Jimmy Carter: The last progressive evangelical

Jimmy Carter’s death marks both the passing of a peacemaker and the demise of a distinguished strain of religious life in America: progressive evangelicalism.

This tradition, with roots in the Second Great Awakening at the turn of the 19th century, set the social and political agenda of much of the 19th century as evangelicals sought to reform American society according to the norms of godliness, paying particular attention to the admonition of Jesus to care for “the least of these.” Carter’s life and career, not to mention his probity, cannot be understood without reference to progressive evangelicalism.

But his electoral defeat in 1980, at the hands of Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right, dealt a crippling blow to this tradition, which has been reeling ever since. That election led to the melding of white evangelicals with the far-right reaches of the Republican Party, culminating in overwhelming support for Donald Trump, hardly an avatar of the “family values” that evangelicals claimed lay at the heart of their activism. Over the decades the Religious Right has become the most reliable component of the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once served as the backbone of the Democratic Party.

Carter’s successful presidential run in 1976 was propelled by popular distrust of politicians generally, and Washington specifically, in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Wearied of Richard Nixon’s endless prevarications, Americans were prepared to consider someone from outside the Beltway, someone with a moral compass. Carter, the one-term governor of Georgia and a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher from the tiny town of Plains, fit the bill.

Carter’s election was also abetted by the brief resurgence in the 1970s of progressive evangelicalism, the particular stripe of the Christian faith that he embodied. Others have tried to keep the tradition alive — people like Jim Wallis and William Barber II and institutions such as Sojourners and the Black church — but progressive evangelicals have never been able to match the media megaphones of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or Franklin Graham.

Part of what made the voices of the Religious Right so effective was their canny use of the rhetoric of victimization. Even though evangelicals, by virtue of their numbers and their mobilization, exercise outsized influence in American society, they claim that their values are under siege, that they represent an embattled minority. That rhetoric has proven very effective — and it’s one of the reasons white evangelicals gravitated to Trump, who speaks this language more fluently than anyone I’ve seen.

The demise of progressive evangelicalism has opened the way for compromise on other evangelical principles, including the separation of church and state. Even though evangelicals have benefited perhaps more than any other religious group from the free marketplace of religion set up by the First Amendment, many are now perpetrating the falsehood that the United States is and always has been a Christian nation and that our laws should conform to “Christian” mores. The Religious Right’s opposition to abortion, an attempt to camouflage the real origins of evangelical mobilization, nevertheless proved effective, despite the fact that the Dobbs decision entails government intervention in matters of gestation.

With Carter’s passing, the far-right shift of political evangelicalism is complete — but history will note the massive impact that progressive Christians like Carter have had on American life.

Progressive evangelicalism traces its roots to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and to a much earlier era in American history. Jesus enjoined his followers to be peacemakers and to care for those on the margins of society. Throughout American history, progressive evangelicals have sought to take those commands seriously. Especially in the antebellum period, evangelicals worked to promote peace and to end slavery, even though many Southern evangelicals continued to defend it. Evangelicals also advocated equality for women, including the right to vote, and supported the expansion of public education so that children on the lower rungs of the economic ladder might be able to improve their lives.

Although the fight against slavery arguably represented the zenith of progressive evangelicals’ influence, their presence continued into the early decades of the 20th century. William Jennings Bryan, for example, the “Great Commoner” and three-time Democratic nominee for president, continued to advocate for women’s equality and also for the rights of workers to organize.

Following the Scopes trial of 1925 — which was not Bryan’s finest moment, as he argued against teaching human evolution in state-funded schools — evangelicals largely abandoned the political arena. Bryan might have won the trial (John T. Scopes was convicted), but he, and by extension evangelicals, lost decisively in the larger courtroom of public opinion. Humiliated by the coverage of the trial and by Bryan’s poor performance, evangelicals chose to turn away from politics. Many, expecting the imminent return of Jesus, refused even to vote in the middle decades of the 20th century. This world, they believed, was transitory, corrupt and corrupting, and their time was better spent securing individual regeneration rather than working for social amelioration. What evangelical political advocacy existed in the middle decades of the 20th century listed toward the right of the political spectrum. Evangelicals’ suspicions of “godless communism” helped to push them in a conservative direction, and evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendships with a succession of Republican politicians reinforced that predilection.

