2014/04/16 by Steven P. Miller · 3 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Religion and Society Interactions #Catholicism and Religious Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199777952.003.0003
openalex publication_date 2014/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
During the evangelical Seventies, born-again politics flourished—most famously in the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter. Yet Carter was just one of many evangelical political stories in the decade. The evangelical left competed with the much larger evangelical right to shape the meaning of born-again politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century and beyond. Progressive evangelicals, such as Ron Sider, thought time was on their side. Meanwhile, moderate evangelical politicians—such as John Anderson and Mark Hatfield—gained prominence. Carter rode this momentum into office. His most vocal critics turned out to be evangelicals themselves. Evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer revealed how the evangelical left's simmering kettle became the Christian Right's roiling pot. By the close of the 1970s, evangelical faith rested on the fault line of American political culture. As a result, politics became the dominant lens through which a generation of Americans encountered and evaluated born-again Christianity