Apparently, it’s time for people to start taking vacations.
The Lutheran Public Radio team that produces the “Crossroads” podcast week after week is taking some time off. Thus, there is no GetReligion podcast in this slot today.
At the same time, I am headed due west with my family for a week or more. However, several weeks ago I was a guest on the Engage 360 podcast created by Denver Seminary, the campus where I taught media studies classes in the early 1990s. The topic — the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter — was directly linked to many discussions on this weblog about evangelicals, journalism and American politics IApple podcast link here).
The question, of course, is this: WHICH legacy of Jimmy Carter?
In this podcast, we really didn’t spend much time on Carter the politician — even though his arrival as a centrist Southern Democrat was important. He has continued to evolve toward more progressive positions on moral and social issues (like his party), but not to the same degree. Hold that thought.
We talked quite a bit about Carter’s impact on American evangelicalism and, in particular, the role he played in forcing American journalists to wrestle with the complex world of evangelicalism. When many evangelicals rejected the reality of Jimmy Carter the president, as opposed to the candidate, he also helped fuel the creation of the Religious Right.
Let’s start with journalism. As I have written before:
I’ll never forget the night when an anchor at ABC News – faced with Democrat Jimmy Carter talking about his born-again Christian faith – solemnly looked into the camera and told viewers that ABC News was investigating this phenomenon (born-again Christians) and would have a report in a future newscast.
What percentage of the American population uses the term “born again” to describe their faith? … I mean, Carter wasn’t telling America that he was part of an obscure sect, even though many journalists were freaked out by this words — due to simple ignorance (or perhaps bias).
I was a student at Baylor University at that time and, yes I was active as a volunteer in the Carter campaign. He was already rather controversial among Southern Baptists — since he was a perfect example of the “moderate” wing of Southern Baptist life that would, during his presidency, lose control of America’s largest non-Catholic flock.
People (journalists even) often forget that the Southern Baptist Convention was once — to name a hot-button issue — rather mildly pro-abortion rights and openly opposed to Catholics on many issues linked to private education. Back then, Southern Baptists tended to define themselves in terms of religious experience and total freedom in terms of church polity (that is part of the Baptist heritage, after all), with no need for explicit agreements on many points of Christian doctrine.
As I have said many times, when I was growing up in Texas there was a spectrum of Southern Baptists that ranged from true fundamentalists all the way over to folks who were Unitarians with better preaching skills.
The rise of Jimmy Carter helped change Baptist life (and the wider evangelical world) in terms of politics and doctrine. See this chunk of an “On Religion” column on the topic:
There is no record that political pollsters in ancient Rome even knew that Jesus of Nazareth told a Jewish leader named Nicodemus that he needed to be “born again” in order see the Kingdom of God. …
But America changed forever when Bible Belt Democrat Jimmy Carter shocked journalists by saying that he had been “born again.” That firestorm led Newsweek editors to grab a phrase from pollster George Gallup and proclaim 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical.” Lots of politicos noticed, including a rising Republican star named Ronald Reagan. The rest is a long story.
“The news media and polling agencies realized that the ‘born again’ vote was a seminal political factor,” noted historian Thomas Kidd, in a recent address at Wheaton College, the alma mater of the late evangelist Billy Graham.
“The Gallup organization,” he added, “began asking people whether they had been ‘born again.’ The emergence of EVANGELICAL as a common term in news coverage of politics was a major landmark in the development of the contemporary evangelical crisis. … The media’s frequent use of ‘born again’ and ‘evangelical’ connected those terms to political behavior.”
More some evangelical insiders relished this attention, while denominational leaders and other mainstream evangelicals failed to realize that “they were losing control of the public’s perception of their movement,” said the scholar from Baylor University. But one thing would become crystal clear, according to Kidd’s new book, “Who is An Evangelical?” His bottom line: “The gospel did not make news. But politics did.”
