A month before the 1980 election, the pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Princeton, Texas, sent Jimmy Carter a questionnaire so his church members could know the president’s positions on various matters. Drawn up by the Moral Majority, the questionnaire ignored the bleak economy, the energy crisis, and the tense international situation to focus instead on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, the ERA, pornography, prostitution, school prayer, and sex education. Casting aside the seeming complexities of such issues, the questionnaire reduced them all to a fundamentalist simplicity. “Do you agree that this country was founded on a belief in God and the moral principles of the Bible?” the form asked, allowing a candidate only to check answers under “yes” or “no.”Footnote 1 Bob Maddox, the White House’s liaison to the religious community, waited until just days before the election to respond, likely uneager to make the president’s case to yet another group of conservative Christians disenchanted by Carter. Maddox wrote that despite the bad press generated by publications like the Moral Majority Report, “I assure you that President Carter, a man of deep faith in Jesus Christ, is profoundly concerned about the moral and spiritual welfare of the nation.” However, Carter could not respond to the enclosed questionnaire, Maddox explained, because “legitimate answers cannot be given in terms of a quick yes or no.”Footnote 2 But for fundamentalists, like those at Faith Baptist and throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, “yes” or “no” responses were indeed legitimate answers to the complex questions facing the nation; no gray areas existed on such matters as abortion or homosexuality. The Southern Baptist Convention had undergone a theological shift to biblical literalism in the late 1970s, and this doctrinal transformation led to hardline political positions and directly undermined support for Carter’s reelection. As a Houston pastor had told a reporter at a political rally of fifteen thousand Southern Baptist and evangelical ministers earlier that summer, “We believe in absolutes. . . . The Bible is a book of absolutes.”Footnote 3
For political historians, the story of Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election has also seemed like one of absolutes. A straightforward narrative, largely put in place during the election itself, has generally governed how scholars have understood this watershed moment. As soon as Reagan won in 1980, religious conservatives insisted they had been the key to the election. Buoyed by the impressive turnout of conservative Christian voters, these leaders of the newly christened “Religious Right” hoped to guarantee Reagan’s commitment to their agenda by controlling the narrative of his victory. Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell claimed his new organization had registered 4 million first-time voters for Reagan, “millions of voters who otherwise would not have been at the polls,” as he described them, and had pumped $5 million into the campaign.Footnote 4 One publication claimed that the evangelical vote had provided two-thirds of Reagan’s ten-point win over Carter.Footnote 5 The lesson seemed unambiguous: Ronald Reagan had won because of the evangelical voter.Footnote 6
Soon, however, scholars began questioning religious conservatives’ role in Reagan’s victory. Some argued the Religious Right had, as one study contended, “virtually no influence at all” on the election.Footnote 7 Others reached opposite conclusions.Footnote 8 Historians and other scholars have, from the vantage point of time, worried less about determining the Religious Right’s precise electoral influence in 1980 and instead observed the deeper cultural and political bases for the rise of Christian conservatism and Reagan’s election.Footnote 9 These scholars tend to see Reagan as the white knight of the Religious Right—a folksy politico who captured religious conservative voters with biblically inflected language and hollow promises regarding their chief issues. Yet another group of scholars, while smaller, has contended that religious conservatives spurned Carter as much, if not more, than they picked Reagan, rebuffing the president because of his positions on topics like abortion, gay rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment.Footnote 10 Although historians differ on whether the Religious Right coalesced around supporting Reagan or deposing Carter, they have tended to agree on a seemingly straightforward point—the idea that evangelicals, the Religious Right’s foundation, came to conservatism through politics, as they mobilized in reaction to the social changes of the previous two decades.Footnote 11
This article suggests a different perspective for understanding the political emergence of evangelical voters. By looking at Southern Baptists’ response to Carter’s presidency, it argues that evangelicals came to conservatism not through politics but through religion, namely, the theological remaking of their denomination that established biblical literalism as the basis of Christian belief and identity. Carter’s presidency coincided with one of the most tumultuous times in Southern Baptist history, as moderates and fundamentalists wrestled for control of the denomination and battled over questions of biblical inerrancy, scriptural authority, and the very meaning of being a Christian. While religious scholars have closely examined the fundamentalist realignment of the SBC that began in 1979, they have largely overlooked the political consequences of that refashioning in light of its obvious theological and institutional results.Footnote 12 Yet, I argue, the victory of fundamentalists over moderates in the SBC and the hardening of Baptist belief around biblical literalism and scriptural inerrancy had ramifications far beyond the denomination’s headquarters and pulpits, extending to the realm of national politics. For millions of Southern Baptists, biblical literalism offered more than an interpretive guide to scripture; it also provided a political worldview that reduced issues to a yes-or-no rubric, as seen in the Moral Majority questionnaire. Alongside the concretizing of biblical literalism at the heart of Southern Baptist theology and denominational identity, fundamentalists also moved their denomination away from muddled stances on political issues like abortion and the ERA to hardline positions articulated through and justified by the language of scriptural absolutism. These developments happened hand in hand as fundamentalists used abortion, homosexuality, and the ERA to make abstract theological leanings visible through uncompromising political resolutions, underscoring the religious basis of Southern Baptists’ rightward shift.
Scholars have rightly understood the 1980 election as a watershed moment in American political history, a turning point that ushered in the rising tide of modern conservatism and brought about a fundamental realignment of American politics and culture.Footnote 13 In that story, Jimmy Carter has stood as the weak defender of a collapsing liberalism, rendered ineffective as he sought to appease the various Democratic constituencies of a fraying political order.Footnote 14 Yet Carter was also caught within the realignment of his religious denomination, and he and the nation faced the political consequences of Southern Baptism’s doctrinal shift. Carter’s presidential bid in 1976 coincided with the country’s evangelical resurgence, and Southern Baptists were eager to demonstrate their political clout and cultural relevancy by supporting one of their own. As one Baptist pastor enthused about Carter at the SBC’s 1976 meeting, “We’ve been talking about the need for Christian statesmen. Now that we have one, let’s just unwrap him and show him.”Footnote 15
But once they peeled back the layers, Southern Baptists recoiled at what they found. Carter’s theological alignment with his denomination’s moderates increasingly became a political handicap for the president among conservative Baptists, and his presidential decisions conflicted with the SBC’s new political resolutions. As Carter took moderate and sometimes liberal positions on the ERA, abortion, and homosexuality, the SBC passed unyielding conservative resolutions against them, further distancing the president from the SBC’s fundamentalist base. Increasingly through his presidency, Carter’s Baptist critics responded with spiritual assessments that questioned his Christian standing because of his political stances, an evaluation Southern Baptists were engaging in repeatedly with one another throughout the denomination’s churches, seminaries, and agencies. They had voted for Carter in 1976 in order to elect a fellow born-again believer who could be their standard-bearer. Southern Baptists went to the polls in 1980 not to elect the California governor with his own spotty record on their pet issues, but rather to reject the wolf in sheep’s clothing who had misled them about who he truly was.
