THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF JIMMY CARTER, IN HIS OWN WORDS

Everything, but everything, Jimmy Carter has said about religion over the past two years. Pippert is a Methodist minister in Washington, D.C., who also happens to belong to the UPI White House staff. Armed with scissors and tape, he's plodded through transcriptions of interviews, press conferences, speeches, bible classes in Plains, "Couples' Classes" in Washington, etc., etc., and snipped out every reference to Christianity he could find. Not surprisingly, he found a lot of them. Anyone with the patience to endure almost 200 pages of this (following Pippert's brief but soggy "spiritual biography" of the President) will come away with two unshakable convictions: 1) Carter really is a sincere believer; 2) He makes a very safe and boring theologian. Naturally, part of the problem arises from the embarrassing fact that, as Carter discovered after baring a small section of his soul to Playboy, religion and politics have a way of getting all stuck together. So he watches his tongue. But, beyond this, the man has a narrow, predictable religious imagination, and he says predictable things. Asked by Bill Moyers whether he has any doubts about himself, about God, or about life, Carter replies, "I can't think of any." Every now and then he brightens up a talk by quoting Niebuhr or Tillich or Gandhi. And he makes a moving story of his incongruous adventures "witnessing" in broken Spanish to Puerto Ricans in Massachusetts. But this collection of sermonettes and pious remarks has little else to recommend it—except that, after all, the born-again Baptist saying all this is the President.