Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter was, by any measure, a genuinely devout Christian. A born-again Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher from Plains, Georgia, Carter wore his faith publicly and authentically. His 1976 presidential campaign attracted significant evangelical support precisely because he was one of them: a man of demonstrated personal piety, biblical literacy, and moral seriousness. That made his presidency feel, to the emerging Religious Right leadership, like betrayal. Carter personally opposed abortion and federal funding for it, but would not support a constitutional amendment to ban it: 'I draw the line and don't support a constitutional amendment,' he said in a 1976 debate. His administration maintained the IRS's enforcement of Green v. Connally against racially discriminatory private schools — the enforcement action that Paul Weyrich had identified as the founding grievance of the movement. His administration did not support school prayer. His White House Conference on Families (1980), intended to strengthen American family life, ended up recognizing diverse family structures including single-parent families and, controversially, families with gay members — which the Religious Right took as an attack on the Christian definition of family. Carter supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress had sent to the states in 1972, and signed the 1978 extension of its ratification deadline. For Weyrich, Falwell, and the network of operatives building the Religious Right's political infrastructure, Carter's presidency demonstrated a crucial lesson: an evangelical in the White House was not enough. They needed a president who would advance their policy agenda, regardless of his own personal faith. Ronald Reagan, who rarely attended church and had been divorced, was that president. The Moral Majority's 1980 pivot from Carter to Reagan was not a religious choice. It was a political calculation: Reagan would deliver the policy agenda (judicial appointments, school prayer, anti-abortion legislation, tax exemptions for segregated schools) that Carter had refused to deliver. Carter's faith, it turned out, mattered less to movement leaders than his policies. Carter lived until 2024, remaining active in public life, building houses for Habitat for Humanity, and teaching Sunday school. He never stopped being a Christian. He just never stopped being a democrat.

Themes this entry appears in

• Opposition / Resistance
• Christian Nationalism

Connections to Jimmy Carter

• Moral Majority opposed (1980) — Despite Carter being a born-again Southern Baptist — ostensibly the Moral Majority's demographic — the organization actively worked against his 1980 reelection and delivered its voter mobilization for Ronald Reagan instead. Carter's refusal to back a constitutional amendment against abortion, support school prayer, or intervene against IRS enforcement on segregated schools put him at odds with the movement's agenda. The Moral Majority's 1980 pivot to Reagan — a divorced, rarely-churchgoing Hollywood actor — suggested that policy mattered more to movement leaders than personal piety.
• Paul Weyrich opposed (1979) — Paul Weyrich, the chief architect of the Religious Right as a political machine, was instrumental in turning the evangelical movement against Carter despite Carter's personal evangelical faith. Weyrich recognized that Carter's refusal to advance the Religious Right's policy agenda — maintaining IRS enforcement against segregated schools, declining to back a constitutional amendment against abortion, supporting the ERA — made him a political enemy regardless of his faith. Weyrich's network of organizations coordinated the 1979–1980 pivot to Ronald Reagan, delivering evangelical voter infrastructure to Reagan's 1980 campaign and making Reagan's landslide victory possible.

Sources

• Jimmy Carter, awkward abortion moderate — First Things (2023)
• Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter — Randall Balmer (2014)
• Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South — Steven Miller (2009)