Fundamentalist Takeover
Carter’s bid for the White House in 1976 benefited from the nation’s religious upsurge. The pollster George Gallup Jr. recently had found that 34 percent of Americans, representing some fifty million adults, claimed to have undergone a “born again” experience, leading Gallup to christen 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”Footnote 16 Evangelicals had enjoyed a steady increase in the postwar period, a development the national media finally recognized in 1976, but the growth had also exposed factions and disagreements within the evangelical community, culminating in the Bible battles of the 1970s. Evangelicals debated with one another the nature of their beliefs, the authority of the Bible, and the very definition of what it meant to be a Christian. Harold Lindsell’s 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible, brought all those questions to a head as he defended biblical inerrancy and attacked evangelical bodies like the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the Southern Baptist Convention for tolerating unorthodoxy in their midst.Footnote 17The Battle for the Bible electrified evangelical circles. Billy Graham described the book as “one of the most important of our generation.”Footnote 18 Students at Christian colleges and evangelical seminaries read and debated Lindsell’s book together. Pastors passed dog-eared copies back and forth. “It is a timely book,” Christianity Today contended, “since it seems that evangelicals who do not accept biblical inerrancy are not aware of the seriousness and danger of their decision, and also many evangelicals who believe in inerrant Scriptures are not sufficiently aware of the threat to biblical Christianity that denying this doctrine presents.”Footnote 19
Fundamentalists within the Southern Baptist Convention appreciated their denomination’s diagnosis by Lindsell, a Baptist himself. In 1979, fundamentalists organized to take control of the SBC. For years there had been grumblings about the denomination’s direction among the SBC’s most conservative ranks who feared that liberalism had infiltrated the Convention. Fundamentalists complained about the Convention’s seminaries and universities, where professors sometimes questioned the most orthodox views in their classes or publications. Also disturbing was the Convention’s bureaucracy in Nashville, the various institutional agencies of the denomination, the trustees, and the Baptist state newspapers. Southern Baptist conservatives thought all of these Convention agencies were controlled by moderates who were sliding into liberalism and spiritual heresy and fundamentalists organized to wrest control of the denomination from their rivals.Footnote 20
While outsiders would have been hard-pressed to spot the differences between the fundamentalist and moderate factions, Southern Baptists saw an immense divide between the two groups. The “moderates” were in fact conservatives, but the fundamentalists had taken to calling them moderates and even “liberals” on occasion because of some of their less than orthodox views. The moderates argued they were the heirs of the Baptist tradition, and they called themselves “conservatives” or “traditionalists” because they supported the historical legacy of Baptist anticreedalism, the priesthood of all believers, and congregational authority, whereas the fundamentalists desired a new emphasis on denominational uniformity and theological orthodoxy. Moderates shared the theological conservatism of their fundamentalist brothers on most key issues such as the exclusive saving nature of Christ and the authority of the Scripture. Yet it was not the Scripture’s authority but rather the nature of Scripture itself over which fundamentalists and moderates disagreed. Fundamentalists argued that the Bible was inerrant, containing no mistakes in regard to history, science, or geography, let alone theology. Moderates, in contrast, claimed that God alone was inerrant. His Word provided perfect spiritual authority over their lives, they contended, but, possibly, contained human errors of translation or sometimes offered symbolism rather than literal history. This view was held by the denomination’s controlling elite, but fundamentalists regarded this conception of Scripture as no less than heresy. To declare that the Bible was not entirely inerrant was to disbelieve in the Bible; to not believe in the Bible, fundamentalists contended, was to reveal oneself as not a Christian.
