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| Author: | Michael J. Gerson, Roger Hertog Senior Fellow |
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November 2, 2007
The first time I shook a president’s hand, I was a 16-year-old waiting for hours in honored anticipation at the St. Louis riverfront. The president was Jimmy Carter. His forthright claim to be “born again” generated sympathy among many evangelicals, as well as controversy in the media. One liberal theologian, Albert Outler, argued at the time that religious conservatives “want a society ruled by those who know what the Word of God is. The technical name for that is ‘theocracy,’ and their Napoleon, whether he likes it or not, is Jimmy Carter.”
It was perhaps the only time that Jimmy Carter has been compared to Napoleon. And the American theocracy did not arrive — though the charge has been made again and again in the decades since.
For me, Jimmy Carter was not a theocratic hope but an antidote to the moral emptiness of Nixon Republicanism. Carter was mildly pro-choice, but the party platform he ran on recognized the “religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion.”
By 1984, something had changed. The Democratic platform declared abortion “a fundamental right.” The Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, began attacking religious conservatives in surefire applause lines. He talked of “radical preachers” and “extremists who control the Republican Party” who could “unleash an orgy of religious intolerance in our land.” This was intended to be offensive — evangelical attendance at orgies is generally low — and it worked. In the 1984 election, I volunteered for the Reagan campaign.
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