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 journalists that he was an evangelical and a “born again” Christian.
Those words sent the media scrambling to figure out what Carter meant. What was an evangelical, they asked each other?
Soon after, New York Times reporter Kenneth Briggs provided a lengthy explanation to his readers and suggested that it was the ignorant press — and not the devout Carter — who was the oddity in American life. Noting that some 40 to 50 million Americans at the time also described themselves as evangelical, Briggs observed that Carter’s faith was “not only widely shared but is also growing more rapidly than any other Christian perspective.”
Those words sent the media scrambling to figure out what Carter meant. What was an evangelical, they asked each other?
Now, nearly 50 years later, it’s hard to imagine a time when being an evangelical or openly talking about one’s religious faith would be regarded as a liability for 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 are almost a prerequisite. When someone like Mike Pence says that he’s “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” the former vice president knows he’s speaking in the language that the GOP’s white, evangelical base expects of its candidates.
Pence is speaking from a script that Jimmy Carter, the nation’s 39th president, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, first wrote. “The most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ,” Carter said at one campaign stop in 1976. In 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 that had never been seen before.
Carter, a devout Southern Baptist who taught Sunday school, was simply speaking authentically about himself. He also knew that in the wake of the Watergate scandals, his self-presentation as a moral and religious person would reassure many Americans who had lost faith in the nation’s institutions, especially the government. “I’ll be a better president because of my deep religious convictions,” Carter assured Americans.
Carter understood his Christian faith compelled him to a life of service to others.
But this wasn’t a self-righteous boast — nor was it a threat. Instead, Carter meant that he understood 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 run for president, Carter rode the wave of their enthusiasm right into the White House. Nearly 60% of Southern Baptists voted for Carter in 1976, the 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 said he wouldn’t seek to overturn the law.
This stance was far from progressive. But conservative Christian pastors and religious-right leaders were then arguing that abortion was one of the most important political issues, and they questioned whether Carter was a true Christian if he wasn’t willing to go after abortion.
On gay rights, Carter took a bolder course. Carter indicated 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 the Conference on Families. The name reflected the organizers’ view that Americans belonged to families of all different stripes, including same-sex households. The Southern Baptist Convention, Carter’s own denomination, passed a resolution condemning the conference for its “undermining of the biblical concept of family.”
These positions elicited many conservative Christians’ outrage with the Carter presidency. Their anger highlighted the divide between Carter’s faith-driven sense of public service and the newly forming religious right’s view 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 that 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. Falwell and Reagan were also following in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter, even as they took the nation down a very different path.
More than those numbers, Falwell had put social issues front and center in a presidential election and infused them with the language of religion and morality. Reagan played along, echoing 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 for how things should be done. “Indeed, it is an incontrovertible fact,” Reagan told a crowd of 15,000 evangelical ministers in Dallas right before the 1980 election, “that all the complex and horrendous questions confronting us at home and worldwide have their answer in that single book.” Falwell and Reagan would be credited with transforming the nation by helping cement the religious right to 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 — were also following in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter, even as they took the nation down a very different path. Speaking of his faith openly and sincerely, Carter hoped to show the country he could be trusted and that his religious beliefs would guide how he acted as president. But in making religious belief a component of presidential politics, Carter also opened the door to other uses of religious faith in public life.
Neil J. Young
Neil J. Young is a historian and writer in Los Angeles. His most recent book is "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right." 
