The phrase "born again" conjures a variety of images--straight and clean-cut young people handing out tracts on street corners, sudden revelations, a provincial team spirit for God with a sprinkling of busybodiness.

Jimmy Carter says he's born again. Journalists have written about his religion and speculated as to how it affects him and evokes the image he projects. But they have shied away from defining what born again means.

Carter says he entered into a dynamic born again experience after he lost the 1966 gubernatorial race in Georgia. The defeat left him wondering what he was to do and where he was going. He said that his personal relationship with God through the born again experience offered him meaning, at what appears to have been a breaking point in his life.

The born again event occurs when one accepts God's forgiveness for his sins through Christ's atonement on the cross. One then enters a new life, in which he relates to God and his associates in a spirit of love.

It is an emotional experience, for the concepts of forgiveness and love have extensive impact that people who have been born again feel reach cords in the human psyche that few experiences in life can touch. A change in lifestyle can occur because of the very strength of the truth one has apprehended and applied to his life.

Although Carter was raised in the Southern Baptist church, he consciously chose a personal relationship with God a decade ago.

Carter rejects efforts to circumscribe his spiritual experience by simply relegating it to the Southern Baptist tradition. He said, "I'm a human being. I'm not a packaged article that you can put in a little box and say here's a Southern Baptist...he's got to be predictable."

Carter's so-called "hotline" to God through prayer appears to be his working relationship with the non-material world. According to the Democrats' press aide Mark Cohen, Carter reads the Bible (in Spanish) every night. He is thereby working to maintain a continuous connection with God, the aide says. Carter's spiritual experience gives him a "sense of peace and equanimity and assurance," he says.

William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience quotes Louis Agassiz as saying, "One can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in." James's book is based on interviews with people who have had a spectrum of religious experiences.

The following is in a similar format. The individuals interviewed have intimate knowledge of the born again phenomenon, through association with Eastern Nazarene College or Barrington College, two schools in the New England area that encourage the tradition of the born again experience.

The interviewees describe the born again encounter, and some offer comments on Carter as a presidential nominee who comes from a born again religious tradition.

Harvey Cox, Thomas Professor of Divinity and a member of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, says that Jesus did not necessarily introduce the idea of rebirth, for a rebirth practice can be found throughout preliterate tribal religious groups in Australia and Africa.

In these civilizations, at puberty, boys are taken from their mothers and placed in isolation in a womb-like situation in a tent. After many days they are pulled out by their heads through their fathers' legs. At this recapitulation of the original birth experience, they babble like babies. But soon afterward they are given weapons of adult men to signify that they are ready after their second birth to accept the responsibilities of adult life.

Cox referred to "born again" as an experience rather than an institutional affiliation. But the words become conventionalized, he says. They function as a code with overtones. They are, like an evocation, symbol-suffused. As with the symbolic communion in the Catholic church, vibrations reverberate around the term, Cox says. Included in those vibrations is the question, are you serious about your religion--is it personal?

Cox said that Hamilton Jordan, Carter's national campaign director, comes from a radical New Testament background in the South. His father, Clarence Jordan, was a radical populist and Southern Baptist, who started a farm called Koinonia (the Greek New Testament word for community) in Americas, Georgia. This farm was an inter-racial co-operative group with emphasis on pacifism.