The stakes in the presidential election could not have been higher.
The American economy was stagnating. Several years of the worst inflation in decades have made every trip to the grocery store a painful experience. Federal spending was out of control. Drug use was on the rise. The country was in a tense standoff with Iran and Russia, with no resolution in sight for either conflict.
But Christians were particularly concerned about the morality of the nation. Abortion and divorce rates were rising. Opinions about sexuality and gender are changing rapidly and pornography consumption is widespread.
The outgoing president was of no help. The White House was occupied by a practicing Democrat who was viewed by many politically conservative evangelicals as weak and ineffective. He was more influenced, they believed, by the secular liberals in his administration than by anyone with a biblical worldview. He would not resist the forces of evil in the world, evangelicals decided. In effect, he let secular humanists persecute American churches and jeopardize the First Amendment rights of Christians.
It was time to defend freedom. It was time to defend God. And it was time to “Make America Great Again.” in the words of the campaign slogan of the Republican candidate that most of them supported.
This Republican challenger also professed Christianity. But he went to church much less than the outgoing Democratic president, and he was divorced. He “was not the greatest Christian who ever walked the earth,” said one of his supporters. conceded, “but we really had no choice.” When it came to choosing candidates, evangelical Christians once cared most about their character, but now they can no longer afford to be choosy. In times of crisis, problems mattered more than religious devotion. They didn’t want a Sunday school teacher in the White House; they wanted someone who could produce results.
And so, they voted for… Ronald Reagan.
Despite strange parallels to the present, the year I described is 1980, not 2024. But the moral calculations made by evangelical voters in choosing Reagan over Democratic President Jimmy Carter set the stage for dilemmas policies that Christians face today. .
At the heart of these questions is whether evangelicals should vote as a bloc, uniting behind the candidate who can achieve our legislative or judicial agenda. Does advancing this agenda justify voting for a morally compromised candidate? Are evangelicals obliged vote for the candidate who shares our views on abortion, religious freedom and LGBTQ issues?
In 1980, leaders of the Christian Right said yes. The issues mattered more than the personal character of the candidates, they believed. Christians not only had the option but dutythey said, to vote for the candidate who would obtain the best results, and not for the one who would make the best pastor.
This argument may sound very familiar today, but it was new among evangelicals in 1980. Just four years earlier, almost every evangelical who had commented on the 1976 election—whether supporting Carter or Republican Gerald Ford—had declared that what mattered far more than any position was the personal faith and moral character of the candidate. And they did not necessarily think that Christians would or even should vote en bloc for a party or a candidate.
“Christians in particular should be concerned about the ethical and religious beliefs of those who aspire to the presidency. » Christianity today declared in April 1976 in a statement typical of the time. “The basis on which a leader makes his decisions is more important than the side he takes in today’s fleeting controversies.”
CT cared about political issues, of course. In 1976, the magazine published several editorials expressing great concern about abortion and other moral questions. In Eternity magazine, theologian Carl Henry wrote a list of signs of national moral decline that he hoped the next president would address. But ultimately, the editors of Christianity today and several other evangelical magazines (including Monthly bad mood, Christian lifeAnd Eternity) concluded that character and faith mattered more than separate issues.
In 1976, evangelicals were particularly concerned about their “ethical and religious beliefs” because they felt they had been misled in 1972. That year, more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters supported Richard Nixon, for then learning that his talk of “law and order” and the need for public morality was not accompanied by personal moral integrity or respect for the law. Four years later, they were primarily looking for a candidate with a clear moral compass and therefore sought to avoid policy litmus tests.
Thus, there was no united evangelical voting bloc in 1976. The evangelical vote was split evenly between Ford and Carter, with Northern evangelicals more likely to choose Ford and Southern evangelicals more likely to support their Northern compatriots. South. After all, both men could plausibly claim personal faith and moral integrity.
However, for some politically minded evangelicals, this division seemed like a wasted opportunity. Evangelical vote was a ‘sleeping giant,’ analyst says wrote; If evangelicals united behind a single candidate, they could swing the election.
The dream of taking political power was hard to resist, especially as the country was experiencing seemingly inexorable moral decline. “We have together, with the Protestants and the Catholics, enough votes to run the country,” said Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson. declared evangelicals in 1979. “And when people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we’ll take over.”
To “take power,” Christians had to be able to dictate a legislative agenda to Congress, which meant they could not rely on “nice guys” who maintained impeccable lifestyles but voted the wrong way. They had to behave like any other political interest group.
When their newly formed political action committees (like the Moral Majority PAC) donated to campaigns, they wanted assurance that their contributions would buy them the right votes. They wanted something more than good people in Washington; they wanted results. “Christians must keep America great by…passing laws that will protect the freedom of its citizens,” Jerry Falwell Sr. said. declared in 1980.
In the short term, the strategy appears to be working. Evangelical votes helped put Reagan in the White House and gave Republicans control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter century. Over the next 40 years, Republicans won more presidential elections than Democrats and controlled both houses of Congress more often than they had since the early 1930s.
But most of the Christian Right’s program has not been realized. And even when conservative evangelicals got the laws or court rulings they wanted, they felt frustrated that they couldn’t change the cultural direction of the country. Even the overthrow of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022 appears not having reduced abortion rates in most states.
Politically, with decades of hindsight, evangelicals’ decision to prioritize policy over character has produced mixed results. But it had a profound effect on the Church, because it transformed evangelicals into a voting bloc. This is how evangelicals are increasingly perceived outside the churchand this is often how we perceive ourselves too.
The only way Christian Right leaders could muster millions of votes starting in 1980 was to treat the Church like a political machine. With this model in place, it was inevitable that politicians – even Christians – would begin to treat evangelicals not as citizens of a heavenly kingdom or as members of a blood-bought church of Christ, but as a political interest group whose votes would be cast. to the candidate who ticked the right boxes on a political questionnaire.
This dynamic has also exacerbated racial divisions among American Christians. It quickly became clear that the vast majority of black Christians would not make the same partisan voting choices as white evangelicals. Today, in any political conversation, evangelical usually means “white” although many evangelicals are not white.
It is not too late to reverse the choice made by Christian Right leaders in 1980. We can choose a different path again this year. Whatever politicians or the media may say about the “evangelical vote,” we do not have to treat the Church as a voting bloc. We need not boil down our concerns about the spiritual and moral health of our nation to a small handful of policies that might not pass even if our candidates won.
After all, the policy goals that led many evangelicals to support Reagan in 1980 were elusive after his election and remain so today. Evangelicals began to function as a voting bloc, but America’s moral crisis could not be resolved by a political platform. The same will prove true this year, regardless of the election outcome.
The more we reflect on the gospel, the more we will realize that for citizens of a higher realm, no approach to voting can produce the moral renewal that can only come from Christ and his Church. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote. But that means we can make different choices on Election Day. Many important things are at stake in this election, but the survival of God’s kingdom certainly is not.
Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the author of The politics of the cross: a Christian alternative to partisanship.