In the early 1970s, however, progressive evangelicalism mounted a comeback. In the throes of the Vietnam War, progressive evangelicals sought to reclaim Jesus’ command that his followers be peacemakers. They gravitated to the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, a Wesleyan Methodist preacher’s son and himself a former seminary student. A year after McGovern’s landslide loss to Nixon, a small group of progressive evangelicals gathered at the Chicago YMCA hoping to keep the tradition of progressive evangelicalism alive. The document that emerged out of that November 1973 meeting was called the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, a remarkable reprise of evangelical concerns from a century earlier. The signatories — 55 initially, but many more signed later — called the powerful to account and decried the persistence of racism and rampant militarism in American life. They lamented the persistence of poverty and hunger in an affluent society. At the insistence of an English professor from Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois (where I was then an undergraduate), the Declaration also reaffirmed evangelicals’ historic commitment to women’s equality.

Not quite six months later, Carter echoed many of these themes in his famous remarks at the University of Georgia Law School, though he did so in far more strident terms. One of the venerable traditions at the University of Georgia Law School is Law Day, an occasion to honor student achievements, as well as to invite distinguished guests, including Supreme Court justices, senators, attorneys general and, on this day, the governor. On a warm spring day in May 1974, Carter unleashed a blistering extemporaneous critique of the legal and legislative process. His own sense of justice, he said, derived from two sources. The first was theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his oft-quoted lament that the “sad duty of politics was to establish justice in a sinful world.” The second was Bob Dylan. It wasn’t until Carter heard Dylan’s “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More,” he said, that he began to appreciate the plight of the poor, especially tenant farmers.

Carter lamented that “the powerful and the influential in our society shape the laws and have a great influence on the legislature or the Congress.” He lit into lobbyists and decried the incestuous relationship between corporations and the agencies regulating them. The governor also noted that the prison population consisted overwhelmingly of poor people. Part of the problem, he suggested, is that “we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.” He concluded his remarks by sounding the populist theme that he was already honing for his presidential bid. Any hope for the future, Carter said, lay in “the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment of the common ordinary people.”

Carter’s address captured the attention of Hunter S. Thompson of Rolling Stone magazine. During the course of his speech, Carter noticed that Thompson had briefly left the room; he surmised that the self-proclaimed “gonzo journalist” had simply exited to refresh whatever adult beverage he was consuming that day. Thompson, however, scurried to the parking lot to retrieve a tape recorder so he could record what he believed was an extraordinary moment: a politician who dared to speak the truth.

“I have heard hundreds of speeches by all sorts of candidates and politicians,” Thompson later wrote, “but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made at Law Day at the University of Georgia on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974.”

Carter’s campaign for the presidency would emphasize many of the themes articulated by progressive evangelicals in Chicago: racial, economic and gender equality; justice; care for those less fortunate. (Although he didn’t describe himself as a progressive evangelical at the time, he eventually embraced the term.) By no means were progressive evangelicals decisive in Carter’s 1976 victory, but many evangelicals supported him either for his policies or simply for the novelty of voting for one of their own at a time when evangelicals themselves were largely apolitical. His share of the evangelical vote would have been even greater were it not for the misbegotten Playboy interview that appeared a few weeks before Election Day; Carter’s approval dropped 15 points, and by Election Day evangelicals split their vote evenly between Carter and Gerald Ford, the Republican incumbent.

