Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to like in BL Classics. On today’s National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, Hal Wingo’s words from our November 1976 issue remind us of Carter’s transformation of the perception of the Southern Baptist denomination during his rise to presidency.
Whatever else history may finally decide about Jimmy Carter, it should surely credit him with shaking the regional dust off the words “Southern Baptist.”
Let the record reflect that what George Washington Carver did for peanuts, Jimmy Carter’s “religion on his shirt sleeve” did for his brethren in the faith, whatever they may have thought of him. No one, not even Billy Graham, ever came close to creating the public awareness and curiosity about Southern Baptists that Carter managed from the moment he burst on the national scene in 1976.
And his lustings in Playboy notwithstanding, Carter remains the personification of a Southern Baptist to most Americans. The spotlight that fell on him, in fact, brought the Southern Baptist Convention into a prominence it had never before enjoyed – or endured.
Why? Because most Americans had never seen a Southern Baptist up that close before. Even though the denomination is part and parcel of the social and political life of every Southern town and claims representation in all the other states, the pickings north of the Mason-Dixon line are slim indeed. Consider: There are 22 million people living in the greater New York Metropolitan area, and the Baptist Convention of New York (covering New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut) numbers only 18,000 followers. Among the 45 million people – one out of every five Americans – who live along the eastern seaboard from Boston to Washington, there aren’t enough Southern Baptists to fill Baylor Stadium.
And since most of the national press is located in this eastern corridor, a presidential candidate who happened to be Southern Baptist was a challenge to the reportorial and interpretive skills of the nation’s press. Some of them met the challenge honorably while others never got past a misunderstanding of “born again.”
“In some of the more cynical circles of Manhattan, it was suddenly chic to be southern and nothing less than politically prescient to be Southern Baptist.”
The press was nonetheless obliged to deal with Carter’s religion. He was the one, after all, who said that it shaped everything else in his life – his politics, his social attitudes, his priorities. There was nothing for journalists to do but get on the bandwagon and discover the joys of being southern and religious.
Not long after it became clear to even Jerry Brown and Mo Udall that Carter was going to sweep through the New York convention like Sherman through Georgia, the press began looking for new ways to extoll the South. The New York Times actually devoted half a page to the greater glories of grits, complete with mouth-watering recipes. And in some of the more cynical circles of Manhattan it was suddenly chic to be southern and nothing less than politically prescient to be Southern Baptist. On more than one occasion this year I had people say to me, “You mean you really are one?” and then proceed to stare as if I were going to sprout wings or babble in tongues.
At an only slightly more sophisticated level, this was the early reaction of much of the national press. The problem was that they had confronted a presidential candidate whose “manner of believing” was a complete enigma to most of them. Not only was Carter southern, and a peanut farmer, but he admitted without a trace of embarrassment that he was first and foremost a “born again” Christian.
This upfront confession of a frequently misunderstood faith explains much of the difference in the way that religion was a factor in the election of 1976 as opposed to John Kennedy’s race in 1960. Everybody has some idea of what a Catholic is, and Kennedy’s only real hurdle was to convince a segment of the voters that he wouldn’t be taking orders from the Pope. He did that effectively in his famous encounter with the Baptist Ministers Conference in Houston, and the religious issue was pretty much behind him from then on.
But with Carter the problem ran deeper for two reasons: the electorate didn’t really understand what a Southern Baptist is, and Carter’s religion was apparently much more central to his life than Kennedy’s was to him. It is not known that anyone ever stayed up nights worrying about Kennedy’s being fanatically religious. When James Reston made this point in the New York Times, however, he heard from one interested dissenter: Rose Kennedy responded that Kennedy was indeed a deeply religious man, that he had prayed every day!
As Carter’s prominence grew, so did the stories dealing with his church. The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, this year got much bigger play in the New York papers than ever before and Time magazine did a two page feature attempting to explain who these Baptists were anyway. The stories were often objective, fair and sometimes admiring of the denomination. Some of them even understood what Carter meant by being “born again.”
Others are still trying to figure that one out. Not long after Carter won the nomination, New York Magazine produced a cover story entitled “Jimmy Carter: Thrice Born – a psychohistory of his mystical rebirth.” In the article, two respected scholars reported on their personal interviews with Carter and how they can to the conclusion that Carter was “born again” for the first time when his father died in 1953 and a second time on a mission trip to New England for the Home Mission Board in 1967. By this reckoning Carter could have been expected to experience a third rebirth the night of his nomination and a fourth on election day. (And all this time Baptists thought that Catholics were the mystics.)
But journalists love catch phrases, and “born again” quickly became the most popular description of the season. More often than he was called a peanut farmer, Carter was labeled a born again Southern Baptist, and from that accurate beginning sprang other uses of the words that left theology waiting to be reclaimed. Theater advertisements on New York radio soon began beseeching audiences to “be born again – see ‘Godspell.'” A journalist friend of mine proposed that a terrific idea for a new magazine would be one called Born Again, with limitless editorial possibilities: “Born again with a new career,” “Born again with a new wardrobe,” “Born again with a new mate,” etc.
“On more than one occasion this year I had people say to me, ‘You mean you really are one?’ and then proceed to stare as if I were going to sprout wings or babble in tongues.”
Somewhere along the way Carter’s purer protestations of the rebirth experience almost got lost in the shuffle. Because he did make such an obvious point of his own religion (and his mother complained that his religion was being overdone in the press), Carter’s Sunday morning church attendance and public prayers were initially met with a healthy dollop of skepticism. One midwestern bureau chief for a national magazine spent two weeks following Carter on the road and reported to his editors in New York that he felt Carter really believed he was Jesus Christ. Other reporters feared that Carter was using his religion to get the “evangelical vote,” which in itself became a major new bloc of the electorate to contend with.
Everytime Carter went to church, his morning prayers and Sunday School observations were dutifully reported by the wire services, news magazines and television networks. On occasion he actually taught the lesson for his Bible class, and reporters soon noted that he brought some of the same mannerisms and methods of the Bible class into his campaign speeches. Often at political rallies Carter would ask questions for which there were simple, obvious answers, waiting for the response from the audience. Other times he would ask for a show of hands in response to a question. Observers who had sat with him through the Sunday School sessions dubbed his campaign style “Southern Baptist dialectic.”
But the newsmen had to admit they never found a real inconsistency between the public and private Carter on questions of his deepest personal beliefs. Not even after Playboy. Ironically, at just about the time the press began to perceive Carter’s religious sincerity (there may have been no conversions from all those hours spent in the Plains Baptist Church, but the skeptics about his religious convictions fell away for the most part), Carter’s stock among fellow Baptists and other evangelicals appeared to fade. While some took exception to his candor and his works, the language in the Playboy interview was reassuring to many who had wondered all along if anybody could be as consistently righteous as Carter appeared.
Years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm.” Probably so, but at the end of the Carter campaign the man and his religion seemed compatible to those who had followed him down the long months of the political trail. Religion was one thing on which he had never changed his point of view.
And in the process much had been written about the kind of church he represented, the kind of faith he claimed. Southern Baptists living far away from the encircling presence of the denomination could now confront that part of their identity without hearing “Southern what?” in response.
For that, if there had been nothing else, I say “Thank you, Jimmy.”