By 1979, fundamentalists had endured the moderates’ control of the SBC long enough. Several prominent fundamentalists realized that the key to remaking the denomination depended on capturing the SBC presidency, since he appointed new trustees of SBC agencies as spots opened up. Such a transformation would not be immediate, of course, but generational, and two leaders of the fundamentalist camp wrote and disseminated a ten-year plan for gaining control of the denomination. However, the first step rested on winning the presidency, which could be fulfilled right away. Adrian Rogers, pastor of the eleven-thousand-member mega-church Bellevue Baptist in Memphis, was the fundamentalists’ choice, and they packed the 1979 SBC meeting convening in Houston that summer with supporters to elect Rogers. Before they voted, Rogers delivered a fiery sermon. Entitled “The Great Deceiver,” Rogers’s talk warned against the country’s increasing embrace of Satan’s lies, including the Equal Rights Amendment. “Satan’s fib about women’s lib,” Rogers characterized it.Footnote 21 But while Satan had hold over the nation, he also had gained a foot in the Southern Baptist Convention, luring some Baptists through the appeals of intellectualism as he had tempted Eve with the fruit of knowledge. Though the SBC had historically championed the priesthood of the believer—that is, the spiritual autonomy of the individual—and congregational authority, fundamentalists now felt the spoiled fruit of this legacy was the large body of unorthodox, perhaps even unchristian, members and leaders of the denomination. Instead of conciliation, the fundamentalists urged cutting off the moderate elements. Earlier that summer, one leading fundamentalist had stated that Southern Baptists needed to hold firm on biblical inerrancy even if it meant losing five hundred thousand members.Footnote 22 Rogers had more direct words. “It’s time that we got out of the boat,” he railed, “and let the devil take the hindmost, live or die, sink or swim, every inch, every ounce, and go for God.”Footnote 23
Southern Baptists across the theological spectrum had coexisted for decades rather peaceably, a harmony in part achieved by Baptist principles and practices like congregational authority and the denomination’s decentralized organizational structure. But the inerrancy battle of the 1970s, set against the decade’s larger cultural and political shifts, convinced fundamentalist Baptists that they could no longer quietly tolerate doctrinal diversity within the denomination. Tellingly, Southern Baptist preachers at the 1979 meeting characterized their cause as a spiritual conflict rather than an organizational shuffle. “My friends, we are in a battle,” the Dallas televangelist James Robison warned the crowds, “And we are in a battle with satan [sic].”Footnote 24 Robison urged Southern Baptists to elect not only a biblical inerrantist, but one who was also devoted to cleaning house. “We must elect a president who is totally committed to the removal from this denomination any . . . who does not believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of the living God,” Robinson said. Acceptance of anything but biblical orthodoxy would no longer be allowed. “If you tolerate any form of liberalism,” Robison explained, “you are the enemy of God.”Footnote 25 “Friend, when satan [sic] attacks, he will attack from within,” he continued. “Friend, the enemy will spring up from among us.”Footnote 26 This was as much a message to the moderates, the alleged abettors of the adversary, as it was to the fundamentalists. In calling for a fundamentalist takeover, Robison and others were also advocating a denominational purge of the moderates. “I wouldn’t tolerate a snake of any kind in my house . . . and I wouldn’t tolerate a cancer in my body,” Robison raged. “I want you to know that anyone who casts doubt on the word of God is worse than cancer and worse than snakes.”Footnote 27
After the sermons, Adrian Rogers won the SBC’s presidency on the very first ballot over five challengers.Footnote 28 Previous SBC presidential candidates had won on the first ballot only a handful of times. The easy win for Rogers signaled the strength and energy of the fundamentalist movement within the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC’s remaking into a thoroughly fundamentalist organization would take another decade, but the political effects of the SBC’s growing theological and organizational overhaul would be felt much sooner by Jimmy Carter.
The Born-Again President
Initially, Southern Baptists had delighted in the candidacy of Jimmy Carter, a fellow believer who frequently touted his Baptist credentials and professed of his conversion experience. Carter was an active Baptist, having served as a deacon and Sunday school teacher, and he had chosen the SBC’s Broadman Press to publish his campaign autobiography in 1975.Footnote 29 As the first presidential candidate to describe himself as “born again,” Carter attracted the interest of evangelical voters just as they were beginning to coalesce as a self-conscious political constituency. “The most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ,” Carter declared on the campaign trail.Footnote 30 If previous presidential candidates had felt the same way, none had so plainly and frequently expressed his faith. Among Baptists, Carter benefited from the support of several influential Southern Baptists pastors. In the summer of 1976, Bailey Smith, a mega-church pastor in Oklahoma, stumped for Carter during his keynote address at the SBC’s annual meeting. Declaring that the nation needed a “born again man in the White House,” Smith noted, “And his initials are the same as our Lord’s!”Footnote 31
But other Baptist pastors, notably those from some of the SBC’s most prominent congregations, withheld their support from Carter for reasons ranging from reports that he occasionally enjoyed alcohol to his support for appointing an ambassador to the Vatican.Footnote 32 For undecided Baptists, Carter’s Playboy magazine interview settled matters. It was bad enough that Carter had met with a pornographic publication, Baptists felt, but Carter’s salty language—he had used the word “screw”—drew even more outrage. “‘Screw’ is just not a good Baptist word,” admonished Bailey Smith, the one-time Southern Baptist enthusiast for Carter.Footnote 33 Other ministers, including Carter’s own pastor in Plains, questioned Carter’s language.Footnote 34 In Virginia, Harold Lindsell, who had just published The Battle for the Bible, attacked Carter in a sermon also broadcasted on his popular radio show, wondering aloud how “a man who . . . professes to be a Christian . . . gets himself all tied up in speaking words which at best are most questionable.”Footnote 35 Dr. Jerry Vines, a pastor from Mobile, was more explicit: “A lot of us are not convinced that Mr. Carter is truly in the evangelical Christian camp, and this tends to indicate to us that he isn’t.”Footnote 36 At one campaign rally, Carter faced a picketer holding a sign asking, “With Christians Like Carter, Who Needs Pagans?”Footnote 37 W. A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas and author of the book Why I Preach that the Bible Is Literally True, switched his endorsement from Carter to Ford after the release of the Playboy interview. Criswell’s church, the world’s largest Baptist congregation, boasted nineteen thousand members, and the pastor reached millions more through his weekly radio show. First Baptist had also opened the Criswell Bible Institute in 1971 to offer a fundamentalist alternative to the SBC’s seminaries, and Criswell had emerged as one of the most important conservative voices in the convention. After the Playboy interview, Criswell suggested that Carter’s faith was suspect and predicted that Baptists would agree: “I think he’s mixed up in his moral values, and I think the entire church membership will feel the same way.”Footnote 38 Shortly before the election, Ford visited First Baptist Dallas, smiling throughout the sermon as Criswell attacked Carter. After the service, Criswell told reporters, “I’m for him,” as he stood by Ford on the church’s front steps.Footnote 39
Prominent Southern Baptist pastors, many of whom would help orchestrate the fundamentalist takeover, publicly opposed Carter’s 1976 campaign, but their words could not weaken Baptist support. While these pastors represented some of the largest congregations, their influence remained largely local. On election day, 60 percent of Southern Baptist voters selected Carter. No Democrat since Harry Truman had won a majority of Southern Baptists.Footnote 40 In the nation’s ninety-six most heavily Baptist counties, some of which had not picked a Democrat since FDR, Carter received 58 percent of the vote.Footnote 41 In a close election, Carter’s showing among Southern Baptists helped push him over the edge. Though he held a nearly two-million-vote advantage, Carter won with a fifty-seven-point electoral college advantage that depended on his sweeping all of the former Confederate States except Virginia. Several of these southern states gave Carter over a ten-point margin. The support from Southern Baptists had been critical to Carter’s victory.
