ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter may never have been president if he didn’t go square dancing.

The Georgia Democrat credits a rural square dance club he joined in 1953 with helping him win a state Senate seat by a scant 66 votes.

“If I hadn’t received support from our square-dancing friends, I would have lost and never become a state senator,” he wrote in his latest book, “Through the Years with Jimmy Carter.” “And if that had occurred, I never would have run for office again.”

Carter has penned 26 different books, including childhood memoirs, treatises on the Middle East and accounts of his presidency. But none are like his latest, which offers 366 devotionals, each with a biblical passage, a personal story and an original prayer.

The one-page items are sprinkled with lessons Carter gleaned from more than 30 years of teaching Sunday school classes and anecdotes from his country upbringing to his ascent to the White House and beyond.

“The totality of my teaching presents a view of a lay person. I’m not a theologian,” he said in an interview. “I’m extracting real messages from the Bible or from Christian faith that apply to daily existence and that’s applicable whether you’re a farmer, a journalist, a lawyer, a teacher or a political office holder.”

In the book, Carter is open about struggles over his own faith. He writes that he felt “despondent and alienated from God” after losing his first bid for Georgia’s governor in 1966, and said his wife Rosalynn went through a rough patch when he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. But he said he retrenched during those dark times and worked to remind himself of the role religion has played in his life.

“If there is no basis for our faith ... then how do we account for the presence of Jesus Christ in hundreds of millions of lives across the globe?” he wrote in the book. “How could Jesus still be alive to me? How could so many hearts be touched and minds stimulated by Jesus to seek ultimate truths about life and the world around us?”