A man who gave love, not war

CARTER: 'ROCK 'N ROLL' PRESIDENT HAD DEEP RELIGIOUS ROOTS AND LIBERAL POLITICS

For years, visitors pulled into the parking lot of Maranatha Baptist Church in rural Plains, Georgia, in the wee hours to queue in the pitch black for Jimmy Carter's Sunday school class.

Some were Christians, some were not. Many were Americans, while a substantial number came from other countries - Brazil, Canada, Russia. If evangelical Christianity was not their thing, it didn't really matter.

Carter's death on Sunday at age 100 marks not just the passing of a former US president whose single term was defined by an unshakable Christian faith.

It is also a farewell to a leader whose deep evangelical roots and liberal politics are seemingly antithetical in today's America.

Carter - a Democrat, Baptist and peanut farmer - was elected in 1976 on the heels of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, which saw Richard Nixon resign the presidency rather than face near-certain impeachment.

The Gospel-loving, "born again" Christian was the antidote to America's woes.

"Casting a ballot for Carter, the redeemer president, would expunge the voters' sins and absolve them of complicity" in Nixon's rise, historian Randall Balmer wrote in Redeemer, a Carter biography focused on religion.

Carter said Christian tenets such as justice and love were the bedrock of his presidency.