But Southern Baptist support quickly ended once Carter assumed the presidency, matching the discomfort conservative pastors had shown for him during the campaign. Many of those pastors increased their profile during Carter’s presidency, their prominence helping refashion the SBC and remake Southern Baptist opinions about Carter. Thrust into the spotlight by a media eager to document their responses to Carter and emboldened by a president who provided them with so many causes for reaction, these pastors oversaw the politicization of their denomination, bringing a host of issues to the forefront of Southern Baptist life. Carter’s handling of the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, and abortion led conservative Christians to question the validity of his professed faith and spurred them to remove him from office. As a conservative Christian publication declared shortly before the 1980 election, “The one observation which must be made is the intensity of the evangelicals’ opposition to Carter on moral issues.”Footnote 42 Notably, Southern Baptists articulated their opposition to Carter not solely as a political leader and candidate but primarily as a Christian man and fellow Southern Baptist. For sure, Carter had set the stage for such a response himself. Repeatedly, Carter had touted his own religious faith and made his spiritual commitment central to his candidacy in 1976. At one point he had even boasted, “I’ll be a better president because of my deep religious convictions.”Footnote 43 But the sword cut both ways. If Carter hoped his born-again status would attract voters to him, conservative Christians also expected a certain course of leadership in exchange. Failure to actively oppose the troubling issues of the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, and gay rights would have been disappointing, but possibly forgivable; Carter’s support for such issues, however, was unpardonable. Worse, it drew into question the very claims Carter had made about himself to Christian conservatives and emboldened their spiritual response, by way of a presidential election, to repudiate his suspect faith. In doing so, Southern Baptists not only voted a president from office, but they also hardened their own conception of salvation. More than just a personal born-again experience authenticated by Baptist beliefs of individual conscience and the priesthood of the believer, one’s salvation could have political indicators. The politicization of the SBC during the Carter administration delivered a litmus test of issues by which Baptists might judge one another’s eternal state. In the years between Carter’s 1976 triumph and 1980 defeat, certain positions on the ERA, abortion, and homosexuality became visible signifiers of one’s true relationship with God and proper understanding of Scripture. Carter failed on all these counts. Southern Baptists came out in droves to repudiate Carter in 1980 just as they were driving out the unorthodox elements in their denomination.
The Carter Presidency
While Carter publicly touted his Christian faith and Baptist identity, Carter’s 1976 campaign documents show that his election team frequently worried about evangelical voters. As a candidate, Carter had a mixed record on the issues that concerned Southern Baptists, including the ERA, gay rights, and abortion, and his staff understood evangelicals were becoming increasingly galvanized by these matters.Footnote 44 Although Carter’s campaign team, drawn largely from his Georgia staff, included many churchgoing Christians, hardly any of them belonged to conservative congregations and so they largely failed to see the political implications of the rising conservative tide within the SBC and other Protestant denominations even as they fretted about the results.Footnote 45 Instead, as Carter moved from the primaries to the general election, he lessened his religious talk, following recommendations from those like his Jewish adviser Stu Eizenstat, who counseled Carter to describe his religious beliefs as “quite normal Baptist views” but were otherwise strictly personal and would not affect his decisions as president.Footnote 46
Ford’s own discomfort with speaking openly about his Episcopalian faith aided Carter’s reticence, and their similar positions on several issues of concern to religious conservatives minimized their weight in the election. Both Carter and Ford supported the ERA, for instance, neutralizing the issue in 1976. But Carter’s energetic advocacy for the amendment as president enraged conservative Southern Baptists, who expected him merely to voice his support for the ERA, as Ford had, rather than actively campaign for it. Douglas Brewer, a Baptist pastor from Tennessee, wrote to the director of the SBC’s political arm, the Christian Life Commission, describing the work that women in his and other nearby churches were doing in response to the effort that “some ‘women’s groups’ are doing toward influencing President Carter . . . in pushing for acceptance of immoral practices and standards.” Brewer enclosed materials his women had created opposing Carter and urged the Christian Life Commission to use them in any way it saw fit.Footnote 47 After Carter addressed the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1978 meeting, many Southern Baptists expressed displeasure at his invitation because of his efforts for the amendment. “Since Carter . . . supports ERA and the Women’s Movement . . . this makes one believe that he supports the things that they stand for—I and many other Southern Baptist [sic] resent him being the Speaker [at] the Southern Baptist Convention,” one woman wrote the Christian Life Commission.Footnote 48
Carter’s mild support for gay rights further angered Southern Baptists. Though he had hardly been a gay rights advocate during the 1976 campaign, Carter’s administration made a significant outreach to the gay community. In May 1977, Midge Costanza, a presidential assistant, met with a group of gay rights activists.Footnote 49The Voice of Florida, a conservative newsletter, declared the White House’s meeting with a “delegation of sodomites who wanted to talk about their rights certainly has raised very strong doubts whether President Carter is really a born-again Southern Baptist as he claims.”Footnote 50
