How Jimmy Carter Helped the Religious Right Rise to Power

In 1976, Jimmy Carter said something that had almost never been uttered before in American presidential politics. During the Democratic primaries that year, Carter mentioned to some reporters that he was an evangelical and a “born again” Christian.

These words sent the media scrambling to find out what Carter meant. What was an evangelical, they asked each other?

Shortly after New York Times reporter Kenneth Briggs gave a longer explanation to his readers, suggesting that it was the ignorant press—and not the devout Carter—that was the quirk of American life. Noting that about 40 to 50 million Americans at the time also described themselves as evangelical, Briggs noted that Carter’s faith was “not only widely shared, but also growing faster than any other Christian perspective.”

Now, nearly 50 years later, it’s hard to imagine a time when being evangelical or outspoken about one’s religious beliefs would be considered the responsibility of a presidential candidate, as many thought it was for Carter in 1976. Such things have become standard. in American politics. And for Republicans hoping to make it to the White House, they’re almost a prerequisite. When someone like Mike Pence says he’s “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” the former vice president knows he’s speaking the language the GOP’s white, evangelical base expects from its candidates.

Pence is speaking from a script that Jimmy Carter, the nation’s 39th president, who died Dec. 29 at age 100, first wrote. “The most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ,” Carter said at a campaign stop in 1976. By making his personal faith a central aspect of how he presented himself to voters, Carter helped bring religious talk into the American presidency to a degree never seen before.

Carter, a devout Southern Baptist who taught Sunday school, simply spoke authentically about himself. He also knew that in the wake of the Watergate scandals, his self-presentation as a moral and religious figure would reassure many Americans who had lost faith in the nation’s institutions, especially government. “I will be a better president because of my deep religious convictions,” Carter assured the Americans.

But this was not a self-righteous boast – nor was it a threat. Instead, Carter believed he understood that his Christian faith compelled him to a life of service to others, especially those whom the Bible commanded Christians to help: the poor, the sick, and the marginalized.

At the same time, Carter’s presidency coincided with and helped consolidate the rise of politically active white evangelicals in the late 1970s. In his 1976 candidacy, Carter rode the wave of their enthusiasm right into the White House. Nearly 60% of Southern Baptists voted for Carter in 1976the first time a majority had voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1948—and the last time it would happen.

As president, Carter took different positions on controversial social issues than Southern Baptists and other white evangelicals likely expected from a fellow believer. During the campaign he had expressed his moral opposition to abortion, but he said would not try to overturn the law.

This attitude was far from progressive. But it was conservative Christian pastors and religious right-wing leaders then argued that abortion was one of the most important political issuesand they asked whether Carter was a true Christian if he was not willing to go for abortion.

On gay rights, Carter took a bolder course. Carter indicated that he would sign a gay rights bill, and he spoke out against an anti-gay ballot initiative in California. (Ronald Reagan did too.) In the summer of 1980, with the election just months away, his White House hosted Conference on families. The name reflected the organizers’ view that Americans belonged to families of all stripes, including same-sex households. Southern Baptist Convention, Carter’s own denomination, passed a resolution condemning the conference for its “undermining of the biblical family concept.”

These attitudes provoked those of many conservative Christians outrage with the Carter presidency. Their anger highlighted the divide between Carter’s faith-driven sense of public service and the nascent religious right’s perception that it could use politics to impose its beliefs on the public square. It also drove white evangelicals into the Republican Party to stay.

Jerry Falwell, the late fundamentalist televangelist, helped guide this development through the creation of the Moral Majority. The religious right organization worked with evangelical churches across the country to mobilize conservative Christians and register new voters. Falwell later claimed his group mobilized 4 million first-time voters—and energized millions more—to vote for Reagan over Carter.

More than these numbers, Falwell had put social issues at the center of a presidential election and infused them with the language of religion and morality. Reagan played along and echoed the religious right’s views on abortion and gay marriage, and also things like school prayer and sex education. And he presented the Bible as a black-and-white guidebook to how things should be done.

“It is indeed an indisputable fact,” Reagan said a crowd of 15,000 evangelical ministers in Dallas just before the 1980 election, “that all the complex and terrible questions facing us at home and around the world have their answers in that single book.”

Falwell and Reagan would be credited with transforming the nation by helping cement the religious right into the Republican Party and securing its place in American politics. But Falwell and Reagan — and many Republicans who have come after, including President George W. Bush — also followed in Jimmy Carter’s footsteps, though they took the nation down a very different path.

By speaking about his faith openly and honestly, Carter hoped to show the country he could be trusted and that his religious beliefs would guide how he acted as president. But by making religious faith a part of presidential policy, Carter also opened the door to other uses of religious faith in public life.