President Carter taught a Sunday school lesson on Genesis — and international aid
President Jimmy Carter teaching Sunday School at First Baptist D.C. Photograph courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
Christi Harlan
Forty-seven years before the U.S. Congress voted to rescind funding for international aid, a Sunday school teacher in Washington, D.C., took time from a Bible lesson to share his thoughts on the humanitarian role and responsibility of the United States.
The teacher was President Jimmy Carter, and the lesson was one of 14 recorded between 1977 and 1981 at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C. — Carter’s church home for the 48 months of his presidency.
The recordings show him to be a skilled scholar of Scripture and a solicitous teacher who rarely mentioned his day job. An exception came on June 25, 1978, when Carter was scheduled to teach from Genesis about Joseph and his brothers.
“Since I’ve been president, I’ve had a chance to travel around a lot and to learn the unique perspective of others,” Carter said. “And I’ve begun to see that Americans are legitimately subject to tough criticism because, quite often, we preach Christian principles about being so concerned about those who are poor, destitute, deprived, illiterate, inarticulate, and, when we start putting it into practice, we are not too good at it.”
Carter’s audience was about 100 members of First Baptist’s Couples Class, formed in the mid-1940s to accommodate the young married couples whose long work hours during World War II kept them apart except on Sundays.[1]
When the president and First Lady Rosalynn Carter joined First Baptist of D.C. on January 23, 1977 — three days after his inauguration — they also joined the Couples Class, which was then integrated by gender, race and nationality.[2] On that first Sunday, Carter agreed to a request from the class leader to continue what he had done for years at Plains Baptist Church in Georgia: teach Sunday school.
On June 25, 1978, the curriculum assigned the scripture and the title, “The Growth of Concern.”
Before Carter got to the text, he described a recent presidential trip to Texas, then pivoted to an unusually specific and pointed commentary on international aid. Carter didn’t name particular government initiatives, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, but his words are a sharp contrast to the political polemics of 2025.
After suggesting that the United States isn’t “too good” at practicing what it preaches, Carter went on, telling his Sunday school class:
“I had a meeting the other night with about 75 or 80 members of Congress, key members who were interested in foreign policy,” Carter said. “I had the Secretary of State in Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense, there with me, and we just sat on a little raised platform and answered questions. The session lasted three hours. And the strongest condemnation I gave to the Congress was their attitude toward foreign aid.
Forty-seven years before the U.S. Congress voted to rescind funding for international aid, a Sunday school teacher in Washington, D.C., took time from a Bible lesson to share his thoughts on the humanitarian role and responsibility of the United States.
“Ordinarily, stalwart, courageous members of Congress, when they’re put under the slightest bit of pressure, will vote against foreign aid.
“We spend a tiny amount of our total budget, of our total gross national product, in helping others. Quite often that’s the best investment we can make. It’s a peaceful way to meet the challenge of alien philosophies, communism, and so forth. It doesn’t cost us anything.
“When we give another country a little bit of money to help them have a better agriculture, a better industry, or build dams or have better health, we get enormous benefits back.
“But that is a target for people who want to be demagogic. And we suffer because of it. We have the least foreign aid toward other people of any developed country in the world, three tenths of 1 percent of our gross national product. And countries like Sweden or the Netherlands or France or Germany or Great Britain even, some of whom are in trouble financially, are three times more generous.
“And this is not compatible with the American character, I don’t believe. But it’s a truism. And other nations know it. But we tend to think we are better than other people.”
Carter then turned to the text, describing Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt and his accurate prediction of a coming famine. Near the end of the lesson, a class member, barely audible on the recording, asked the president whether the United States was responsible for addressing famine as Joseph was in Egypt.
“It is, and we are doing that as a matter of fact right now,” Carter responded. “We’re not only setting up a grain reserve in our own country, but we’re also working with other nations who produce wheat and corn, soybeans and so forth to set up an international grain reserve.
“That grain would be kept in the individual countries, but it would be available for international exchange to the countries that are particularly destitute because of a drought of some other things. Yes, it’s good for our country, good for our farmers, provides a more stable price for all of us, and also can help to alleviate suffering when people are hungry. Good point. Thank you.”
After the June 1978 lesson on Genesis — and international aid — President Jimmy Carter taught 10 more Sunday school lessons to the Couples Class at First Baptist D.C. His last was on January 4, 1981; later that month, he and Rosalynn Carter transferred their membership to Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, where he continued to teach Sunday school.[3] When Carter died on December 29, 2024, he was still an associate member of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C.
Christi Harlan is a member of and former publicity director for First Baptist D.C. She is the author of Mr. President, The Class Is Yours, containing the first-ever transcripts of the Sunday school lessons taught by President Jimmy Carter. She published the back stories of the lessons and the church in Normal Lives: President Jimmy Carter and His Church. The books are available from Amazon and other booksellers. www.ChristiHarlanWriter.com
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[1] Harlan, Christi, “The Sunday School Class.” Mr. President, The Class Is Yours: Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School Lessons in Washington, D.C., xv-xvii. Washington, DC: Christi Harlan Media, LLC, 2024.
[2] Johnson, Janis, “Carters, Family Members Join First Baptist Church,” Washington Post, page B1, January 24, 1977.
[3] United Press International, “Church Formed by Split Welcomes Carter Family.” New York Times, Page A22, January 26, 1981.
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