We’re going to protect Christianity.
As the midterm elections approach, white evangelical Christians are a
key part of the Republican coalition and have stuck with the
president through a series of scandals.
Do you care if your president had an affair before he was president?
No.
I believe he’s president of the United States for a reason.
I think God put him there.
But 40 years ago, evangelicals were at the margins of American
politics.
I think the decision was made in 1979 that it was O.K. to be just
like every other citizen and to get involved in politics.
We think of evangelicals today as a major force in American society,
and certainly in American politics.
But in the mid-1970s they weren’t.
Evangelicals were not involved in politics, certainly not in any
organized way.
Many were not even registered to vote.
They considered politics dirty and, kind of,
beneath them.
Glory!
Hallelujah!
Until Jimmy Carter came along.
Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign put faith at the center of
the national conversation.
He read the Bible every night,
taught Sunday school,
and had occasionally preached at Robert Maddox’s church.
Questions were coming up about what kind of religion he had.
And he said, Well, I’m a born-again
Christian.
The most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ.
All throughout the press and everybody else wanted to know what
in the world that was, what kind of magic, what kind of-of a charade
would he have gone through.
We have checked on the religious meaning of
Carter’s profound experience.
It is described by other Baptists as a common
experience, not something out of the ordinary.
Being reborn does not mean having a vision or hearing the
voice of God.
The press seized on this and made a big deal out of it.
But for evangelical voters, it was an important moment.
To have a presidential candidate talk openly
about his faith. It was staggering.
As much as any American, Jimmy Carter made it respectable to be
born again.
There does seem to be a yearning for some kind of spiritual revival
in this country.
And planned or not, it could turn out that Jimmy
Carter’s religion will be a net plus.
And I believe that I can be a better president, if I am elected,
because of my faith.
Carter would become known as the first evangelical president.
Thank you very much for helping me get here and being the president
of the greatest country on earth.
But two years into Carter’s term, Rev. Maddox, now working at the
White House, met with a group of preachers and got a surprising
reaction.
Immediately, from the floor, just erupted.
Catcalls and boos and, and, you know, fists were shaking.
He has told us he’s religious, and he’s not.
I got back to the White House and began to say, friends,
we’ve got a big problem out there.
For me and for many other evangelicals, there was a
disconnect between his personal faith and public policy.
It turned out that some of Carter’s policies were more liberal than
many evangelicals had hoped for.
From a political standpoint, they were turned off.
One of his top aides was the woman who argued the Roe v. Wade case
before the Supreme Court.
He had a White House Conference on Families,
plural, and included gays and lesbians.
If you look at the world from the perspective of an evangelical
Christian, you have Roe v. Wade.
We no longer pray in school.
You have the desegregation of Christian colleges and academies.
All of these things come together and create a great deal of fear
about the loss of some kind of Christian nation.
And I believe in freedom of choice also but I believe you ought to
make the choice before you go to bed and commit sin.
Reverend Jerry Falwell would become the most well known of a new
movement of conservative preachers, who wanted a strong defense policy
abroad and traditional values at home.
We believe when a man marries a woman she is his obligation
for life.
It was a movement that harnessed the power of television.
Televangelism really erupted in the 1970s.
And Jerry Falwell was riding that wave.
Jerry Falwell turned a small Virginia church of 35 into a
Christians communications empire.
A Virginia television preacher with an audience of millions.
As the 1980 election approached, Falwell stepped directly into
politics and formed an alliance with a group of political
operatives, including Paul Weyrich.
Weyrich makes a statement saying that there really is a moral
majority of voters out at there that need to be tapped, need to be
organized.
And Falwell says, I think that’s what we should call
this new movement.
We should call it Moral Majority.
It’s a political action committee, registered as such, just like those
of labor unions or any other organization.
A new political machine that’s anti-abortion, anti-ERA,
anti-gay rights, and for what he calls a Moral America.
Cal Thomas, a journalist in Washington,
went to work for Falwell.
