My childhood of (not) reading

In our "Books Change" series, historians of religion consider books that have changed us or have themselves been changed.

One of the reasons I was drawn to Jimmy Carter, first as an emerging national politician in the mid-1970s and then as a biographical subject decades later, was the similarity of our backgrounds. Both of us were reared in evangelical households, he in rural southwest Georgia and I in Nebraska, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa. We are both the oldest in our families: Carter had three younger siblings, and I have four younger brothers. We had “born-again” experiences at an early age, Carter at age 11 and me initially at, well, three years old—but that is another story.

There is one element of our childhoods, however, that couldn’t be more different: our relationship with books and reading. The Carter household was enamored of books. Jimmy Carter recalls that his parents encouraged their children to read, and they did. Even at mealtime, each family member was buried in a book, and family conversations often centered around what individuals were reading.