Carter fueled those doubts by opposing California’s 1978 ballot initiative, Proposition 6.Footnote 51 Also known as the Briggs Initiative after its originator, Republican State Senator John Briggs, Proposition 6 permitted California school boards to fire or refuse to hire anyone who engaged in or even publicly supported homosexuality. Briggs, a Catholic, found his strongest support among Southern Baptists and other fundamentalists in California. By the 1970s, the SBC was a truly national denomination; with 320,000 Southern Baptists in California, the SBC ranked as the state’s second largest Protestant denomination, making them a potentially powerful political force.Footnote 52 Just a year before, the Southern Baptist General Convention of California had passed a resolution asserting the sin of homosexuality and supporting opposition to the employment of homosexuals in particular jobs, including public education, and Southern Baptists and other religious conservatives were increasingly concerned with what they saw as a mounting gay rights movement.Footnote 53 Evangelicals had long opposed homosexuality, of course, but the rise of a visible and active gay rights movement encouraged them to translate private convictions into public theological discussions and political actions. Despite such views, Californians rejected Proposition 6 by a 2-to-1 margin. Briggs met with a crowd of 250 supporters the night of the election and promised to place another antigay initiative on the ballot in 1980. “Cocktail Republicans” and Ronald Reagan, who had also opposed the measure because of libertarian concerns over privacy, were to blame for the proposition’s defeat, Briggs fumed. Blaming Reagan for its defeat, Briggs warned that conservative Christians would not forget the former governor’s betrayal of their issue. “They will remember that,” Briggs charged, “I think he’s finished as a national politician.”Footnote 54
Though Carter and Reagan both opposed Briggs, just as Carter and Ford had both supported the ERA, Carter became the target of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals who believed he had turned on them, revealing his suspect Christian faith. A month after the election, the Southern Baptist General Convention of California informed Carter of a resolution it had just passed. The resolution “express[ed] our grave disappointment to President Jimmy Carter for his public opposition to an issue so strongly supported by his fellow Christians and Baptists. We furthermore encourage him to reconsider his stand and to give his unreserved support to future efforts to oppose the acceptance of homosexuality as a normal if not privileged lifestyle.”Footnote 55 A separate letter to Carter from the group’s president drove home Baptist dissatisfaction with Carter’s actions and underscored the distrust many of them had for Carter’s spiritual authenticity. “We have worked hard to pass Proposition 6,” William Hann wrote Carter, “and your statement hurt us. Christians . . . are wondering why Southern Baptists are not together on moral issues.”Footnote 56
In 1980, for the first time, the Democratic Party listed “sexual orientation” as a category deserving protection from discrimination in its convention platform.Footnote 57 Such a move further confirmed suspicions that Carter supported gay rights and had abandoned his Baptist convictions. “I am appalled,” a Baptist pastor from Greenville, Texas, wrote Bob Maddox, the moderate Southern Baptist minister who served as the White House’s liaison to the religious community, “at the fact that you, a Southern Baptist Minister, would condone the dreadful sin of sodomy by approving and encouraging others to approve the Gay rights plank.” The pastor urged Maddox to use his influence to “reverse [Carter’s] stand on homosexuals” before it cost him the election. But with this pastor, Carter had already lost. “I will encourage as many of the evangelicals that I come in contact with to vote for Governor Reagan,” he warned, “because I want no part of such a whitewash as you put on homosexuality.”Footnote 58 Other letters from ministers poured into the White House demanding Carter’s position on the sin of homosexuality. Maddox continued to handle the responses, writing in the political language of constitutional protections and minority rights to address the question of homosexuals. But the ministers fired back again with scriptural absolutes against homosexuality and judgments about Maddox’s faith. “You are not a Christian and need to become one,” one letter attacked Rev. Maddox, but Carter bore the brunt of those charges.Footnote 59
Though Carter had continually expressed his moral opposition to abortion during the 1976 race, his refusal to advocate for an overturning of the law rendered his personal feelings on the matter insignificant in the eyes of his antiabortion foes. Worse, in 1978, Carter hired Sarah Weddington as his Special Assistant with advising responsibilities on women’s issues and minority rights. As a private attorney, Weddington had argued successfully in favor of Roe before the Supreme Court in 1973 before serving as president of the National Abortion Rights Action League.Footnote 60 Her appointment led one pro-life publication to characterize Carter as a “president who has surrounded himself with abortion advocates in key executive and judicial positions.”Footnote 61 An onslaught of disapproval filled the White House mailbags. In one week alone, the White House received 328 letters related to Weddington’s appointment; 97 percent voiced their opposition.Footnote 62 That Carter would employ Weddington while refusing to support a human life amendment to the Constitution belied his moral opposition of abortion, pro-life activists argued. Indeed, even his public statements had shown an increasing insistence for the legality of abortion while expressions of his moral objections to abortion had decreased in volume and conviction. Coupled with a White House staff that many knew to be pushing for the extension of abortion rights, Carter was seen as an untrustworthy chameleon, changing his colors to suit worldly trends.
Yet Baptist views on abortion were changing too. In 1971, the SBC had passed a resolution calling for Southern Baptists to “work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”Footnote 63 After the Court issued Roe, the national Baptist news service declared that the Supreme Court had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality, and justice.”Footnote 64 And the Baptist General Convention of Texas included a pastor’s sermon in its newsletter that contended there existed “no clear, biblical command dealing with . . . [abortion] in a specific way.”Footnote 65 A year later, SBC delegates reaffirmed the 1971 resolution.Footnote 66 When a conservative pastor wrote SBC headquarters to protest the denomination’s apparent support for abortion rights, Carl Bates, the SBC’s president, responded that Baptist strength owed in part to the “unity that still exists in diversity.”Footnote 67 Yet that diversity was what conservative Southern Baptists intended to stamp out of their denomination as they plotted the fundamentalist takeover, and fundamentalists used the abortion issue as one of their chief means of denominational reform in the late 1970s. Where moderate Baptist theologians and denomination leaders had pondered the uncertainty of life’s beginnings and wondered about the Bible’s view on abortion, fundamentalist pastors and laypersons fought back with a firm insistence that Scripture denounced abortion as murder and clearly maintained that life began at conception.Footnote 68 In doing so, they made abortion both a symbol and a measure of scriptural inerrancy and biblical authority. One could not equivocate on abortion without revealing their less-than-orthodox view of the Bible, thereby exposing their unsaved soul. The right Christian understood clearly the Bible’s prohibition against abortion just as plainly as they knew Scripture contained the inerrant, infallible word of God.