He invited me down to Lynchburg, Virginia, saying, we’re going to
lead a movement that’s going to change America.
Now, who couldn’t be involved in something like that?
We were hoping to accomplish the political organization
of evangelicals, fundamentalists, conservative Jews, and
conservative Catholics into a large voting block that would
elect like-minded people to public office and restore a sense of
patriotism and love for the country.
We can—and so help us God, we will—make America great again.
The candidate they backed was a twice-married former Hollywood
actor who signed a liberal abortion law
as California governor.
There was great deal of reservation about Ronald Reagan.
God put us here for some reason...
The turning point was a gathering of a group called
the Religious Roundtable.
I’m sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the
perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists
coming out of the closet.
It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet,
out of the churches and change America.
And Reagan stood up and, he said famously, I know this group can’t
endorse me...
But I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse
you and what you’re doing.
That rippled throughout churches and religious establishments
throughout the country.
It was like, come up out of the catacombs, you know.
You don’t have to be silent anymore.
As in no election past, the evangelical right wing is up
in arms, out in force this year.
175,000 worshipers sang, prayed and marched
around the Capitol Mall.
They said their purpose was to call the national leadership
back to God.
We have a threefold primary responsibility. Number one:
get people saved. Number two: get them baptized.
And number three: get them registered to vote.
They hadn’t participated in the political life of the country
for a long time.
And Jerry gave them permission to do that again.
Reagan and the Republicans pledged to appoint pro-life judges and
support prayer in public school.
For really the first time in any significant way, evangelicalism
becomes interlocked with the Republican Party.
Looking at the Democratic platform and the things that, that, uhm,
Jimmy Carter supports, I’m... I’m not sure that Jesus Christ,
well, I know that Christ would not support that platform.
But in the end, Reagan didn’t follow through on many of the
issues evangelicals cared about.
Cal Thomas, who left Moral Majority after a few years, came to feel
that the organization was too concerned with maintaining access,
and that political influence wasn’t the best way to change the country.
Evangelicals liked George Bush.
They liked Ronald Reagan.
They’ve liked other Republicans in the past,
but they never seem to be able to close the deal on the
issues that evangelicals care about.
In the long term, things have not really
fundamentally changed.
They’ve gotten worse, in their view.
We’ve gone from same sex marriage to transgenderism,
60 million abortions.
Our Christian heritage will be cherished, protected...
And then along comes Donald Trump, the antithesis of everything that
evangelicals stand for — multiple affairs, crude language,
you name it.
And, uh, a lot of them have made a bargain that
it didn’t matter anymore.
Dad explained that when he walked into the voting booth,
he wasn’t electing a Sunday school teacher or a pastor.
It was just as tough a sell with evangelicals to get them to vote
for somebody like Ronald Reagan, who had been married twice,
as it was for me to get people to vote and support Trump.
It was the same dynamic.
It was like history repeated itself.
Today, Jerry Falwell Jr. leads the university his father founded,
and has emerged as a prominent evangelical voice in support of
President Trump.
I think Jesus made it clear that you use your common sense,
and your God-given brain,
to decide who will be the best political leader.
I don’t look to the teachings of Jesus
for what my political beliefs should be.
I don’t think he wanted us to.
We need somebody tough, we need somebody who has the right
position on the issues.
He promised to appoint strong conservatives to the federal courts
at every level and President Trump came through.
He’s not only done everything he said he was going to do
but he’s done more.
The president is preparing to reveal his decision to recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s capitol.
The announcement fulfills a campaign promise
for President Trump and is popular among evangelical Christians...
I think he’s going to end up being
our greatest president since George Washington.
While Trump still has the support of more than 70 percent of white
evangelicals, some worry that what started as a religious movement is
is now seen as just another political constituency.
The evangelicals are missing a greater point.
If you’re not careful, the political activism overwhelms the
primary message, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ,
the only thing that is able to truly change a life
and by extension change a nation.
And no politician can fill that role.