Today's funeral for former President Jimmy Carter follows nearly two weeks of reminiscence about the legacy of the Georgia Democrat who held the White House for one term in the late '70s. Some of it has been hagiographic, especially in light of the dramatic contrast between Carter's genuine faith decency and Donald Trump's sociopathy and obviously fake Christianity. But much of the remembrance has been refreshingly nuanced, reflecting both on Carter's failures in office alongside his many accomplishments, many in his post-presidency. One of the most important legacies he'll leave behind is a complex one, though it is rooted in one of Carter's best traits, his commitment to anti-racism. During his presidency, Carter inadvertently revealed a fundamental truth about white evangelical culture: its guiding star is not faith or morality, but racism.
Hard as it may be to believe, Carter won the majority of evangelical voters in 1976. Being a white evangelical Christian from the South, he read to many as one of theirs. Things shifted in 1978, however, over an issue that seems obscure now, but was a big deal to white evangelicals at the time: school desegregation.
The lies about Carter and the IRS had traction with white evangelicals because they touched on a larger truth: he was opposed to racial segregation and white supremacy.
In January 1976, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, a Christian school that banned Black students. In 1978, the IRS tried to expand this by proposing a rule that would strip schools of tax-exempt status if they didn't meet very conservative criteria for including students of color. Careful readers have likely already picked up on the fact that Carter wasn't involved in any meaningful way in these IRS moves. Gerald Ford was still president when Bob Jones University was penalized, the policy being enforced was developed during Richard Nixon's administration. In 1978, Carter wasn't aware that IRS leadership was upping enforcement against segregation academies. These were the countless private — often religious — schools that opened after Brown v. Board of Education to recreate the whites-only education environment racist parents preferred.
But it didn't matter. Evangelical leaders hated Carter because he was publicly anti-racist and supported gay rights and women's equality. They used the school segregation issue to turn white evangelical voters against Carter.
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As historian Randall Balmer explained at Religion News Service, the sleight of hand regarding the timeline was only the beginning of the mendacity religious right leaders brought to their campaign against Carter. Jerry Falwell openly invented an exchange between himself and Carter that never happened:
Falwell began recounting to various audiences and political rallies across the country how he had asked Carter why “practicing homosexuals” served on the White House staff. Carter, according to Falwell, replied, “I am president of all the American people and I believe I should represent everyone.” Falwell’s rejoinder: “Why don’t you have some murderers and bank robbers and so forth to represent?”
As a tape recording of the White House gathering demonstrated, however, the president made no such comment. Falwell, in fact, had fabricated the entire exchange in an apparent attempt to discredit Carter in the eyes of evangelicals.
In this, we can see the seeds of the modern, MAGA-infused religious right, where lying is treated as an honorable weapon against Democrats, who are routinely painted as a demonic force. But it's also telling that, while Falwell and fellow Christian right leaders swiftly pivoted attention to gender and sexuality issues, the initial hook to get evangelical voters to hate Carter started with outrage over school desegregation.
The lies about Carter and the IRS had traction with white evangelicals because they touched on a larger truth: he was opposed to racial segregation and white supremacy. He gave a speech on the 25th anniversary of Brown v. Board where he acknowledged that "racial segregation still exists in our schools, and so does discrimination in housing and in other aspects of human life," but also called on the audience to "be even more determined" to fight for racial equality. Carter also made a lot of high-profile moves to welcome Black people into American leadership, such as appointing Black civil rights leader Andrew Young to be the United Nations ambassador and appointing the first Black woman, Amalya Kearse, to be an appellate judge.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan beat Carter with a campaign that may seem subtle by Trumpian standards but winked heavily at those who were still bitter over the end of Jim Crow. He kicked off his campaign by giving a "states rights" speech near the location of an infamous Mississippi murder of three civil rights activists 16 years before. He noted that the state had been mostly Democratic and "I was a Democrat most of my life myself, but then decided that there were things that needed to be changed." He didn't mention what had sent so many white people from the Democratic to the Republican party, but he didn't need to. Everyone knew it was outrage over Democrats passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With these winks at white supremacy, Reagan won over evangelical voters and they've been loyal Republicans ever since.
In the past few decades, there's been a great forgetting in much of the media over how central racism was to the evangelical shift from left to right in those years. A new story was written, which made it less about race and more about gender and "family values." So many in the press started to believe the myth of the "moral" Christian right that they were genuinely shocked when white evangelicals turned out to be Trump's most stalwart supporters. After all, Trump is a chronic adulterer who laughs at religious believers behind their backs, but Christian right leaders regard him as close to a messiah figure.
This decades-ago history is clarifying. White evangelicalism has never been about morality or even really faith, but identity — specifically Whiteness. By conflating religious and racial identity, white evangelicals have put a moral gloss on a deeply immoral desire for white supremacy. That's why the election of Barack Obama as president was regarded as an apocalyptic event in the white evangelical community, giving rise to hysterical claims that Christians are being "persecuted." Racism underpins their escalating claims that they must "take back" the country by any means necessary, which includes regular nods to violence. There was a protesting-too-much quality when Jerry Falwell named his 1979 anti-Carter group "Moral Majority." When that movement became the backbone of MAGA 37 years later, it proved there was never anything moral about it.
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