Jimmy Carter, “Progressive” Evangelicals, and the Religious Right

Jimmy Carter, “Progressive” Evangelicals, and the Religious Right October 29, 2013
Pepperdine University’s Washington, DC program honored the late U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Oregon) in a Senate conference room on October 22 with speaker Randall Balmer, historian of evangelicals, Episcopal priest and Chairman of Dartmouth College’s Religion Department. Balmer’s lecture examined the history of evangelicalism’s — both liberal and conservative — effect on former President Jimmy Carter’s political success and failures.
“How it is that the very [evangelical] people who helped catapult [Carter] to the White House in 1976 turned so drastically…rapidly against him four years later?” questioned Balmer, who is currently working on a book addressing Carter’s faith and the presidency.
Balmer explained that the impetus behind his book really began while he was in college shortly after Carter arrived on the national scene. “Here was someone who claimed to be a born-again Christian and isn’t ashamed to say so, which at that time was a rather new thing, at least for us evangelicals in the Midwest.”
Once, when the former President was asked about faith’s compatibility with politics, Balmer relayed that Carter responded, “I think every one of us in our own lives has inherit conflicts built in as we equate our Christian beliefs with our worldly responsibilities.”
Similarly, “In positioning himself for the presidential campaign, Carter frequently invoked the vocabulary of evangelicals. As a born-again Christian, he told reporters for the National Courier, ‘I don’t want anything that is not God’s will for my life.’”
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