I have long suspected that the acrimony between left and right in U.S. politics stems not only from the Religious Right and the inevitable upping of the ante of civil matters to moral or eschatological significance, but also to the self-righteousness that accompanies the conviction (w-w alert) that one’s policy or vote is an expression of faithfulness to God. I also have long felt that Jimmy Carter exhibited the latter tendencies — self-righteousness — and was a particularly poor sport in the way he took Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. I thought then that Carter believed he had lost to a dumber and inferior man, and so was responsible for launching the Democrats’ sense of intellectual superiority. (Republicans counter with patriotic/civil religious superiority.)
It turns out that I (all about me) not have been that far off, and this from Jonathan Yardley who voted twice for Carter (thanks to John Fea):
Religion is a tricky business, never more so than when it gets mixed up with government. Although Balmer pays due respect to the argument that “religion functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power,” that “once a religious group panders after political influence, it loses its prophetic voice,” he does not convince me that Carter, either as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s or as president in the second half of that decade, really “understood that the Christian faith had flourished in the United States precisely because the government had stayed out of the religion business.”
To the contrary, Carter brought religion (religiosity, too) into the national government more directly and intensely than any president before him in the 20th century. He campaigned as a religious man, speaking repeatedly, openly and almost boastfully about his religious convictions, about the centrality of prayer to his daily life, about the joy he took in being “born again.” Balmer sees this as a redemptive response to the cynicism and venality of the Nixon years, and unquestionably there is some truth to that. But Carter made religion a campaign weapon as well as a private belief, which was not appreciably less calculating than Nixon’s disregard for the Constitution and the common decencies.
If Carter’s presidency was indeed redemptive, why is it that in the 31 / 2 decades since it ended, American politics has been plunged into one of the most bitterly partisan periods in the country’s history? Granting for the sake of argument Balmer’s apparent belief in the sincerity of Carter’s religious beliefs and his commitment to “progressive evangelism,” it remains that it was Carter who brought religion into the public arena and thus opened the way for others whose evangelical beliefs are the polar opposite of his own. Balmer would have us believe that the rise of the religious right was in large part due to the clever political manipulations of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and others, but it was Carter who made it possible for them to present themselves as a legitimate political opposition. If it is permissible to grant a political role to “progressive evangelism,” why is it any less legitimate to grant a similar role to those whose evangelism “emphasized free-market capitalism, paid scant attention to human rights or the plight of minorities, and asserted the importance of military might as resistance to communism”?
For the five cents that it’s worth, my own political views are far closer to Carter’s than to those who carry the banner of the religious right — I actually voted for him twice, though holding my nose the second time — and Balmer is right that there is more than a little to admire in the record of his brief presidency, but he was his own worst enemy: smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, humorless, vindictive and exhibitionistic about his piety. He was too haughty and aloof to deal effectively with friends and foes in Congress — foreshadowing the presidency almost three decades later of Barack Obama — and he never understood how to talk to the American people, as made all too plain by his well-intentioned but tin-eared address to the nation in July 1979 about the “crisis of confidence” from which the country ostensibly was suffering.
Old Life 
There may also be some interest in J. Brooks Flippen’s recent book, Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family and the Religious Right(University of Georgia Press, 2011)
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A recent letter to the editor of a magazine gave this food for thought. I will gladly divulge the source if it becomes an issue….
The South had two groups intensely jealous of their own rights but rather blasé
about the rights of others. Puritan New England was settled by people who believed
in controlling themselves and their neighbors, intricately regulating their communities,
and cherishing the right of local government to do this. Between were the
Quakers who were more mutual, believing that rights must be the same for all, and
trying to govern by consensus. Today we see the cultural descendants of the Puritans and Southerners as blue and red states on our political maps. One might think that a pluralistic society like America could live in peace and mutual respect, following the example of the Quakers
and seeking consensus—as opposed to simple-majority politics or judicial fiat—
on divisive social issues. However, this approach is inconsistent with Evangelical
Progressivism, which compels the descendants of the Puritans to impose their will
on the whole country.
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Balmer needs to spend more time in the Political Science department. From a short piece he did for Christian Century: “Jimmy Carter rode to the White House in 1976 on the twin currents of his reputation as a “New South” governor and a resurgence of progressive evangelicalism in the early 1970s.”
This is just flat wrong. There was no “resurgence” of Progressive Evangelicalism in 1976. This election has been studied to death. Carter carried states that have never, ever voted for a Democratic Presidential nominee since then– Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and South Carolina. His victory was a blip on the trend line of conservative, formerly Democratic, Southern white voters towards the GOP. Carter was able to credibly present himself as a Southern Baptist (this was before the split) and he did phenomenally well among his co-religionists. By 1980, though the national trend was against him by then, the drop off in his support among these same voters was particularly notable. The most dramatic example was in his home state of Georgia. In 1980, he barely carried it– we (I was involved in the campaign of the GOP Senate nominee, Mack Mattingly, who won in a nail biter) had to wait until the next morning to find out). In 1976, he won it 2-1. His most consequential drop off was in the white precincts of the Northern suburbs of Atlanta, where Southern Baptists were thick on the ground.
If DGH is right that Evangelical is a construct, Progressive Evangelical is doubly so. And to say or imply that the 1976 election represented some kind of high water mark for them is a hallucination n
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I would agree wholeheartedly with Dan here. The high-water mark for the progressive evangelicals, as put forward in David Swartz’s narrative in Moral Minority, would have been the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern (1973).
