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Carter quoted Jesus and famous theologians and connected it all to his policy pursuits, living out his own definition of what it means to be a self-professed Christian in American politics. As a candidate in 1976, Carter described himself as a “born-again Christian.” The reference is routine for many Protestants in the South who believe following Jesus means adopting a new version of oneself. To national media and voters unfamiliar with evangelical lexicon, it made Carter a curiosity.
“We saw ourselves as being very much cultural outcasts” as evangelicals in the mid-1970s, said Dartmouth College professor Randall Balmer, who has written extensively on Carter’s faith. The evangelical movement had not yet become a political force mostly aligned with Republicans, and “to have someone use our language to describe himself and still be taken seriously as a presidential candidate,” Balmer said, “was startling, really.”
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Carter’s unabashed evangelism was an outlier in a Democratic Party that grew more secular and pluralistic during his public life. Yet Carter advocated “absolute and total separation of church and state” and opposed public money for religious schools. Carter further distinguished himself from many evangelicals by criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and taking liberal stances on race relations, women’s rights and, as he grew older, LGBTQ rights.
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