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Assessing Presidential Character in an Election Year

Assessing Presidential Character in an Election Year

Last updated on: August 28, 2024 at 10:07 am by Daniel K. Williams

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Assessing Presidential Character in an Election Year 2024-08-28T10:07:41-04:00 Daniel K. Williams

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In the 1976 presidential election, evangelicals across the political spectrum were determined to vote for the candidate who demonstrated the highest standard of integrity and the most exemplary character – not the candidate who shared their positions on policy issues.

Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in a debate, September 1976 (Gerald R. Ford Library)

Four years earlier, more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters had cast their ballots for Richard Nixon, but after the Watergate scandal, many of them felt they had been duped. Across the spectrum, evangelicals insisted that they would vote only for a genuine Christian who was a person of integrity. They didn’t want another Nixon-style pretender in the White House.

“Christians in particular ought to be concerned about the ethical and religious convictions of those who aspire to the presidency,” Christianity Today declared in April 1976. “The basis upon which a leader makes his decisions is more important than what side he takes in current transient controversies.”

But a curious thing happened when evangelicals decided that presidential candidates’ moral character mattered more than policy: They couldn’t agree on how to evaluate the candidates’ character. It turned out that determining what was in a person’s heart was a lot more complicated than they initially expected.

For the first half of the year, an overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists favored Jimmy Carter, according to polls. Carter, after all, was the first major-party presidential candidate to describe himself as “born again.” He was a deacon and Sunday school teacher at his Baptist church. He talked about his commitment to human rights and moral values, and he promised never to lie to the American people. Southern Baptist pastor Bailey Smith (who would later serve as president of the SBC) was so excited about Carter that he gave him a public endorsement during his keynote address at the SBC’s annual meeting. Americans needed a “born-again man in the White House,” Smith said. “And his initials are the same as our Lord’s!”

But not every evangelical was convinced that Carter was an exemplary Christian or even a person of integrity. Early in his presidential campaign, the people who raised the most concern included evangelicals on the left, who noted that Carter had run as a moderate conservative on racial issues in his 1970 gubernatorial campaign in order to win votes from Georgians who might have reservations about racial integration. He had then come out as a strong supporter of civil rights as soon as the election was over, but his campaign tactic left some progressive evangelicals wondering whether they could trust Carter. “We should be thankful he is not a segregationist, but we must demand a level of integrity that requires politicians to state their views openly before election time,” John F. Alexander, the editor of the progressive evangelical magazine The Other Side, declared. This was important, he said, because “in the first presidential election since Watergate, we must search for guileless candidates, candidates with a quality of transparency.”

If some left-leaning progressive evangelicals were concerned about Carter’s integrity in the early months of the 1976 election season, evangelicals on the political and theological right were more likely to raise questions about Carter’s character during the final weeks of the campaign. One of the most prominent of these critics was Ron Boehme, a young evangelist and international missionary who was initially excited by Carter’s candidacy but quickly soured on him after deciding that he might not be a true Christian.

Boehme’s book What about Jimmy Carter?, which he published in the midst of the campaign, noted that Carter took liberal positions on abortion, marijuana, and the Equal Rights Amendment. He also expressed doubts about the literal historicity of Adam and Eve, and he saw nothing wrong with drinking alcoholic beverages in moderation, which conservative Southern Baptists strongly opposed.

In truth, Carter’s behavior and issue positions were closely in line with those of other Southern Baptist “moderates.” Like other members of the moderate party in the Southern Baptist Convention, Carter was a gender egalitarian, an advocate of civil rights, and a strong proponent of religious liberty who thought that maintaining a wall of separation between church and state was more important than restricting abortion – even though abortion was morally problematic, in his view. His use of alcoholic beverages and his openness to theistic evolution were not evidence of religious hypocrisy, but were instead signs that he was a moderate, not a conservative or fundamentalist, in the Southern Baptist intradenominational culture wars.

But Boehme didn’t recognize this. Rather than conclude that Carter was a different sort of Christian than he was, he began to question whether he was a Christian at all or whether he could be trusted.

Those questions became much more widespread after Carter’s interview with Playboy magazine was released in September 1976. Many conservative evangelicals who had trusted Carter felt betrayed. They had viewed Carter as one of their own, but instead of joining the fight against pornography, he assured a Playboy interviewer that he didn’t want to take a judgmental attitude toward those who embraced a more permissive sexual ethic. Carter insisted, in fact, that this was fully in keeping with Jesus’s injunction in the Sermon on the Mount. “Christ says, don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife,” Carter said.

As soon as he saw the report of Carter’s interview, Bailey Smith had second thoughts about the candidate he had so enthusiastically endorsed at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting only two months earlier. “We’re totally against pornography,” he said. “And, well, ‘screw’ is just not a good Baptist word.”

For many conservative evangelicals, Carter’s Playboy interview was incompatible with authentic Christianity – and thus, sufficient reason, to call his integrity and faith into question. “Here’s a man, who like us, professes to be a Christian,” Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell said. “And then he gets himself all tied up in speaking words which at best are most questionable. How can the words he speaks be consistent with the Christianity he professes?”

But if some evangelicals had concerns about Carter’s integrity, others raised similar questions about Ford, mainly because of his presidential pardon of Richard Nixon. Russell T. Hitt, the recently retired editor of Eternity magazine (a centrist evangelical publication that was probably slightly to the left of Christianity Today but well to the right of progressive evangelical publications such as Sojourners and the Other Side), wrote in 1976 that he would likely vote for Carter, even though he had once been a loyal Republican and a Nixon supporter. “Watergate was a traumatic experience, and it still colors my thinking,” he wrote during the summer of 1976. “I was very upset when President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. It appeared as if he had made a deal. . . . That Carter is a genuine believer I have no doubt . . . It will be difficult for a lifelong Republican to do it, but I may jump the traces and vote for enigmatic Jimmy Carter.”

