Jimmy Carter’s Evangelical Downfall: Reagan, Religion and the 1980 Presidential Election

Last updated on: May 27, 2014 at 8:24 am by Guest Contributor

Jimmy Carter’s Evangelical Downfall: Reagan, Religion and the 1980 Presidential Election 2014-05-27T08:24:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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In October 1976, just prior to Jimmy Carter’s election as president, Newsweek had christened 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical.” Carter’s candidacy had introduced many Americans to the term evangelical, and his articulation of the themes of progressive evangelicalism—care for the poor, concern for human rights, and an aversion to military conflict—brought many evangelicals into the arena of politics, some of them for the first time. Nearly half of evangelical voters in 1976 favored Carter, which represented a significant increase from the showing of Democratic candidates in years past; white evangelicals, following the lead of Billy Graham and others, had generally tilted Republican in the postwar era. In 1980, four years after Carter’s victory, however, the evangelical vote was very much in play. Three candidates were competing for the presidency, and all three claimed to be evangelical Christians: Carter, the Democratic incumbent; Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee; and John B. Anderson, Republican member of Congress from Illinois, running as an independent.

The political winds had shifted dramatically during Carter’s term in office. High inflation and soaring energy prices at home coupled with Soviet aggression and the taking of American hostages abroad had eroded his support among the general population. But Carter himself was astonished to learn that some of his fellow evangelicals were mobilizing against him. Initially distressed by the Internal Revenue Service’s rescission of tax exemptions for racially discriminatory schools, these evangelical leaders directed their anger toward Carter, even though the policy was formulated at the behest of Richard Nixon and enforced during Gerald Ford’s administration, long before Carter became president. Once Paul Weyrich and other conservative leaders had enlisted these evangelical leaders in the fight against Carter, they found that a growing evangelical uneasiness over abortion could bring grassroots evangelicals to the front lines of what was increasingly characterized as a moral crusade. By early 1980, Carter, the Southern Baptist Sunday-school teacher and husband for more than three decades, was being pilloried as an enemy of the family and “traditional” values.

Such was the general discontent with Carter and his presidency that few people, and not many evangelicals, rose to his defense. The Carter-Mondale campaign took it upon itself to counter the attacks from the Religious Right. “I think I know President Carter better than anyone outside his immediate family,” Walter Mondale told the congregation of North Christian Church in Chicago. “I am with him sometimes four, five, and six hours a day. And I can tell you there is no man who is more deeply moral.”

Despite attacks from the Religious Right, however, Carter was not entirely bereft of evangelical support. R. Douglas Wead, who would later serve as an adviser to both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, applauded the Carter campaign’s “sensitivity” to the evangelical voter. “Though she may be fickle and ungrateful at times,” Wead wrote, “she is coming into her own as a political force and may be your best friend in a crisis.” Some observers attuned to the evangelical community expressed confidence that evangelical voters would never succumb to the rhetoric of the Religious Right, that the agenda was so blatantly at odds with progressive evangelicalism. “It’s all scare,” Tom Getman, an aide to Mark O. Hatfield, said about the Religious Right. “It’s all playing on people’s dark side. They say nothing about social justice. Nothing about the nuclear arms race. Nothing about our militarism or materialism.”

Carter, however, was losing support among some progressive evangelicals as well as the Religious Right. Wes Michaelson at Sojourners never forgave Carter for what he considered Carter’s tardy condemnation of the Vietnam War. Progressive evangelicals tacked on other complaints during the course of Carter’s presidency. He was timid about addressing the economic roots of racial inequality and inconsistent in his demands for human rights. Carter, they believed, was too cozy with business and corporate interests. He did not press hard enough for education funding or lobby sufficiently for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Even Ronald Sider, who convened the gathering that approved the Chicago Declaration in 1973 but was tacking toward the right by the end of the decade, criticized Carter for failing to govern according to the biblical mandates of justice.

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