The interconnection between a strict interpretation of the Bible and particular political views became a hallmark of Baptist identity and was plainly revealed in a series of resolutions at the SBC’s 1980 convention, a year after the 1979 fundamentalist takeover began and just months before November’s presidential election. Messengers to the convention affirmed that the SBC’s seminaries and universities should only employ those “who believe in the divine inspiration of the whole Bible, infallibility of the original manuscripts, and that the Bible is truth without any error.”Footnote 69 The delegates then passed a host of resolutions addressing some of the hottest political issues of the day and underscoring the denomination’s fundamentalist direction.Footnote 70 A resolution on abortion overturned the mild support offered by previous resolutions as it denounced the nation’s “abortion on demand” ethos and called for legislative efforts “and/or” a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion in all cases but to save the life of the mother.Footnote 71 A resolution on women condemned the ERA.Footnote 72 (Just three years earlier, two anti-ERA resolutions had not been able to emerge from the Resolutions Committee for a vote by the general audience.)Footnote 73 Other resolutions in 1980 opposed pornography, homosexuality, children’s rights, and providing birth control to minors without parental consent.Footnote 74 But the “Resolution on the White House Conference on the Family” issued a direct blow at Carter. Carter had promised a White House meeting on the state of the American family in his 1976 campaign. Finally held in 1980, the White House Conferences on Families, renamed to reflect the organizers’ different visions of what constituted a family, elicited the ire of religious conservatives because of its endorsement of the ERA, abortion rights, and homosexuality.Footnote 75 The SBC’s resolution blasted the White House conference for its “general undermining of the biblical concept of the family.”Footnote 76
While Baptists had always addressed a contemporary issue or two at their annual meeting, no convention had ever passed as many political resolutions as the 1980 convention considered. Representing the SBC’s overt politicization, the resolutions also signaled the numbered days for Carter’s presidency. Carter’s apparent changing position on abortion and gay rights may have reflected similar trends among the American public, but this was exactly what troubled so many of the Southern Baptists who supported their denomination’s overhaul. For them, Carter’s changes too closely mirrored mainline Protestant accommodation of the world and its values. At the same time, the emerging tensions between moderates and fundamentalists within the Southern Baptist Convention brought many political issues, like abortion, to the center of denominational politics. Fundamentalists worried that this same worldly accommodation that had overtaken mainline Protestant denominations was festering inside their own house, and they sought to push out moderate Southern Baptists, both within the convention and inside the White House, who threatened to steer the denomination from orthodoxy and lead it toward apostasy.
Organizing Against Carter
Not long after the 1979 fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, a group of prominent ministers, mostly Southern Baptist, gathered near Dallas to discuss how they might also take the presidency from Carter. Notably, the talks focused on removing Carter from office rather than rallying around Reagan. Elected California’s governor in 1966, Reagan enjoyed more than a decade of national political prominence, including his 1976 bid for the Republican nomination, but he had still yet to attract the support of religious conservatives, who opposed his fairly liberal record on social issues as governor and worried about his spotty personal life.Footnote 77 The group in Dallas included some of the SBC’s most influential pastors, like newly elected SBC president Adrian Rogers, James Robison, Jimmy Draper (SBC president from 1982 to 1984), and Charles Stanley of First Baptist Atlanta (SBC president from 1984 to 1986). A few non–Southern Baptist ministers also attending included Pat Robertson, Rex Humbard, and Clayton Bell, Billy Graham’s brother-in-law. The pastors had gathered to pray for the country and discuss what they could do about the nation’s moral afflictions. Urgency filled the meeting, as each of them worried aloud that the nation’s fate depended on turning the country from its evil ways. The pastors committed to each other that they would motivate their congregations to become politically involved in the upcoming election. Part of the discussion focused on the complicity complacent Christians held for the direction the country had turned because of the legacy of fundamentalist noninvolvement in politics, and the pastors vowed to end that disengagement.Footnote 78
After the Dallas meeting, Charles Stanley organized a “Campaign Training Conference,” inviting Southern Baptist ministers to First Baptist Atlanta for training on voter registration and education about pivotal moral issues they could share with their congregations. Paul Weyrich was one of the conservative activists who led the conference for Stanley, and he realized after spending time with the Southern Baptist ministers that Carter would lose. One pastor after another stood up and testified to their disillusionment with Carter and their suspicions of his Christian faith. “‘I was part of Carter’s team in 1976,’” Weyrich remembered various ministers saying, “‘I delivered my congregation for Carter. I urged them all to vote for Carter because I thought he was a moral individual. I found out otherwise, and I’m angry.’”Footnote 79
Baptist organizing against Carter did not go unnoticed by the White House, thanks to Bob Maddox. Maddox, a moderate pastor of First Baptist in Calhoun, Georgia, and an acquaintance of the president for more than ten years, had offered to help the White House’s outreach to religious Americans in 1978, but the president had spurned the suggestion.Footnote 80 A year later, Carter would reconsider. Realizing the potential political consequences of the SBC’s fundamentalist takeover and his own shaky standing with religious conservatives, Carter asked Maddox to serve as his special assistant for religious affairs to help smooth relations with religious conservatives.Footnote 81 Maddox urged Carter to talk again about his deep faith in order to connect with religious voters he knew were souring on the president. Noting in a White House memo the “coalescing of conservative, evangelical, religious groups for political action is one of the important political phenomenon [sic] of our day,” Maddox recommended that Carter also meet with a group of influential pastors and televangelists, including Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Oral Roberts, and James Bakker.Footnote 82 The meeting—and Maddox’s other attempts with religious conservatives—backfired, however. Maddox hoped that Carter could connect to religious conservatives on spiritual grounds, emphasizing their shared faith and religious convictions. But the pastors only wanted to talk politics, and in their minds Carter’s positions on ERA, abortion, and gay rights rendered his Christian professions invalid. “We had a man in the White House who professed to be a Christian, but didn’t understand how un-Christian his administration was,” LaHaye recalled of the meeting.Footnote 83 As 1980 progressed, Carter’s prospects with Southern Baptists and other evangelicals worsened. Maddox let the White House know that the SBC’s meeting that summer had passed a “range of conservative, fundamentalist resolutions,” in his view spelling trouble for Carter. As a moderate Southern Baptist, Maddox lamented the theological remaking of his denomination, but he also understood the implications for Carter, warning that the resolutions “reflect the rising tide of political conservatism in the country.” “This swing to the right causes me great concern,” Maddox concluded.Footnote 84
