With the passing of Jimmy Carter on Sunday, we have lost one of our last surviving connections to a hinge moment in American political history—a time when a majority of evangelical Americans voted Democratic in a presidential election.
At a time when Caligulan GOP crime lord and accused serial sexual assaulter Donald Trump—whose religious affiliation and observance could charitably be described as erratic—commands well over 80 percent support in the same voting bloc, this seems like extraterrestrial lore.
Carter's appeal among the true-believing Protestants of the 1970s—and his subsequent rapid descent into pariah status among the same group—reveals instructive portents of the unshackled resentment politics that in remarkably short order secured the hard-right political profile of modern American evangelicalism.
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