Is Jimmy Carter to blame (or the last straw) for the progressive evangelicals leap to the right- PB/TK
The weakness of the religious left: How progressive evangelicals ceded moral authority to the right wing – April 9 2017
Last January Dave Brat — the Virginia Republican who snatched Eric Cantor’s congressional seat in a primary challenge, now best known for having women in his grill — claimed that Republicans “own the entire Biblical tradition.” That triggered a predictable storm of partisan outrage, which mostly missed the point. Like it or not, if you take “the Biblical tradition” to mean “evangelical Protestantism,” Brat was right. The GOP owns it. It may seem inevitable now, but as recently as 1980 it was anything but.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Protestantism’s first appearance, with Martin Luther’s Reformation, and for most of those five centuries Protestantism has been spread across the political map. It’s been the default religion in the United States from the beginning, and every party has claimed its mantle. There’s a strong Protestant tradition on the right, but the greatest progressive president America never had — three-time Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan — was also a Bible-thumping evangelical. The really surprising thing about our own age isn’t the strength of the religious right. It’s the weakness of the religious left.
Half a century after Bryan’s death, the Democrats once again nominated a bona fide, born-again evangelical for president. Jimmy Carter promised moral renewal to a post-Watergate America. His election poster — “J. C. Can Save America!” — was a joke, but not just that. A flood of political novices volunteered for the campaign. Pat Robertson, then just a televangelist without much of a political profile, interviewed Carter on his show, and later claimed, “Carter was the one who activated me and a lot of others.” Unprecedented evangelical turnout in the early primaries and caucuses gave him the nomination, and, in an unexpectedly close general election, evangelical voters put him over the top. America’s new religious left was on the march.
Continue to salon.com article: http://www.salon.com/2017/04/09/the-weakness-of-the-religious-left-how-progressive-evangelicals-ceded-moral-authority-to-the-right-wing/
