President Jimmy Carter, whose funeral is taking place today at the National Cathedral in Washington, pursued a foreign policy more attentive to human rights than his immediate predecessors. Motivated in part by his deep Christian faith, Carter was thus part of a broader development that included a transformation of Catholic “foreign policy,” too.

When the Cold War against expansionist Soviet communism began, a certain “realpolitik” thinking took hold in Western capitals. To contain communism, an emphasis on balance of forces and alliances became primary. An anti-communist authoritarian, even a cruel tyrant, might be favored by U.S. foreign policy over a democratic country sympathetic to Moscow. 

In his inaugural address, Carter indicated a shift toward putting a priority on human rights. A tyrant might be anti-communist, but he was still a tyrant, and U.S. foreign policy should take that into greater account. 

“Ours was the first society openly to define itself in terms of both spirituality and human liberty,” Carter began in January 1977. 

“To be true to ourselves, we must be true to others,” the new president continued. “We will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home. … Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.”

Realpolitik did not end then and there, but alongside foreign policy “realism” a renewed “idealism” was proposed. 

The Carter foreign policy took shape in a time of “détente” — efforts to reduce tensions between Cold War adversaries. The Helsinki Accords were signed by dozens of countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, in 1975. The Helsinki Accords principally recognized the borders of post-World War II European countries, with pledges to avoid aggressive attacks on neighbors. Yet they also included what was known as “Basket III,” which called for respect for human rights, and linked a culture of human rights to peace and security.

The communist bloc ratified Helsinki and, at the time, Basket III was given lesser attention. It would become though a key development in the Cold War, adding moral urgency to the violations of human rights behind the Iron Curtain and exported around the world. “Helsinki Watch” groups were established to monitor Soviet compliance with human rights.

From Helsinki in 1975, to Carter’s new emphasis on human rights in 1977, to St. John Paul’s epochal pilgrimage to Poland in 1979, foreign policy in the late 1970s elevated the moral dimension of the struggle against communism to include a more robust defense of the rights and dignity of the human person.

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, Carter looked back at his presidency in those terms. 

“In those days, the nuclear and conventional armaments of the United States and the Soviet Union were almost equal, but democracy ultimately prevailed because of commitments to freedom and human rights, not only in our own country and those of our allies, but in the former Soviet empire as well,” he said in Oslo. 

He also placed the shifts of the late 1970s into an American and personal context following the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by Christian pastors. 

“The [1964] Nobel Peace Prize also profoundly magnified the inspiring global influence of Martin Luther King Jr., the greatest leader that my native state has ever produced,” Carter added in Oslo. “On a personal note, it is unlikely that my own political career beyond Georgia would ever have been possible without the changes brought about by the civil rights movement in the southern part of our country and throughout our nation.”

In the years after King’s Nobel Peace Prize, several other laureates were chosen who emphasized human rights and human dignity, many of them inspired by their religious faith: René Cassin (1968), Andrei Sakharov (1975), Mother Teresa (1979), Lech Wałęsa (1983), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984), Elie Wiesel (1986), the Dalai Lama (1989), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), Bishop Carlos Belo (1996) and Shirin Ebadi (2003).

Indeed, Carter received in his first week in office a letter from Sakharov, the dissident Soviet scientist. Carter wrote back that “human rights is a central concern of my Administration. … You may rest assured that the American people and our government will continue our firm commitment to promote respect for human rights not only in our own country but also abroad.”

That earned a ferocious response from Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, who declared that Moscow would not tolerate “interference in our internal affairs, whatever pseudo-humanitarian slogans are used to present it.” 

The Catholic Church contemporaneously had its own turn toward human rights in the teaching of Vatican II and the subsequent pontificate of John Paul II. 

Vatican II declared a universal right to religious freedom, thus arguing that a limited state was demanded by man’s very nature. John Paul would employ that argument to enter the Cold War debates with renewed vigor, not as a minor diplomatic power, but as a powerful moral defender of human rights. George Weigel has called this the “Catholic human rights revolution.” 

“In the mid-1980s, I found myself in conversation with Sir Michael Howard, the distinguished English historian,” Weigel wrote in the 1990s. “Sir Michael remarked that, in his view, there had been two great revolutions in the twentieth century. The first had taken place when Lenin’s Bolsheviks expropriated the Russian Revolution and began the world’s first experiment in totalitarianism. The second revolution was taking place even as we spoke: the transformation, as Sir Michael put it, of the Catholic Church from the last bastion of the ancien régime to the world’s foremost institutional defender of basic human rights.”

The history of Europe from Helsinki 1975 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 could be read as a contest between those two revolutions. There were many factors which defeated the Soviet empire in the Cold War, but the moral revolution for human rights, informed by religious faith, was essential. 

When John Paul visited Carter at the White House in October 1979, just months after his triumphant return home to Poland, he emphasized religious freedom behind the Iron Curtain. One of Carter’s biographers, Stuart Eizenstat, would write: “The head of the Catholic Church had in effect made common cause with the president’s human rights agenda.” 

While it is Ronald Reagan who is more closely associated with John Paul’s human rights challenge to communism, there were bipartisan roots, beginning during the Carter administration’s foreign policy turn toward human rights. However, in his long post-presidency, Carter would increasingly find himself at odds with Christian defenders of human rights, as the Democratic Party became more radical on social issues.

The 1979 visit of John Paul to Carter’s White House was a symbolic moment of the shift toward human rights in international relations. With Carter’s return this week for a final time to Washington, Catholics ought to remember that.