(RNS) — Amid the numerous accolades and occasional brickbats now raining down on the late Jimmy Carter, allow us to observe that probably the most consequential legacy of his one-term presidency is the non secular proper, the longest-lasting political motion in American historical past.
How so?
Successful the best workplace within the land in 1976, Carter represented a mortal menace to the Republican Get together’s technique of constructing the more and more populous South the engine of a brand new, nationwide GOP majority. Raised Southern Baptist on a peanut farm in southwest Georgia, he used religio-regional satisfaction to recall white Southerners to the nationwide Democratic fold. The place the final Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, had misplaced all 5 Deep South states from South Carolina to Louisiana 12 years earlier, the previous governor of Georgia received each state of the outdated Confederacy besides Virginia.
Carter’s private non secular identification was extra difficult than you might need thought from Newsweek’s well-known “Born Once more!” cowl story, which christened 1976 as “the 12 months of the evangelical.” As described by Jonathan Alter in his tremendous biography, Carter had no sudden come-to-Jesus second as a youth, however relatively, in center age, a progress in Christian dedication derived from studying the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, doing mission work and reflecting on his personal non secular state.
No liberal, the reasonably progressive positions Carter took on points comparable to abortion and ladies’s rights had been according to the reasonable progressivism of the Southern Baptist Conference of the Seventies. That, nevertheless, was about to vary.
In 1979, conservative leaders within the SBC mobilized their forces, electing certainly one of their very own as president and setting in movement a full takeover of the denomination. The next 12 months, a number of the identical leaders joined forces with Republican operatives to mobilize evangelicals in opposition to Democrats on the whole and Jimmy Carter particularly. For if the Southern technique was to be saved intact, Carter needed to be discredited and defeated.
In June, after being chosen because the conservatives’ second SBC president, Oklahoma pastor Bailey Smith confirmed up on the White Home and denounced Carter as a “secular humanist.” A month after being anointed Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan confirmed up at Reunion Area in Dallas and addressed the Nationwide Affairs Briefing, a gathering at which one outstanding pastor after one other summoned evangelical attendees to political engagement.
“I do know it is a non-partisan gathering, and so I do know that you could’t endorse me, however … I would like you to know that I endorse you and what you’re doing,” Reagan mentioned with a straight face, earlier than urging the group to get out and vote for his or her values.
FILE – U.S. President Jimmy Carter waves as workers holds up signal proclaiming “We Love you Mr. President” in Washington, Nov. 5, 1980, because the president walks to the helicopter for a visit to Camp David, Md., after dropping the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. (AP Picture, File)
In November, Carter went right down to defeat, the sufferer of persistent inflation, the Iranian hostage state of affairs — and of evangelicals turning in opposition to certainly one of their very own. Returning to Georgia, he established the Carter Heart in Atlanta as a spot to advertise good issues all over the world, wielded a hammer serving to Habitat for Humanity construct homes for poor individuals in America and educating Sunday faculty at his small church in Plains. In 2000, he introduced he was now not a member of the SBC.
As for the non secular proper, it took off from the Carter years, remaking the Republican Get together’s social coverage agenda, reconstituting its demographic base and establishing religiosity as a central characteristic of American political habits. It largely succeeded in advancing the Southern technique it was designed to rescue and, having undergone some delicate and a few not-so-subtle transformations, persists to this present day.
Whether or not it might have come into existence within the absence of Jimmy Carter’s presidency is a pleasant query — one which, like all historic counterfactuals, can’t be conclusively answered. My guess is that one thing like it might have emerged however that it might have been smaller and weaker, much less consequential and fewer enduring. And the nation could be higher off.
