Randall Balmer, professor of religious history at Barnard College, the editor-at-large for Christianity Today, and, since 2006, an Episcopal priest, was interviewed today on Fresh Air about his book God in the White House. It’s well worth clicking through the link above where you’ll find two podcasts. Did you know that as late as 1976 the Southern Baptist Convention supported the legalization of abortion? What mobilized evangelicals politically, Balmer says, was the IRS ruling that Bob Jones University was not a charitable organization because it did not admit blacks. It was not until 1991 that the university admitted blacks and not until 1995 that it admitted unmarried blacks. Hmmm.
An excerpt from the book:
Does probity translate into policy? The record of the past four decades is mixed. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon was an expression of his religious convictions. Jimmy Carter’s sense of morality led him to renegotiate the Panama Canal treaties and to draw attention to human-rights abuses around the world. Ronald Reagan’s moral compass prompted him to reverse his earlier support for abortion rights and to advocate a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution.
On the other side of the equation, Lyndon Johnson’s personal life would never suggest that he was a paragon of virtue, but he worked passionately for civil rights and sought to improve the lot of those less fortunate. Richard Nixon, hardly a moral exemplar, nevertheless sought to protect the environment and signed several bills that restored lands and a measure of self-rule to Native Americans.
These examples suggest that the quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates’ declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern.