Onward Christian Soldiers

1 1979 In 1976,Newsweekfamously announced the "Year of the Evangelical." Most people were not familiar with Evangelical piety at the time. To them, the headline seemed exactly right. For the first time, a self-professed Evangelical Christian -- Jimmy Carter -- was about to make his home in the White House. His candidacy was attracting the support of religious voters nationally. Most notable was the effect Carter was having on Evangelical pastors and communities across the South, where Republicans already had made serious inroads since the civil rights and busing controversies of the '60s. It appeared that religiously motivated voters, turned off by the '72 George McGovern candidacy, were returning to the Democratic Party. TheNewsweekheadline introduced the country to the growth of the Evangelical movement. The mention of an Evangelical evoked an image of a Bible-toting hick who talked about "being saved" in a Southern accent. Carter didn't fit this stereotype,andhe was a liberal. His politics were formed out of the crucible of the civil rights movement. "Carter is not a strict Evangelical,"Timehad written several months earlier. Little explanation was given for this observation, which would turn out to be decisive for Carter's presidency. The article briefly mentions Carter's fondness for the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a figure unknown to the general public but whose influence on Protestant clergy in America was immense. A professor at Union Theological Seminary from 1928 to 1960, Niebuhr had a career that encompassed successive periods in American religion, from the Social Gospel of the '20s to the mainstream Protestant liberalism of the postwar period. Carter was particularly taken with one sentence from Niebuhr: "The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world." This reveals the fundamental difference of outlook between Carter and the Evangelicals he was supposed to represent. The federally enforced notion of justice was precisely what was fueling the coming revolution of the religious conservatives against Washington. Carter was an Evangelical whose White House activism aroused a slumbering giant known as the Religious Right. Niebuhr's call for political elites to correct injustice, protect civil rights, and challenge structures of inequality was the dominant voice of religion in politics at the time. This kind of religious activism was not new in American politics; it was the bread and butter of the National Council of Churches and mainstream Protestantism. The fact that a Southerner, Carter, had become its principal spokesman was not new, either. The country was only a decade beyond the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What was new was that Carter -- Southernand white-- had unified other Southern Evangelicals behind his Democratic candidacy. The liberal base of the Democratic Party, uncomfortable with his public piety, made common cause with Evangelicals, still at odds with the party over civil rights issues. Evangelicals were about to learn a political lesson. They had signed on to support one of their own, or at least they thought so. BREAKING WITH CARTER Eight days before the election, Pat Robertson put his arms around a Sunday-school teacher from Plains, Georgia, on his nationally broadcast television program,The 700 Club,and called him "my Christian brother." After Evangelical voters were decisive in putting the Georgia governor into office, their brother soon disappointed and alienated them. Carter turned out not to be so Evangelical after all, at least by the standards of Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, such as Robertson, who had helped to make him president. Carter's religious convictions were those of a mainstream Protestant, but he walked and talked like an Evangelical. He quoted the Bible more freely than any presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan, but hisHudson, Deal W. is the author of 'Onward Christian Soldiers', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416524427 and ISBN 1416524428.