When the aging Baptist preacher John Leland took to his diary in December 1826, he recorded “two remarkable events” that had transpired over the previous year. The first was that two former presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, had died on the Fourth of July. Leland marveled that this was “fifty years after they signed the Declaration of Independence.”
The other was less noteworthy to most Americans, but to Leland it was significant: “In the state of Vermont, the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor are both Baptist preachers. . . . This is a new thing in the world.” That Baptists would hold such esteemed positions in government was previously unthinkable to Leland. After all, only one Baptist had signed the hallowed Declaration of Independence.
Leland could never have conceived that 150 years later, in 1976, a Baptist Sunday school teacher from rural Georgia would be elected to the nation’s highest office. Newsweek called it the “Year of the Evangelical,” but the bicentennial also marked a Baptist coming of age in American politics.
After 200 years, with the combined political, cultural, and economic strengths of the American Baptist tradition, a “born again” Baptist had finally arrived in the White House.
Evangelical and Baptist
Georgia governor Jimmy Carter wasn’t the first Baptist to be elected to the Oval Office. Warren G. Harding and Harry Truman were also members of Baptist churches. However, unlike his political predecessors, Carter was unashamedly evangelical: He routinely testified to the transformative power of the rebirth in his life and shared his faith in Jesus Christ with others. Against the counsel of his campaign advisors, the folksy Southern peanut farmer occasionally called himself a “born again Christian” to reporters, prompting some to research the meaning of “born again.”
After 200 years, a “born again” Baptist had finally arrived in the White House.
Rooted historically in the Great Awakening of the 18th century, the word “evangelical” was less of a political identity or sociological term and more of a theological commitment drawn from the Greek word for gospel, euangelion, meaning “good news.” As Carter once told an audience in New Hampshire, “The most important thing in my life is my belief and my commitment in God.” With an emphasis on things like conversion, the Bible, and activism, Carter stood apart from Harding, for example, whose reputation was tarnished by scandal and infidelity.
In short, Carter was the first Baptist president to actually publicize and prioritize his faith. He even quoted the Bible when he announced his candidacy at the National Press Club in 1974. Not since Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan in 1908 had a candidate been so outspoken about his born-again faith on the campaign trail. Although “evangelical” and “Baptist” weren’t necessarily synonymous terms, Carter embraced both.
Carter was also a third-generation Southern Baptist, and he walked and talked like one. “As President,” he declared in a Baptist Press interview, “I would try to exemplify in every moment of my life the attitudes and actions of a Christian.”
On the one hand, Carter had extensive connections to moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention world. On the other hand, to mainstream America, he was still a conservative. In 1975, the Los Angeles Times dubbed Carter “The Religious Moralist Candidate for President.”
In the end, it was a winning formula. Following the Watergate scandal and a malaise from the Vietnam War, Carter rode a wave of evangelical support to the White House, winning over the American public with his personal integrity, his support for civil rights and poverty relief, and his sincere faith. Drawing together black Protestant and white evangelical voters, and carrying every Southern state except Virginia, Carter narrowly defeated incumbent Gerald Ford, who still had the stain of the man he pardoned, Richard Nixon.
Southern and Northern
Although Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson were also Southerners, Carter was the first president from the Deep South elected since the Civil War. However, Carter represented much more than the emergence of political power in the New South. As disillusioned as conservatives eventually became with Carter for his views on abortion and gay rights (spawning the rise of the Christian Right and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980), it’s easy to overlook how much Carter reflected the Baptist church in which he was raised. In fact, his election in 1976 was something of a Baptist team effort, showcasing the breadth of the American Baptist tradition.
Most obviously, Carter’s public faith was fostered in his local Southern Baptist church. After his conversion experience in the late ’60s, Carter practiced door-to-door evangelism in Pennsylvania. In preparation for the Billy Graham Atlanta crusade of 1973, Carter, then governor of Georgia, ranked “among the first to offer his services” for his fellow Southern Baptist.
Missional to the core, Carter was equally committed to his local church. Once, when a journalist suggested the lack of black members at Plains Baptist indicated latent racism, Carter replied,
I think my best approach is to stay within the church and try to change the attitudes which I abhor. Now if it was a country club, I would have to quit. But this is not my church; it’s God’s church.
