In 2017, I traveled with my two teenage children to Plains, Ga., from Jacksonville, Fla., to hear Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church.
My son Gibson asked for this trip to celebrate his 17th birthday. A fierce and unusual admirer of the Carter presidency, he’d recently written a high school history paper on Jimmy Carter’s Administration and the rise of arch-conservatism, and we had all been rattled by Donald Trump’s “carnage” inauguration address that month.
The three of us spent a pastoral Saturday roaming around Plains, visiting Carter’s childhood home and peanut farm, his brother Billy’s gas station and the train depot that became the presidential campaign headquarters in 1975. We stood as a southern family in the Carter visitor’s center, housed in the high school where the future President and First Lady were students. We admired Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize and took pictures of sitting at…