The Republican National Committee also watched the 1980 SBC meeting closely, believing the denomination’s remaking would benefit the party’s election chances. RNC chairman Bill Brock congratulated Bailey Smith, the Oklahoma pastor who had briefly backed Carter in 1976, on his election to the SBC presidency and offered his prayers for the denomination. Brock reminded Smith that he had recently met with Adrian Rogers at RNC headquarters, where they had discussed the “problems and issues we mutually face,” and he offered to meet with Smith to discuss “the practical implementation of voter registration and participation by Christians who in the past have not had their full political impact.” “Our goal is a mutual one,” Brock concluded, “to articulate and achieve the values we share—faith, freedom, and family.” “I would love to take advantage of that,” Smith responded.Footnote 85 In the last months of the 1980 campaign, Southern Baptist and other conservative churches launched full-scale voter registration drives and focused their congregants on the coming election. “Jimmy Carter was the chief target of this activity,” the New York Times noted.Footnote 86
Of course, no minister could back a specific candidate from the pulpit, but by preaching on the biblical injunctions against abortion, homosexuality, and the ERA, pastors could communicate their political endorsement indirectly. Randy Stewart, a Baptist minister and Moral Majority member in Lexington, Kentucky, explained to a reporter, “I will talk about the issues in my church. I will recommend issues to the congregation, not candidates. But when I get through, they will know who I am voting for: Ronald Reagan.”Footnote 87 Other pastors showed less circumspection. A Baptist pastor in Tampa filled out a ballot supporting Reagan and distributed copies of it to church members.Footnote 88 Dr. James W. Bryant, a Baptist pastor in Fort Worth, used his church’s publication to weigh in on the approaching election through a comparison of the candidates’ positions. Noting that Reagan and Carter held “vastly different” political philosophies, Bryant urged his congregants to study their stances and to ask God for help in deciding which candidate to support. Bryant suggested focusing on the candidates’ positions on four “moral issues”: abortion, the ERA, gay rights, and humanism. Bryant couldn’t back a candidate, of course, but his choice of issues tacitly endorsed Reagan. But, more than that, his explanation of each issue engendered doubts about the authenticity of Carter’s Christian faith. If a candidate supported abortion or gay rights, Bryant wrote, he was “anti-biblical.” Support for the ERA meant “taking the opposite view of God’s ordained chair-of-authority.” Last, a true Christian would work against the humanist forces threatening to overtake the nation through control of the government. “Both candidates claim to believe in a supernatural God,” Bryant wrote, “Unfortunately, President Carter has appointed an avowed humanist as the new Secretary of Education.”Footnote 89 Even when Carter spoke directly about his faith, his words worked against him with Southern Baptist fundamentalists. One minister said that although Carter talked of being born again he also “quoted [the liberal theologian] Reinhold Niebuhr, so we knew that he wasn’t reading the right things.”Footnote 90
Even the First Lady suffered from suspicions among fellow Baptists. One Southern Baptist woman complained to the SBC’s president about Rosalyn Carter’s attendance at the International Women’s Year Conference in Houston, where she appeared alongside “confirmed lesbians.”Footnote 91 Other Southern Baptist women were more hesitant to turn their backs on Mrs. Carter. Joyce Rogers, the wife of Adrian Rogers, wrote Rosalyn after she visited the White House with her husband following his election as SBC president. Even after spending time with the First Lady, Mrs. Rogers’s letter revealed her confusion about who Mrs. Carter truly was. “I perceive you are a godly woman with great ability and great commitment to Christ, your country, and your convictions,” Mrs. Rogers wrote. But, she continued, she along with “many Southern Baptist and other Christian women” wanted to know where the First Lady truly stood on the various issues confronting women. Christian charity, if not denominational loyalty, compelled Mrs. Rogers to inquire directly of Mrs. Carter, conceding that it was difficult to arrive at the truth via the media’s accounts. She hoped that the First Lady might communicate “on these vital issues” with her and set the record straight.Footnote 92 Her husband, however, showed no confusion—or charity—about the president’s spiritual standing in his meeting with Carter. “I hope you will give up your secular humanism and return back to Christianity,” Rogers said to him.Footnote 93
Closer to the election, Rogers announced his endorsement of Reagan. Throughout the denomination, Southern Baptists, the group that had been so critical to Carter’s 1976 win, were now ready to vote against their own. One letter to the SBC’s president encapsulates the sentiments many Southern Baptists felt toward the president who had let them down. Mrs. Albert Kemp of Oklahoma City wrote Bailey Smith, accusing Carter of trying to retain Southern Baptists’ support “while at the same time woo the Homosexuals.” Mrs. Carter earned her scorn as well for supporting the ERA and attending the IWY conference, and she blamed Carter for not preventing his wife from doing so. “A man that can’t rule his family has no business in the White House,” Kemp declared. Like so many other Southern Baptists who felt misled by Carter, Kemp doubted the realness of Carter’s faith. “The Blacks are given credit for electing Mr. Carter to office,” Kemp explained, “But I firmly believe it was the Southern Baptists and other Christians hoping that he was ‘born again.’” For many Southern Baptists like Kemp, Carter’s policies and actions in office had spoken more clearly than any testimony of faith he had ever professed. If Carter was a Christian, he was not their kind of Christian, and he certainly represented the elements of the Southern Baptist Convention that the resurgent fundamentalists felt must be purged from their pews. Kemp concluded with a plea that Smith use his influence against Carter’s reelection. “I know that you cannot use your pulpit for politics, but in your contact with people I beg you to please point out the discrepancies of Jimmy Carter,” Kemp urged. “Our country cannot stand him for another four years.”Footnote 94 “Amen! Amen! Amen!” Bailey Smith wrote back. “I agree with everything you have said.”Footnote 95
In their letters to the SBC, Southern Baptists connected their worries about the direction of the country and that of the denomination. “I am one of many Southern Baptist Women (as well as men),” Cindy Miller of Tulsa wrote Smith, “who are concerned not only with the way our country is being run and by whom, but also with those officially within our Southern Baptist Convention who are helping push our country towards its questionable directions . . . and deceiving Southern Baptists at the same time.” Miller documented her offenses with the Carter administration and Southern Baptist moderates, connecting theology to politics. “I would also like for you to know,” she concluded, “that there are some conservative Southern Baptists who . . . have been actively involved in working for what we believe to be Scriptural truths.”Footnote 96 In the face of seeming equivocation over questions of absolute truth, fundamentalists in the SBC had sought to drive out the moderate powers of the denomination. And at the polls in 1980, fundamentalists would vote out Jimmy Carter, the Southern Baptist president who, like the moderates of his denomination, saw moral complexity where they saw clear-cut certainties.
