The fact that Carter and Democrats could not hold the allegiance of evangelicals—particularly Southern evangelicals—in 1980 was a terrible (though not insurmountable) loss for Democrats’ national prospects. What went wrong? What we might call the Carter model—personal commitment to church, the Bible, and Christian values, combined with libertarian views of law and public morality—was highly disappointing to most evangelical voters. They wanted action on conservative moral issues, even if that action came from politicians who did not manifest Carter’s private devotion to church, family, and the Bible.
When Carter first ran in 1976, there seemed little doubt that Southern evangelicals, especially Carter’s fellow Baptists, would support him. Some certainly did. Oklahoma Baptist pastor Bailey Smith, a future president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), exclaimed at the denomination’s 1976 meeting that America needed a “born-again president.” He didn’t want to mention his preferred candidate by name, Bailey joked, but “his initials are the same as Our Lord’s.” At the same assembly, however, Gerald Ford became the first sitting president to address the SBC.
Thus, the trajectory of the white evangelical vote was uncertain in 1976. So was the future of the SBC, which was Carter’s denomination at the time. In fact, Carter’s presidency would become one of the chief catalysts of the SBC’s transformation into a uniformly conservative denomination.
The SBC had been the nation’s largest Protestant group since the mid-20th century, and it was a surprisingly diverse organization, both theologically and politically. Despite his evangelical testimony and personal adherence to the Bible, Carter was part of a small but influential group of SBC moderates and liberals. These SBC progressives affirmed abortion rights in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, and they supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which sought to enshrine legal equality between the sexes in the Constitution.
Carter’s SBC was “evangelical” in the sense that it supported evangelism, Christian missions, and the special authority of the Bible, along with Baptist distinctives such as the baptism of Christian believers instead of infants. But SBC pastors and professors were not in agreement about the “inerrancy” of scripture. Was the Bible entirely without error, whether of facts or morals? Southern Baptists gave a range of answers. Neither did SBC members agree about the role of women, especially in the home and in the church. Were married women to submit to their husbands, as Paul’s letters in the New Testament instructed? Were women eligible to be senior pastors, despite the historical opposition across most Christian traditions to that practice?