Evangelical voters “were very much in play” during that election cycle, says University of West Georgia historian Daniel K. Williams, author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. “When Carter presented himself as someone who was a devout Christian from the deep South and therefore could be perceived as someone who represented them, a lot of evangelicals, including a few who were Republicans, voted for him, especially in the South.… And I think especially after Nixon and the Watergate scandal, an overwhelming number of evangelicals said they were interested in a candidate’s character. You look at all the leading Christian magazines back then—Christianity Today, Eternity, Christian Life—they all stressed a candidate’s character.”
What changed this virtue-driven consensus? There were, of course, the vanguard forces assembling at the frontiers of the overheated confrontations over morality and culture that now go by the shorthand pundit designation of “the culture wars.” All these emerging nodes of resentment were strung together in a number of key works of millennially minded prophecy and cultural exhortation. “Evangelicals took up the narrative that all this could be attributed to secular humanism, in the catchphrase of the time,” Williams notes. “Francis Schaffer’s book How Shall We Then Live? developed this argument, as did Tim LaHaye’s Battlefield for the Mind. Also you had Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth, which blended the premillennial theology popular among conservative evangelicals with an analysis of political and cultural decline that tended to be intensely anticommunist, anti-Soviet and militaristic.”
The Late Great Planet Earth was indeed the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, and while it antedated the formal rise of the new religious right, it was firmly ensconced in mainstream religious discourse “so that when someone warned about secular humanism in 1976, people who read The Late Great Planet Earth found this very believable,” Williams says.
Before this sustained propaganda barrage, however, many of those questions had not yet acquired any hard-line partisan or denominational coloration—indeed, in 1973, when the US Supreme Court handed down its decision sanctioning the individual right to abortion, Roe v. Wade, Carter’s own Southern Baptist conference issued a statement supporting the ruling. Instead, Carter became vilified among religious conservatives for several specific policy decisions. One of them was a rule approved by the IRS in 1978, denying tax exemptions to private religious schools that weren’t racially integrated. The ruling—which Carter hadn’t even known about in advance—proved to be a rallying cry for conservative evangelicals far more galvanizing than scriptural assessments of individual character in public life. It sparked widespread indignation among religious parents and educators not only because of the threatened loss of a critical tax subsidy; they also bridled at the charge that schools instructing children in their preferred brand of morality were racist—even though many of these institutions, known as “segregation academies,” had indeed been founded to combat the desegregation of schools in the Jim Crow South.