Faced with these competing claims, H. Edward Rowe (a conservative Republican evangelical who wrote the book Save America) proposed what he claimed was a biblical test of character based on Exodus 18:21, a passage which states, “You should also look for able men among all the people, men who fear God, are trustworthy, and hate dishonest gain” (NRSV). Rowe interpreted this biblical verse to mean that Christians should vote for candidates who demonstrated “capability, respect for God, personal honesty, and financial integrity” – and by “financial integrity,” he meant a record of balancing budgets. “A $600 billion national debt . . . amounts to one of the most flamboyant demonstrations of godlessness in the annals of man,” Rowe declared. “Considering these basic realities, I’m for Ronald Reagan, based on his excellent character and record of financial responsibility as governor of California.”

But Virginia Mollenkott, a progressive Christian and a professor of English at William Paterson College, said that she would “refuse to vote for any candidate whose record reveals racial or sexual bias.” How a candidate treated women, Blacks, and “average and poverty-level Americans” said a great deal about that candidate’s character, she believed. “I would rather disenfranchise myself than vote for any candidate with a record like that of George Wallace,” she wrote. “And Ronald Reagan seems to me not much better.”

In the end, Reagan didn’t succeed in wresting the nomination from Ford, so the issue was a moot point for the 1976 general election. But what’s fascinating for me as a historian of American religion and politics is to see the way in which evangelicals who were united in saying that character mattered more than anything were using their own policy inclinations to judge candidates’ characters. Rowe’s belief that the federal debt was a moral issue led him to turn the injunction against bribery in Exodus 18:21 into a modern political litmus test that could be used to call candidates’ character into question if they favored policies that would increase the deficit. Mollenkott’s emphasis on the treatment of the poor and marginalized, on the other hand, led her to be dead-set against the sort of candidates that Rowe favored.

Likewise, Russell Hitt’s anger about Watergate led him (and many other Americans) to suspect that Ford’s pardon of Nixon was based on a secret “deal” – which all the subsequent historical evidence suggests it was not.

In a similar manner, Carter’s conservative evangelical detractors used his more permissive cultural and theological positions to call into question his faith – which was a standard they didn’t apply to Ford in quite the same way. Ford’s cocktail drinking, pipe smoking, and ballroom dancing in the White House were well known. His wife, First Lady Betty Ford, had caused a furor among fundamentalists like Bob Jones Jr. the previous year when she had said that Roe v. Wade was a “great, great decision,” and that she would not object if her children smoked marijuana or had premarital sex. But Ford was an Episcopalian, so conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists did not hold him to the same standard that they used to judge Carter, a Southern Baptist. When Carter violated what they believed were the strictures of his own denomination (at least as conservative Southern Baptists interpreted them – not as Carter himself did), they seized on this as a reason to question his integrity.

In the end, white evangelicals split their vote almost evenly in the 1976 presidential election, just as other Americans did. Those in the South tended to vote for Carter; those in the North (where evangelicals had long been Republican) voted for Ford.

I admire the evangelicals of 1976 for making the personal character and integrity of presidential candidates’ their highest priority when deciding how to vote. But I’m also struck by how easy it was even for Christians with the best of intentions to conflate policy positions and their own personal understandings of Christianity with character. Those who were uneasy with Carter’s theology found it easy to question his character. Those who were concerned about budget deficits found it easy to believe that Reagan had stellar character, simply because of his politics. Those who were angry about Nixon found it easy to question Ford’s character. And some of those who were committed to progressive policies that would benefit African Americans, women, and the poor found it easy to conflate policies with character by attributing conservative policies like Reagan’s to “racial and sexual bias.”

This realization should be humbling for all of us, I think. It’s hard to be charitable toward politicians we disagree with and give them the benefit of the doubt when assessing their motivations and character. If we disagree with a political candidate on abortion, immigration, or another matter of morality and justice, it’s easy to use that position as a supposed proof of the candidate’s bad character. Or, conversely, if we do agree with a candidate’s issue positions, it’s easy for us to try to defend the candidate’s character, even in the face of clear evidence of the candidate’s character flaws.

As voters, we have a responsibility to make determinations about candidates’ personal character and integrity, I believe, but in the heat of an election campaign, it’s easy to make the mistake of judging candidates either too harshly or too leniently because of our own biases. Evangelical defenders of Carter in 1976 were probably too eager to overlook some of his poor judgments in the past, but those who criticized him seemed too quick to call his Christianity into question. Too many people believed in a secret deal between Ford and Nixon that never existed, and too many people evaluated Reagan’s character based solely on his policy positions.

Assessing political candidates’ character, it turns out, is an exercise in fallibility, partly because of our own limited knowledge and personal biases and partly because our own characters are not as pure as we would like to believe. In an election, we have a responsibility to do the best we can to try to figure out which candidates would be best for the nation, but perhaps as we do so this year, we can try to do so with a touch of humility, knowing that despite our best efforts, we might be blind to our own biases. That was certainly the case among evangelicals in 1976. And if it was true then, I imagine that the same may be the case today.

References: Information for this piece comes from: “Carter’s Credibility,” Christianity Today, April 9, 1976, 31; “How I Think I’ll Vote,” Eternity, September 1976, 26-31; Ron Boehme, What about Jimmy Carter? (Third Century Publishers, 1976); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christi

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