At least in 1976, Carter’s beliefs about salvation, revival, and the church were shaped significantly by the Southern Baptist Convention.
However, Carter also stood on the shoulders of many Northern Baptists, some of whom, ironically, laid the groundwork for a Southern Baptist presidency. As it turns out, Carter wasn’t the first socially conscious Baptist to welcome big-city journalists into his Sunday school classroom. For decades, John D. Rockefeller led his famous men’s Bible class at Fifth Avenue Baptist in Manhattan.
At least in 1976, Carter’s beliefs about salvation, revival, and the church were shaped significantly by the Southern Baptist Convention.
In the same church, teaching another class, was Charles Evans Hughes, who would later serve as governor of New York, chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, and inaugural president of the Northern Baptist Convention. With the Rockefellers’ help, Hughes eventually became Harding’s secretary of state.
In 1924, the year Carter was born, Baptists were determining the course of the nation and its foreign policy for the first time. The Rockefellers effectively helped to normalize Baptist political leadership. And as it so happened, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson, Nelson, was Gerald Ford’s vice president—only the third Baptist vice president in American history.
Black and White
Without the money of the Rockefeller Foundation, and without the influence of the black Baptist church, Carter would likely never have united black and white evangelical voters in the South. John D. Rockefeller gave so generously to an upstart female seminary in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta (a school for young black women, many of them born in slavery and illiterate) that they offered to call it Rockefeller College. He declined, opting instead to name it Spelman Seminary after his father-in-law, Harvey Spelman, who served on the executive committee of the American Freedmen’s Union Commission.
In 1924, the year Carter was born, the seminary was renamed Spelman College, and it counted Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother and grandmother as its alumni. The legacy of King, himself a preacher at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and a symbol of the civil rights movement, was on full display at the conclusion of the revivalistic 1976 Democratic Convention, when Carter and his running mate, Walter Mondale, shared the stage with Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Sr.
With the power of Graham revivalism and the help of King’s legacy, and on a foundation laid by the Rockefellers, Carter’s advocacy for public faith and racial justice propelled him toward the White House.
Conservative and Progressive
In Georgia, where Baptist Jesse Mercer wrote the article on religious liberty in the state constitution, Carter inherited a tradition of religious freedom that allowed him to balance his own conservative evangelical convictions with a plurality of political views in the state. The Baptist political tradition in Georgia was indeed wide enough to also include progressive Baptists like theologian and activist Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farm in southwest Georgia who introduced Carter to Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller.
With the power of Graham revivalism, and the help of King’s legacy, and upon a foundation laid by the Rockefellers, Carter’s advocacy for public faith and racial justice propelled him toward the White House.
Carter’s political persona was shaped significantly by Baptists of all kinds. By 1980, the conservative alliances that catapulted Carter to the White House had crumbled, including the unofficial support from Graham, who instead tacitly backed Reagan. However, 1976 truly proved to be the Year of the Baptists. For America’s bicentennial, with an evangelical vote split between Carter and Ford, Baptists of seemingly all stripes united around one of their own to deliver the first Southern Baptist into the presidency.
Past and Present
Today, Carter is still looked on as one of the few “evangelical” presidents in U.S. history. But his distinct Baptist identity was just as influential for his presidency. In characteristically Baptist fashion, Carter’s Secret Service handle while in office was “The Deacon.” Nevertheless, he served only one term, providing yet another reminder that, throughout American political history, Baptists have more often played the role of kingmaker than that of king.
In this regard, not much has changed since John Leland commented on Jefferson 200 years ago. With the 250th birthday of the United States fast approaching in 2026, and with still relatively few Baptists in the government’s executive branch, Baptists should once again reflect on the outspoken faith of Jimmy Carter, when the word “evangelical” was less of a political ideology and more of a description of someone’s belief in the resurrecting power of the saving gospel.
The call to bear witness to our faith in Christ and the miracle of the rebirth is just as important today as it was in 1976—with or without a Baptist in the White House.
The Gospel Coalition