Carter was not the only politician in the 1970s to advocate progressive evangelicalism. Harold Hughes, Democratic senator from Iowa, and Mark Hatfield, Republican senator of Oregon, were among the most prominent. John B. Anderson, a Republican member of Congress from Illinois, was a member of the Evangelical Free Church, an evangelical denomination with Scandinavian roots, and could also be counted in that cohort. Still, Carter was the most prominent among them.

As president, Carter sought, with mixed success, to act on the principles of fairness and equality that he articulated. Early in his presidency, he recognized that if the United States were to have a meaningful relationship with Third World nations, especially in Latin America, it would need to renegotiate the Panama Canal treaties; he expended a great deal of political capital to do so. He sought to move American foreign policy away from the reflexive dualism of the Cold War and toward an emphasis on human rights, even though it angered many U.S. allies. He worked tirelessly for peace, especially in the Middle East, and one of his proudest accomplishments was that no American soldier died in military conflict during his presidency. Although he was not averse to defense spending — and succeeded in restoring the cuts enacted by his Republican predecessors — Carter often said the best and the most effective military armaments are the ones never used. He worked for racial and gender equality, and many environmentalists consider Carter the greatest environmental president ever.

Leaders of the Religious Right routinely claim that opposition to abortion led them to mobilize politically in the 1970s. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” for most of the decade. The Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion in 1971, a resolution they reaffirmed in 1974 and again in 1976. Several evangelical leaders applauded the Roe v. Wade decision when it was handed down in 1973, and Reverend Jerry Falwell, by his own admission, didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978.

Despite the durability of this “abortion myth,” the genesis of the Religious Right is rather less edifying. As the Internal Revenue Service began to scrutinize the racial policies of evangelical institutions, including church-related “segregation academies,” evangelical leaders rushed to defend the tax-exempt status of their schools, arguing that they should be able to retain both their racially segregated policies and their tax exemptions. Falwell, who had described civil rights as “civil wrongs” and who had his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia, led the charge, disingenuously asserting that Carter was responsible for endangering their tax status. Falwell, together with other leaders of the Religious Right, effectively turned evangelicals into hard-right conservatives.

Carter’s reelection campaign in 1980 was bedeviled by a sour economy, the taking of the American hostages in Iran and a challenge from within his own party with the candidacy of Edward M. Kennedy. The formation of Falwell’s Moral Majority, together with the efforts of other Religious Right leaders, undermined the president further; by the end of the race, the Reagan-Bush campaign had begun to emphasize opposition to abortion, ignoring the fact that Carter had a much longer and more consistent record of working to limit the incidence of abortions.

Carter’s loss to Reagan in 1980, and the defection of evangelicals from one of their own, were devastating to him personally. But his defeat also signaled the eclipse of progressive evangelicalism in American politics and the stampede of evangelicals toward the far-right precincts of the Republican Party. Only Hatfield, the senator from Oregon, remained as a national politician who advocated principles consistent with progressive evangelicalism; he retired from the Senate in 1997.

The Carters, Jimmy and Rosalynn, returned to Plains in January 1981, four years earlier than they had planned. Carter told me that one of the reasons he rebounded so quickly from his defeat was that he had to keep reassuring his wife that they still had a life ahead of them and could continue to do good work. Eventually, he said, he began to believe his own rhetoric.

Forced into political retirement, he set about making plans for his presidential library, and here, freed from political constraints, Carter would be able to act most fully on his religious principles. As James Laney, former president of Emory University, memorably remarked, Carter is the only person in history for whom the presidency was a steppingstone. He conceived the Carter Center as a working institution, not merely a celebratory one, and it has been extraordinarily effective in the eradication of disease, the monitoring of free and fair elections, and the pursuit of peace, justice and care for those on the margins.

These are the principles of progressive evangelicalism that Carter sought to advocate throughout his political career. These are the principles he was able to advance even more fully once he left Washington. As a progressive evangelical, someone who took seriously the command of Jesus to care for “the least of these,” Carter might have been the last of his kind. He was also surely among the best of his kind.