Carter is a complicated figure in history. What is interesting about Carter is that he was probably the only president in modern history who really walked the walked when it came to the role of religion in his life and politics. Even after leaving the White House, Carter would teach Sunday school at his church in Plains, Georgia every weekend he was home. Carter was widely ridiculed for his famous "Crisis of Confidence" speech where he warned of the warship of self indulgence and consumption. But that may have been the only time a US president was at all close to the spiritual teachings of Jesus Christ.
On foreign policy, Carter was simultaneously one of the most successful US presidents and possibly the worst. The Camp David Accords ended 40 years of war between Israel and Egypt. That treaty has held to this day. That is easily the most successful peace treaty in modern history. But at the same time, Carter fell for Zbigniew Brzezinski's hawkish foreign policy on communism and set in motion the neo-liberal interventionist policy that caused the US to support the mujahadin in Afghanistan, which would later become Al Qaeda and would set the stage for Reagan to support Central American death squads. Zbig often was able to persuade Carter to ignore Cyrus Vance's efforts at detente with the Soviets and instead set up the arms race and geopolitical chess game that Reagan played. It was also Zbig who had Carter take a hard line against the revolution in Iran, which set up the hostage crisis. Zbig thought that the US should have supported the Shah and allowed the Shah to come to the US after getting Kissinger to threaten to come out against the SALT treaty if he did not let the Shah come to the US for cancer treatment.
Carter is mostly panned for the economy. But Carter had nothing to do with the oil embargo that caused inflation to spiral out of control. Carter and Volker were able to get inflation under control and set up the US economy for Reagan to come in and take all the credit.