloss of a commitment to deeper values and to community), must be contextualized. The qualifier “after World War II” appears time and again in Lasch’s writings. On the topic of mass consumption, Lasch writes that “a consumer culture began to emerge in the [nineteen] twenties.” These historical markers matter—everything after them should be explained in light of them. History, then, is a crucial component to humanistic analysis and criticism. The same is true for the other humanities disciplines and the sciences. 

Carter’s analysis did not appreciate the structural forces that shaped social reality. Part of the reason for this omission, of course, is that Carter was president, and rarely, if ever, do presidents, outside of farewell addresses, name structural forces like the “military-industrial complex” from the Oval Office. Even so, Carter’s failure to acknowledge, except in oblique ways, material conditions, class differences, or elitism in American culture was, perhaps, because his humanism was too indebted to a simplistic type of pietistic Christianity that regarded the inner status of the soul as superior to the external things of this world. He charged Americans of all classes to will themselves out of their crisis, in turn obscuring, in Lasch’s view, the material conditions that had led to malaise. In today’s setting, the Christian humanist, while attentive to the human, to the institution, to the culture, needs to pair these concerns with a robust understanding of how society materially functions. 

Second, even as Carter lacked perspective on structural forces shaping American society, he also lacked a deep understanding of human psychology. He did not, in his official presidential speeches or in later books, offer a coherent criticism of the “psychic” crisis at hand. Maybe he shouldn’t have speed-read Lasch’s book! Some of the early chapters of Culture of Narcissism bear titles such as “The Waning of the Sense of Historical Time,” and “The Therapeutic Sensibility,” exploring such themes as the “search for psychic peace,” and “displaced religion.” Lasch summarizes these as the “social invasion of the self,” a multi-decade process that he explores in other books as well, where once private or protected parts of the self, the family, and the community are subjected to the “new managerial class” and its theories and policies. In this new situation, he argues, the self, the family, and the community have been stripped bare and emptied for therapeutic and consumerist manipulation. 

One may or may not agree with Lasch’s analysis of the psychological problem. I certainly have my qualms about adopting a wholesale “Laschian” approach to self and society. Those with only a casual acquaintance with Lasch’s writing may be surprised, upon further reading, at the extent of his affinity for psychotherapeutic explanations and categories (e.g., ego, superego, id, infantile, libidinal). This is, of course, the generative font of terms like “narcissism” and “psychic survival.” Lasch’s investment in the psychoanalytic tradition supplies some of his distinctive insights but also dates his thinking somewhat. 

Psychoanalysis also just isn’t needed—even, in a sense, by Lasch’s own account. In The Minimal Self Lasch includes a fascinating note in which he observes that it is a “very solid intuition” to conclude that “psychoanalysis recaptures some of the deepest insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” This observation might serve as both a bridge between Lasch and Christian humanists today and a reminder that the deep resources of the Christian tradition can often match or even better their modern, professionalized alternatives. 

But Lasch’s analysis is an analysis, and one that leads to concrete proposals not just on the national level, such as curbing elite authority and reviving local democratic institutions, but also on the psychological level, on the scale of the individual: for example, realizing that consumption commodifies the very things it claims to address, like alienation and protest. Christian humanism, to be effective, must have an account of the internal workings of the human psyche that is both biblical and conversant (even while remaining in tension) with modern categories of selfhood. 

The importance of both the social and the psychological is clear in Lasch’s ideal of local participatory democracy as a means of empowering ordinary citizens—to recover political autonomy and autonomy of the self on a psychological level. While Carter shared a passion for democracy, his post-presidential work focused on election monitoring and human-rights advocacy—dimensions that, even when advanced, do not necessarily empower local governments to ensure citizens have more direct power over their lives. Here Lasch’s humanism seems, in at least one sense, more in tune with the human experience, more understanding of the “psychic stress” that can never be bracketed from politics—as Carter said in his most famous speech but which did not remain central to his approach to political reform. 

Nevertheless, Carter had something to teach Lasch. At the White House dinner, in a moment when they were talking at the table, Carter turned to Lasch and asked directly what the historian would do to solve the energy crisis. Lasch responded, “I don’t know.” The moment was embarrassing and revealing. An approach to social betterment that is all prophecy and no policy—all criticism from outside the levers of power—is as unviable as a Christian humanism bereft of social analysis. 

The implacable nature of the problem that confronted both Carter and Lasch from their very different vantage points reminds me of the Christian realism of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (whom both admired). Niebuhr embraced rather than tried to solve the contradictions of power and morality, emphasizing the “irony” of history when virtues and ideals lead to outcomes that contradict or undermine them. 

As I reflect on the Carter-Lasch relationship, I come to the tentative conclusion that in our political structures there are three social postures that perhaps in a perfect world would be achievable together but in our actual world can almost never be held simultaneously: 

You can be a humanist in power, like Carter, or a humanistic radical, like Lasch. Or you can be a radical in power, like Robespierre or Lenin or Hugo Chávez. But holding all three together is inherently unstable—the core commitment to humanistic values inevitably gives way. 

This conclusion, though chastening, is not entirely hopeless. Though social and psychological knowledge are often difficult to bridge, and though self-knowledge and power rarely go hand in hand, there is a model that Christian humanists have at their disposal: the incarnation. 

A Christian-humanist approach to society, psychology, and power must be based on the reality that God became man and that in him things hold together. The ancient Chalcedonian Definition’s understanding of Jesus as “soul and body; consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin” encompasses, especially in the last clause, the full breadth of human psychology. At the same time, the definition goes on, Jesus is “begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead” and so is the only power, the only person, who transcends the psychic self in that same “soul and body.” The Godhood and manhood are “not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son.” 

Niebuhr did not resort to Chalcedon. He rather advised that “nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.” We are, most precisely, saved by God’s love through Christ. It is in this bringing together of God and humanity, transcendence and immanence, encompassing the social and the psychological, that we might gain the widest frame possible for Christian humanism and plumb the depths of the reality that Jesus, whose power was displayed through sacrifice, and who is the ultimate measure of what it means to be human. 

Practically, a well-meaning Christian humanism without a robust social and psychological framework may help identify key values in our world, but it risks coming up short in understanding the complexity of the problems we face or suggesting viable solutions. Carter and Lasch likely agreed with the Comment manifesto’s commitment “to create a world, not destroy the one we have” but diverged on what that creation must include. This divergence, it seems to me, would be ideal for Christian humanists to explore, perhaps in dialogue with fellow travellers like Lasch.