I first met Jimmy Carter at a small gathering prior to an academic conference at Emory University. What he wanted to talk about was what he characterized as the “unsurpassed joy” of telling others about Jesus.

He was referring, of course, to his own religious transformation, which occurred in 1967, shortly after he lost his first campaign for governor of Georgia. Carter was disconsolate. He had campaigned so vigorously that he lost 22 pounds, and he had invested a great deal of money into the effort. Worse, he had lost to — of all people! — Lester G. Maddox, a notorious segregationist who rose to prominence when he confronted three African Americans with an axe handle when they tried to integrate his Pickrick Restaurant the day after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Carter returned to Plains, Ga., after his bitter defeat in the 1966 election, he began searching his soul. With the help of his sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, a Pentecostal evangelist, Carter rededicated his life to Christ. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Lock Haven, Pa., with other Southern Baptist laymen to knock on doors and share their faith.

Later that same year, Carter was paired with a Puerto Rican minister for a similar venture in Springfield, Mass. Carter, with his rudimentary command of Spanish, would read from the Bible in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, and the pastor, Eloy Cruz, would preach. At the end of their week together, Carter pressed Cruz about why he was so successful. Cruz demurred, thinking that Carter was superior to him. But Carter insisted.

“Señor Jimmy,” Cruz finally responded, “the secret to faith is to have two loves: one for God and the other for whoever happens to be standing in front of you at any given time.”

Evangelicals believe that it is incumbent on a believer to bring others into the faith, what evangelicals call evangelism or “witnessing.” But my observation over the past half century is that they typically hire professionals to do it for them: missionaries, ministers, “outreach” pastors on the staff of large megachurches.

Carter, unlike most evangelicals, actually engaged in person-to-person evangelism.

My second meeting with the 39th president took place in the spring of 2009, this time at the Carter Center in Atlanta. I was a visiting professor at Emory that semester, and he organized a lunch with several other professors. He had prepared questions in advance, and toward the end of the gathering, my wife asked about his work with Habitat for Humanity.

He described the most recent house that he and Rosalynn had helped build, a home for a single mother who had previously been living with her children in an abandoned septic tank. As he described the mother’s reaction to her new home, Carter’s eyes welled with tears.

In the wake of Carter’s death last Sunday, some people have been identifying themselves as “Jimmy Carter Christians” as a way of distinguishing themselves from white evangelicals, a supermajority of whom supported Donald Trump in the last three presidential elections. A Jimmy Carter Christian cares about evangelism, but he or she also takes seriously the command of Jesus to care for “the least of these.”

Carter himself attended to that, both as president and beyond. He sought to be a peacemaker, and he leveraged his status as former president to oversee elections, to mediate disputes and to eradicate disease. To take one example, in 1986 when the Carter Center took on the task of eradicating the painful and debilitating Guinea worm disease, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases worldwide. In 2023, that number dropped to 14.

In my final interview with Carter while writing his biography, I asked if he was comfortable being called a “progressive evangelical,” knowing that some Southern Baptists bridled at the label, considering it a “Yankee” term.

Progressive evangelicalism has a long history of advocating for those on the margins. In contrast to the agenda of the contemporary Religious Right, progressive evangelicals in the 19th century worked for peace and for the equality of women. They were active in prison reform and the formation of public schools. Evangelicals in the North worked to eradicate the scourge of slavery, and many were critical of the excesses of free-market capitalism.

Carter, the Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, smiled and assured me that he was happy to be identified as a progressive evangelical.

Randall Balmer teaches at Dartmouth College and is the author of “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.”