When the polls closed, Carter’s loss among Southern Baptists was devastating, reflecting almost a 25 percent drop from 1976. In all his losses with various voter groups, Carter’s biggest decline came from his fellow Southern Baptists, who gave Carter only a third of their support.Footnote 97 And in the ninety-six most heavily Baptist counties, Reagan won 60 percent in 1980, besting Carter’s showing of 58 percent in those same counties in 1980.Footnote 98 Carter lost every southern state except his own.
Southern Baptists, then, were a critical component of the voters who turned from Carter in 1980. Those who identified themselves as strongest fundamentalists gave Reagan greater support than any other group did. Evangelicals were more likely to vote in the 1980 election than any other group of voters, and they likely provided the margin in Reagan’s slim victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, all states Carter won in 1976. But Reagan’s wins were hardly decisive in these states as he failed to claim more than 50 percent of the vote in any of them. His biggest margin among the six was a meager 2.1 percent edge—a sharp contrast to Carter’s 1976 showing, when he had won several of them by double-digit leads. In the other five, Reagan won by a slim 1.3 percent or less.Footnote 99 In light of this, Reagan’s win hardly seems tantamount to an evangelical landslide for the Gipper, but more accurately as Carter’s loss.
“Everybody I talk to is voting for Reagan + most of them voted for Pres [sic] Carter before,” one evangelical had warned the White House in the summer of 1980. “In the last election 70% of evangelicals didn’t vote.”Footnote 100 While his numbers may not have been exact, his political forecasting proved correct. Evangelicals were energized to come out in 1980, vote Carter out, and bolster a Republican landslide that won back the Senate for the first time since 1952 and posted impressive gains in the House. Though the results may have been immediate, the forces for such a movement had been at work far longer, building from the SBC’s debates over the Bible and its theological shift. Shortly before the election, one Baptist minister pointed to the theological developments of the 1970s as the basis for what he hoped would be a political revolution in 1980. “For the last 10 years, we’ve been raising a generation that believes in the Bible as the word of God,” Reverend Pennell explained. “And they’re ready to vote now. You see?”Footnote 101
Even after Carter had left office, many Southern Baptists still bristled at the notion that he was one of them. “Former President Carter, used the church, always toten his bible [sic], and saying he was born again, to be elected,” one woman wrote the SBC, clearly situating the rejection of Carter in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention’s own internal struggles. “The deceit of Carter, of a nation, and the corruption in our churches has brought down the wrath of God on us, and would seem we are members of the Seven Churches of Revelation.”Footnote 102
Conclusion
Fundamentalists were remaking the Southern Baptist Convention, but they had also helped redirect the political direction of the nation. Emboldened by the message to purify their denomination, Southern Baptists embraced a hard-line faith that challenged anything but the most orthodox beliefs as unchristian. Carter, the most famous moderate Southern Baptist in the nation, paid the political price for the remaking of the Southern Baptist Convention, but that refashioning, of course, would have national implications too.
Underappreciated in the narrative of the rise of the Religious Right is the important love and loss religious conservatives felt for Jimmy Carter. Examining the 1980 election in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention’s fundamentalist takeover helps us understand the rise of the Religious Right as a theological story with political implications. Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals had spent the 1970s wrestling over powerful doctrinal questions of scriptural inerrancy and biblical authority. What they had really been debating was the basic definition of what it meant to be a Christian. While previous generations of Southern Baptists had allowed a range of theological views and worship practices throughout the Convention—the Baptist principles of congregational authority and the priesthood of all believers demanded such acceptance, after all—the Bible battles of the 1970s exposed divisions that even Christian comity could not overlook. Conservative Baptists saw in their moderate denominationalists doctrinal threats that had to be confronted. Led by fundamentalist pastors who depicted the theological battle as not merely an interpretive disagreement but, instead, the very work of Satan, these conservatives rallied to purify their denomination. In calling their rivals the “enemy,” in likening them to “snakes,” and in characterizing the denomination’s reorganizational moment as a “battle,” Southern Baptist fundamentalists equipped their cause with the language of spiritual warfare. This was not a metaphor for them but rather an objective reality. And it drew the dividing line not across differing Christians but between the true believer and the heretic, between the forces of God and of his adversary.
That dividing line separated Jimmy Carter from the bulk of conservative Southern Baptists. Increasingly over his presidency, Carter endured questions about his spiritual authenticity from fellow Baptists. In letters to the White House and to SBC’s headquarters, in denominational publications and Sunday sermons, Southern Baptists judged the state of Carter’s soul, calling him unchristian and disbelieving his born-again testimony. Southern Baptists were hardly alone in these conclusions. More generally, evangelicals frequently raised doubts about Carter’s Christianity.Footnote 103 In the last months of the campaign, a group called Christians for Reagan ran television advertisements in conservative Christian districts charging, “Although Jimmy Carter calls himself a Christian, he hasn’t been acting one.”Footnote 104 Those judgments may be lost on political historians as the inconsequential preoccupations of the faithful, but their importance to the religious conservatives who made them—and to our understanding of those religious conservatives—cannot be overstated. Over and over, Southern Baptists scrutinized Carter’s presidential decisions through the rubric of evangelical orthodoxy, testing his faith just as they assessed the convictions of their moderate brethren in the denomination before finally disposing of them both. Other evangelicals, as members of denominations undergoing their own divisions or simply aware of the larger theological battles within conservative Protestantism, made similar judgments of Carter and helped usher him from the White House. “President Carter’s Christianity, like his policies, is difficult to understand,” one evangelical wrote to Christianity Today halfway through Carter’s presidency.Footnote 105 But conservative Christians understood Carter’s policies and his presidency through their evaluation of his Christianity, underscoring the theological basis of the ascendant Religious Right. Political historians would do well to understand that now too.
