President Jimmy Carter verbatim said, “evangelical Christianity has been hijacked by people who would have given Jesus himself the boot if he knocked on their…

Following news of former President Jimmy Carter’s Dec. 29 death, photos, remembrances and quotes about the peanut-farmer-turned-39th-president flooded social media news feeds. Although many posts addressed Carter’s political record, diplomacy and humanitarian work, one post, on Threads, addressed religion and got a key fact wrong when it attributed a quote to Carter, who described himself as a born-again Christian.

“‘Evangelical Christianity has been hijacked by people who would have given Jesus himself the boot if he knocked on their door.’ — Jimmy Carter,” read text presented beside an image of Carter in a Dec. 29 post. 

This post and others like it were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

(Screenshot from Threads)

Carter, a Democrat, once expressed this general sentiment about evangelical Christianity, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune report, but this exact quote was not attributed to Carter.

For a 2005 article about Carter’s book, “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis,” the Star Tribune’s Pamela Miller wrote that she’d interviewed Carter by telephone.

“Referring often to his own brand of evangelical Christianity, Carter said he could remain quiet no more about the Christian far right and its influence on government,” Miller wrote. “Evangelical Christianity has been hijacked, he said, by people who would give Jesus himself the boot if he knocked on their door.” 

The paraphrase was attributed to Carter, but there aren’t quotation marks, meaning those weren’t his exact words. The specific phrasing was Miller’s summarization of Carter’s remarks. 

Because that interview and article were focused on Carter’s 2005 book “Our Endangered Values,” we also searched the book’s available pages for keywords and phrases such as “evangelical Christianity,” “hijacked,” “Jesus himself,” and “the boot.” We did not find the verbatim quote in the book, either.

This misattributed quote circulated and was fact-checked in November 2023, following former first lady Rosalynn Carter’s death.

It’s also not the first time social media users have wrongly assigned a quote about Christianity to Carter. In 2019, we rated False Facebook posts claiming that Carter once said, “If you don’t want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying you want a country based on Christian values, because you don’t.”

We rate the claim that Carter said verbatim, “evangelical Christianity has been hijacked by people who would have given Jesus himself the boot if he knocked on their door” False. 

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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