The stakes within the presidential election couldn’t have been higher.
The American economy was stagnant. Several years of the worst inflation in many years made each trip to the food market a painful experience. Federal spending was uncontrolled. Drug use was on the rise. The country was in a tense standoff with each Iran and Russia, with no resolution to either conflict in sight.
But Christians were especially frightened concerning the nation’s morals. Abortion and divorce rates were on the rise. Views of sexuality and gender were changing rapidly, and pornography use was rampant.
The incumbent president was no help. The White House was occupied by a churchgoing Democrat who was seen by many politically conservative evangelicals as weak and ineffective. He was more influenced, they thought, by secular liberals in his administration than by anyone with a biblical worldview. He wouldn’t rise up to forces of evil on the earth, evangelicals decided. In fact, he was letting secular humanists persecute American churches and jeopardize Christians’ First Amendment rights.
It was time to rise up for freedom. It was time to rise up for God. And it was time to “make America great again,” within the words of the campaign slogan of the Republican candidate most of them got here to support.
This Republican challenger also professed Christianity. But he went to church loads lower than the Democratic incumbent, and he’d been divorced. He “was not the perfect Christian who ever walked the face of the earth,” certainly one of his supporters conceded, “but we actually didn’t have a selection.” When it got here to selecting candidates, evangelical Christians had once cared about character at first, but now they couldn’t afford to be choosy. In a crisis, issues mattered greater than religious devotion. They didn’t desire a Sunday school teacher within the White House; they wanted someone who could deliver results.
And so, they voted for … Ronald Reagan.
Despite eerie parallels to the current, the yr I’ve described is 1980, not 2024. But the moral calculations evangelical voters made as they selected Reagan over the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, set the stage for the political dilemmas Christians are wrestling with today.
At the guts of those questions is whether or not evangelicals should vote as a bloc, uniting behind whichever candidate is more likely to deliver our legislative or judicial agenda. Does advancing that agenda justify voting for a morally compromised candidate? Are evangelicals obligated to vote for the candidate who shares our views on abortion, religious liberty, and LGBTQ issues?
In 1980, leaders of the Christian Right said yes. Issues mattered greater than candidates’ personal characters, they believed. Christians had not only the choice however the duty, they said, to vote for the candidate who would deliver the perfect results, not the one who would make the perfect pastor.
This argument could seem very familiar today, however it was novel amongst evangelicals in 1980. Only 4 years earlier, nearly all evangelicals who had commented on the 1976 election—no matter whether or not they supported Carter or the Republican, Gerald Ford—had said that what mattered excess of any position was a candidate’s personal faith and moral character. And they hadn’t necessarily thought Christians would and even should vote as a bloc for one party or contender.
“Christians specifically should be concerned concerning the ethical and spiritual convictions of those that aspire to the presidency,” Christianity Today declared in April 1976 in a press release typical of the time. “The basis upon which a frontrunner makes his decisions is more essential than what side he takes in current transient controversies.”
CT cared about political issues, to ensure. In 1976, the magazine published several editorials expressing great concern about abortion and other moral issues. In Eternity magazine, the theologian Carl Henry wrote an inventory of signs of national moral decay that he hoped the following president would address. But ultimately, the editors of Christianity Today and several other other evangelical magazines (including Moody Monthly, Christian Life, and Eternity) concluded that character and faith mattered greater than discrete issues.
Evangelicals in 1976 were especially concerned about “ethical and spiritual convictions” because they felt they’d been duped in 1972. That yr, greater than 80 percent of white evangelical voters had supported Richard Nixon, only to learn that his talk of “law and order” and the necessity for public morality weren’t accompanied by personal moral integrity or respect for the law. Four years later, they most wanted a candidate with a transparent moral compass and accordingly sought to avoid policy litmus tests.
Thus, there was no united evangelical voting bloc in 1976. The evangelical vote was evenly divided between Ford and Carter, with northern evangelicals more more likely to pick Ford and people within the South more inclined to support their fellow southerner. Both men, in spite of everything, could make a plausible claim to private faith and moral integrity.
To some politically minded evangelicals, nevertheless, this division felt like a wasted opportunity. The evangelical vote was a “sleeping giant,” one analyst wrote; if evangelicals would only unite behind a single candidate, they might swing the election.
The dream of a political takeover was hard to withstand, especially with the country experiencing a seemingly inexorable moral decline. “We have together, with the Protestants and the Catholics, enough votes to run the country,” Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson declared of evangelicals in 1979. “And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we’re going to take over.”
To “take over,” Christians needed to find a way to dictate a legislative agenda in Congress, which meant they couldn’t depend on “nice guys” who maintained a squeaky-clean lifestyle but voted the mistaken way. They needed to behave like every other political interest group.
When their newly formed political motion committees (just like the Moral Majority PAC) donated to campaigns, they wanted some assurance that their contributions would buy the fitting votes. They wanted something greater than good people in Washington; they wanted results. “Christians must keep America great by … getting laws passed that can protect the liberty and liberty of her residents,” Jerry Falwell Sr. declared in 1980.
In the short term, the strategy looked as if it would work. Evangelical votes helped put Reagan within the White House and gave control of the Senate to Republicans for the primary time in 1 / 4 century. Over the following 40 years, Republicans won more presidential elections than Democrats did and controlled each houses of Congress more often than that they had for the reason that early Thirties.
But many of the Christian Right’s agenda remained unfulfilled. And even when conservative evangelicals did get laws or court decisions they wanted, they felt frustrated of their inability to vary the cultural direction of the country. Even the reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022 appears to not have lowered abortion rates in most states.
Politically, with several many years of hindsight, evangelicals’ decision to prioritize policy over character has produced mixed results. But it has had a profound effect on the church, since it turned evangelicals right into a voting bloc. That’s how evangelicals are increasingly perceived outside the church, and it’s often how we perceive ourselves as well.
The only way Christian Right leaders could marshal hundreds of thousands of votes from 1980 onward was to treat the church as a political machine. With that model in place, it was inevitable that politicians—even fellow Christians—would begin treating evangelicals not as residents of a heavenly kingdom or as members of a church purchased by the blood of Christ but as a political interest group whose votes could be delivered to whichever candidate checked the fitting boxes on a policy questionnaire.
This dynamic has also exacerbated racial divisions amongst American Christians. It quickly became apparent that the overwhelming majority of Black Christians wouldn’t make the identical partisan voting decisions as white evangelicals. Today, in any political conversation, evangelical typically means “white,” though many evangelicals should not white.
It’s not too late to revisit the selection that Christian Right leaders made in 1980. We can still select a unique path this yr. Whatever politicians or the media may say concerning the “evangelical vote,” we don’t need to treat the church as a voting bloc. We don’t need to boil our concerns about our nation’s spiritual and moral health all the way down to a small handful of policies that may not pass even when our candidates win.
After all, the policy goals that prompted many evangelicals to support Reagan in 1980 were elusive after his election and indeed remain so to today. Evangelicals began to operate as a voting bloc, but America’s moral crisis couldn’t be solved by a political platform. The same will prove true this yr, nevertheless the election seems.
The more we reflect on the gospel, the more we’ll realize that for residents of the next kingdom, no approach to voting can produce the moral renewal that may only come from Christ and his church. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote. But it does mean it’s okay if we make different decisions on Election Day. Many essential things are at stake on this election, however the survival of the dominion of God most assuredly isn’t.
Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the creator of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.
