Overview

As Jimmy Carter ascended to the presidency the heir apparent to Democratic liberalism, he touted his background as a born-again evangelical. Once in office, his faith indeed helped form policy on a number of controversial moral issues. By acknowledging certain behaviors as sinful while insisting that they were private matters beyond government interference, J. Brooks Flippen argues, Carter unintentionally alienated both social liberals and conservative Christians, thus ensuring that the debate over these moral “family issues” acquired a new prominence in public and political life. The Carter era, according to Flippen, stood at a fault line in American culture, religion, and politics. In the wake of the 1960s, some Americans worried that the traditional family faced a grave crisis. This newly politicized constituency viewed secular humanism in education, the recognition of reproductive rights established by Roe v. Wade, feminism, and the struggle for homosexual rights as evidence of cultural decay and as a challenge to religious orthodoxy. Social liberals viewed Carter’s faith with skepticism and took issue with his seeming unwillingness to build on recent progressive victories. Ultimately, Flippen argues, conservative Christians emerged as the Religious Right and were adopted into the Republican fold. Examining Carter’s struggle to placate competing interests against the backdrop of difficult foreign and domestic issues—a struggling economy, the stalled Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, disputes in the Middle East, handover of the Panama Canal, and the Iranian hostage crisis—Flippen shows how a political dynamic was formed that continues to this day.

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9780820337708

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J. Brooks Flippen's rich analysis of these years details how the rise of secular humanism, the controversy surrounding Roe v. Wade, the feminist fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive rights, and the struggle for homosexual rights were seen by many religious Americans as evidence of cultural decay.. . . Scholars interested in presidential coalitional politics, the intersections of politics and religions, and contemporary history will find this an important and readable resource. --Mary E. Stuckey, Presidential Studies Quarterly

The strength of Flippen's book--and what makes it an important contribution to the spate of recent works on the seventies--is that it casts Carter as an active agent in the late 1970s conservative turn, even if he was not always an eager participant in developments he often could not control. . . . Flippen's work goes a long way toward clarifying Carter's role in the rise of the Religious Right. -- Journal of Southern Religion <br>

A dramatic and detailed account of the mobilization of the Religious Right, its battles against feminism and gay rights, and Jimmy Carter's futile attempts to placate all sides of the culture wars that exploded in the late 1970s. Flippen shows how the revolt of conservative Christians against Carter's theological belief in the separation of church and state, not simply a religious versus secular divide, laid the foundation for the Republican embrace of 'family values' politics. --Matthew D. Lassiter, author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

Author Information

J. BROOKS FLIPPEN is a professor of history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism and Nixon and the Environment.

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