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Progressive Evangelical? I remember scoffing back in ’76 about his being enamored with Paul Tillich. Not exactly an Evangelical. (Sorry, –. –. ….)
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From up here on the globe, watching your elections since 1972, to me the only time the US chose the lesser candidate for President was 1976.
And that was fully understandable after Watergate, and it was kind of a close election anyways.
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There is no difference between progressive evangelical and liberal Methodist. Check out the sermon Ode to Jimmy Carter at Duke Chapel http://chapel.duke.edu/sites/default/files/Winner–02-16-14.pdf.
No Reformed person should ever think of themselves as “evangelical”, unless they believe that some points of Arminianism are part of the gospel. To endorse the utopian optimism of Ronald Reagan seems at odds with a conviction about the guilty and corrupt status of all humans as they are born (covenantal diapers or not).
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“… Carter believed he had lost to a dumber and inferior man, and so was responsible for launching the Democrats’ sense of intellectual superiority …”
and,
“… smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, humorless, vindictive and exhibitionistic about his piety. He was too haughty and aloof to deal effectively with friends and foes in Congress — foreshadowing the presidency almost three decades later of Barack Obama …”
Hmmm…so that explains a bit of how our current mess got started. Certainly the “intellectual elite” had gotten their foot in the door at universities during the turbulent 60’s, but it would figure that Carter’s administration was where the radicals of that decade embedded themselves into mainstream politics.
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the self-righteousness that accompanies the conviction (w-w alert) that one’s policy or vote is an expression of faithfulness to God.
Perhaps. But the same is true of many who ostentatiously eschew “worldview” as an expression of their faithfulness to God.
As for Carter “launching the Democrats’ sense of intellectual superiority,” it has always been the conceit of the left that they are smarter than everyone who ever lived. All things must bow to “progress.”
[And even Carter appealed to their sense of moral superiority. Reagan was the first Republican to speak to America’s higher aspirations. Until then, they saw themselves as the hard-bitten reality-based community.]
To Kent–and I have voted for losers–IMO the only year the USA got it egregiously wrong was 2012.
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George
Posted May 23, 2014 at 9:46 pm | Permalink
“… Carter believed he had lost to a dumber and inferior man, and so was responsible for launching the Democrats’ sense of intellectual superiority …”
and,
“… smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, humorless, vindictive and exhibitionistic about his piety. He was too haughty and aloof to deal effectively with friends and foes in Congress — foreshadowing the presidency almost three decades later of Barack Obama …”
Hmmm…so that explains a bit of how our current mess got started. Certainly the “intellectual elite” had gotten their foot in the door at universities during the turbulent 60′s, but it would figure that Carter’s administration was where the radicals of that decade embedded themselves into mainstream politics.
I would say that was the McGovern campaign, George. The left began to take over the party apparatus from the liberals starting in 1972. Carter was the last gasp of a recognizably Christian Democratic Party, unless we count the Christian counterfeit Bill Clinton–who although was electorally successful himself, was a disaster for the Dems, bringing to an end over a half-century’s domination of Congress and the statehouses.
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<i.mark mcculley
Posted May 23, 2014 at 3:39 pm | Permalink
There is no difference between progressive evangelical and liberal Methodist. Check out the sermon Ode to Jimmy Carter at Duke Chapel http://chapel.duke.edu/sites/default/files/Winner–02-16-14.pdf.
No Reformed person should ever think of themselves as “evangelical”, unless they believe that some points of Arminianism are part of the gospel. To endorse the utopian optimism of Ronald Reagan seems at odds with a conviction about the guilty and corrupt status of all humans as they are born (covenantal diapers or not).
Although it’s unfair to label Reagan a utopian by any means–he was a proper conservative anti-utopian–as a strict Calvinist theology niggle, that’s certainly borne out by Reagan’s epitaph.
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What is the difference between a “strict Calvinist” and a regular kind of Calvinist? Is it gospel stuff like the fact that Christ died only for the elect and that all for whom Christ died will be saved from God’s wrath by Christ’s satisfaction?
Here’s a working link for the “ode” to jimmy….
http://www.faithandleadership.com/sermons/lauren-f-winner-ode-jimmy-carter
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I’d give a thousand guineas to be able to say “Nuclear” like Jimmy Carter!
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mcmark, Winner did study with Balmer.
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It does not matter to me if Balmer is considered an “evangelical” or an ex-evangelical. As long as he and Mark Noll continue to tell the New York Times what the label means, who needs it?
It’s like the Amish needing Don Kraybill to go on TV to do his thing about the Amish. Move on in your life without turning your personal past into a fetish….
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Here, Paul, paractice away. http://youtu.be/k7spOEfRN-0
And for that you owe me 40% of the prize.
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Mud, what you need is some nook-ya-luhr power pants.
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MG . . . that is great!
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Maybe the greatest lesson of the Carter years is the lesson that Bill Clinton demonstrated he understood with his slogan, “it’s the economy, stupid.” People will accept an idealistic progressive in the White House as long as they can continue to make money and go about their personal business for the most part unimpeded. Runaway inflation and the sky-high interest rates needed to bring it under control will not be tolerated, however, whether the President is a Democrat or Republican.
Since Obama has been in office unemployment has remained stubbornly high, but inflation and interest rates have stayed low, enabling a lot of people from both parties to make a lot of money. The business of America was, is, and will remain, business.
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