Waging Peace: UCC pastor who served in Carter’s administration remembers the President

As thousands gathered to honor the life of Former President Jimmy Carter at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday, the Rev. Robert Maddox and his spouse Linda were among them.

Maddox, a retired pastor in the United Church of Christ, worked as Carter’s speechwriter and special assistant for religious outreach during Carter’s presidency.

While Maddox became UCC clergy during his time on staff at Westmoreland Congregational UCC in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 2000’s, it was his roots as a Baptist pastor in churches near Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, that connected his family with Carter’s before his presidential efforts.

Mailing a presidential speech

Maddox’s entry into the Carter Administration came when he “hit upon an idea of the speech Carter could use at the signing ceremony of the Middle East Treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1978,” he said.

He had heard the phrase from a friend “Peace, like war, is waged,” and crafted a speech around this idea.

In these days before email or fax existed, Maddox mailed the speech to First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s press secretary, who he had come to know.

“Lo and behold, three hours before the big ceremony, I got a phone call to get to a TV because the president was using my speech,” he said. “I was still a pastor in Georgia, and the president used my speech. That was the trigger that sent me the White House.”

While he started as a speechwriter at the White House, Maddox quickly moved into a role of religious liaison and worked in the Carter administration for two years.

In the years since, he has served as a pastor, as the former executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and he founded the Briggs Center for Faith and Action. The Rev. Michael Neuroth, director of the UCC Office of Public Policy and Advocacy, described Maddox as “a true example of a pastor and theologian who embodies the call to love our neighbor.”

A legacy of ‘waging peace’

Carter became well known for his deep religious faith and an insistence on keeping church and state separate when he was president, as well as his long-term humanitarian work following his presidency.

The words “waging peace” still serve as a tagline for The Carter Center’s work today.

“Jimmy Carter, in today’s vernacular, ‘gets Jesus.’ He and Rosalynn got Jesus’ memo about compassion, justice, and unbrokered inclusion,” Maddox said. “For me, the heart of Jesus’ Gospel is the passage in Matthew 25 when the writer says ‘What you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me’ – the whole litany. Jimmy and Rosalynn got that part of Jesus. Those were their marching orders to the world. All of the humanitarian work they did was framed, energized, and impelled by that kind of example of Jesus.”

After Carter’s presidency ended, Maddox continued to periodically visit the Bible study that Carter taught in Georgia.

“I learned early never to attend his Bible class unless I had studied the lesson for the day,” he said.

Carrying the stories

As Maddox, now 87, sat in the National Cathedral for Carter’s funeral service, he looked around and considered how every person there carried “a cluster of Jimmy Carter stories” — many of which they were able to share together.

He felt fortunate that he was at the right place at the right time to experience many Carter stories of his own.

“It is the honor of Linda and I to have known them and to be known by them,” Maddox said. “He fundamentally shaped my life. As the apostle Paul said of his Philippian friends, I count as joy every remembrance of Jimmy Carter.”

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