Halfway into his presidency, Jimmy Carter’s back was against the wall. It was July 1979, the height of the energy crisis, and the beleaguered president went on national television to deliver not a speech, but a kind of sermon.

The address — called “Crisis of Confidence” — challenged Americans to acknowledge personal failings that he believed were compounding very real public problems.

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” said Mr. Carter, who died Sunday. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

The dangers of a society’s growing ever more covetous of bigger and better and more seemed obvious enough to Mr. Carter, who grew up in rural Georgia and lived in public housing as a young adult. By appealing to

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