When he first ran for US president in 1974, Jimmy Carter drew strong support from a group that had mostly abstained from politics: evangelical Christians.
With the news that Carter has entered hospice care prompting a wave of reflections, one measure of his presidency’s enduring impact is that evangelicals went on to become one of the most powerful constituencies in US politics — only they did so on the side of Republicans, not Democrats.
In the space of a few decades, they became the base of the modern Republican Party and, even more remarkably, the staunchest supporters in 2016 and 2020 of scandal-soaked former US president Donald Trump.
Their split from Carter remains noteworthy not just because it reshaped US politics, but because it presaged other fissures.
Carter’s initial appeal is not hard to understand. He was a Southern Baptist, taught Sunday school and described himself as “born again” — a term that mystified millions of people in 1975, and sparked plenty of media wonderment, but of course needed no explaining to US evangelicals.
It was not Carter’s religion, but his religiosity, that captured the nation’s attention. He spoke openly about his faith, sometimes over the objection of anxious advisers, at a time when most politicians did not.
That won him evangelical votes, even though Carter’s Christian faith, while shaping his views on social justice, human rights and personal morality, did not impel him to adopt conservative positions on issues such as abortion.
At the time, being a Democrat did not register as a political negative. It was a category that included the nation’s best-known evangelical leader, Reverend Billy Graham. Most evangelicals were simply excited to find a candidate who shared their faith.
That excitement generated enough press interest for Newsweek to declare 1976 the “year of the evangelical.”
Carter’s election centered religion in US politics in a way it had not been since former US president John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign. This prompted a conservative backlash orchestrated most publicly by the televangelist Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in June 1979 to oust Carter from the White House.
Falwell spotlighted some Carter positions that conservative evangelicals considered heretical, such as his supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, calling for a Palestinian homeland and holding a “White House Conference on the Families” that included discussions of gay rights, contraception and abortion.
His efforts to undermine Carter had the intended effect: In 1980, two-thirds of Falwell’s supporters voted for former US president Ronald Reagan, despite his being a twice-married Hollywood actor who had signed a liberal abortion law as governor of California.
Reagan’s victory established the “religious right” as a rising political force in the Republican Party. Not every evangelical leader approved.
“It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right,” Graham told Parade magazine in 1981.
However, Reagan’s instrumental value to conservative evangelical leaders — his willingness to take conservative positions and appoint conservative judges who opposed Roe v Wade — eclipsed such concerns.
That rationale only strengthened over the decades.
“I don’t look to the teachings of Jesus for what my political beliefs should be,” said Falwell’s son Jerry Falwell Jr in 2018, justifying his support for Trump shortly before his own career collapsed with revelations of a tawdry sex scandal.
Evidently, most evangelicals agreed. In an analysis of 2016 exit poll data, the Pew Research Center found that Trump won self-described white “evangelical/born-again” voters 81 percent to 16 percent, by far his strongest performance among any religious denomination.
The evangelical shift from backing a pious Democratic Sunday schoolteacher to backing a twice-divorced Republican television celebrity and tabloid fixture famous for allegedly cavorting with porn stars is an extreme example of the polarization that has suffused US politics since Carter’s White House days.
As evangelical voters learned about some of Carter’s more liberal positions, many responded by voting for Republicans.
As evangelical churches strengthened their affiliation with Republican politicians, members who disagreed often left their churches — or “disaffiliated,” in political science language — which then concentrated the conservative skew of the congregants who remained.
A 2018 paper on the phenomenon in the American Journal of Political Science concluded that “the Christian Right is driving congregants out of the pews.”
The process of political sorting is hardly limited to religion. One effect of former US president Barack Obama’s election was that it polarized US politics around the issue of race.
Before Obama, racially conservative voters were about as likely to vote for a Democrat as a Republican. After his election, that changed. A team of academics documented this shift in their 2018 book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.
“No other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama’s presidency as powerfully and as consistently as racial attitudes,” they wrote. Polling underscored this: By 2016, Pew found that white voters supported Republicans by 15 points — 54 percent to 39 percent.
It has been about half a century since Carter took the political world by storm. A lot has changed since then, as anyone would expect. It is impossible to imagine a Democratic candidate drawing significant evangelical support.
However, if he were running today, Carter would not expect it. He was one of the countless churchgoers swept up in the polarization of evangelical voters.
When the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention voted in 2000 to bar women from serving as pastors, he made what he called “a painful decision” to leave the church of his grandfather and father because its “increasingly rigid” doctrines “violate the basic premises of my Christian faith.”
Joshua Green is a national correspondent at Bloomberg Businessweek. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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