the president & religion in the south with Dr. Jared Phillips (ep 2, 34).

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
dr. jared m. phillips. (00:02):
and I think what what we see happen
is that the evangelical worldbecomes an evangelical world
that doesn't just think aboutsharing good news through
good actions or sharinggood news just share it
through, sharing good news.
But it becomes a world that is,there is a fundamental set of
beliefs about not just what wethink of in, in, the, in the

(00:23):
Bible, in the New Testament,in the Old Testament, whatever,
but in how we understand whatculture is and how we understand
what morality is and that thosethings equal evangelicalism.

mike rus (01:16):
Well, you're listening to the underview, an Exploration
in the Shaping of Our Place.
My name is Mike Rusch, andtoday we're taking on a
subject that has been quietlythreaded through nearly
every conversation thisseason, but one we haven't
yet stopped to name directly.
And that's the relationshipbetween faith and power
in the American South.
Because in northwestArkansas, like much of the
South, religion is more thana personal belief system.

(01:39):
It's a cultural framework, apolitical force, a builder of
institutions and identities.
And as we've explored thequestions of mythologies
and race, labor, policy andbelonging, faith has been a
current underneath it all.
In nearly every conversationacross these two seasons,
someone has named the roleof churches of faith, leaders
of personal faith, of sacredscripture, and in more than

(02:01):
a few conversations, oncethe microphones were turned
off, the topic of faith wasthen discussed even more
deeply and more openly.
But no one person can speakfor a faith community, and
no single episode can holdthe full scope of religion's
impact here in the Ozarks.
So today we're gonna narrowthe lens for a moment to focus
on what I believe has becomethe single largest influence

(02:22):
in our region and beyond.
We're asking the question,how did southern evangelical
power structures emerge?
How did religion becomesuch a force in Southern
American politics, and whatrole did our region play
in that transformation?
Because when you bringtogether race, economics,
labor and faith, somethingvery powerful happens.
These aren't separate forces.

(02:42):
They reinforce each other.
They create structuresof meaning and
systems of belonging.
And in the South, thesesystems have often determined
who gets to lead, whogets left behind, and what
version of righteousnessgets written into our laws.
Today we're asking howfaith has been used to shape
belonging and also exclusion.
How it has informed southernidentity, racial hierarchies,

(03:03):
and eventually partisanpolitics, and ultimately how
some corners of the faithcommunity have used spiritual
authority for political control.
To help us uncover thathistory, I knew I needed to
go back to a trusted source,so I asked Dr. Jared Phillips
historian, educator, andsomeone who understands the
deep story of the Ozarksto speak into this topic.
Through his own personalstory and his work.

(03:25):
He helps us trace the rise ofevangelical political power in
the south, the creation of themoral majority, and the moment
when faith and politics becomeso intertwined that to belong in
one space often meant pledgingallegiance to the other.
Because the questionisn't just what happened.
It's how did we get here andwhat can we learn from the past
if we want to create a futurewhere faith leads us towards

(03:46):
justice and not just influence.
We're gonna start in the1970s with President Jimmy
Carter and really theevolution of this evangelical
political force in politics.
Alright, A lot towork through today.
Let's get into it.
I have the privilege ofsitting down and sharing a
space with Dr. Jared Phillips.

(04:06):
We happen to be at hishome today, so thank
you for the invitationto come and visit you.
Yeah.
Out on the farm here,just a beautiful time
of year at spring.
And I'm pursuing you in thisconversation because you made
a statement in one of ourprevious conversations that you
said "if you want to talk aboutJimmy Carter, then you have to
talk a lot about the south andyou have to talk a lot about
religion" and that phrase thatyou said it really captured my

(04:30):
imagination about what does thathave to do with where we are
in the South and in the Ozarks.
Maybe help me unpackthat statement you made.

Yeah.
No, thanks for having me back.
I I always look foran opportunity to talk
about Jimmy Carter.
I spent a lot of yearsof my life researching
and writing on Jimmy andor may he rest in peace.
What I would say that statement,if you wanna talk about Jimmy
Carter, you have to thinkabout the south and you have
to think about religion.
That statement isborn from a couple of
considerations that I have.
One very much is rootedin who I am as a person.

(05:02):
I'm a proud son of the south.
My family's been herefor a very long time.
My wife's family's beenhere for a very long time.
But when I say that I'm aproud son of the South, I say
that with a giant asteriskbecause I understand like
many of us do that the southis a complicated place.
And so when I say that I'mproud to be from the South, I'm
proud largely in this, in, ina way, I hope like Mr. Carter

(05:26):
was proud to be a Southernerbecause Mr. Carter it, it had
within him all of the differentpieces that embodied what
the south was becoming in themiddle of the 20th century,
in particular part that wecall the American century.
So that's that part afterthe second World War,
really until the end of theCold War, the first part
of the 20th, 21st century.

(05:46):
And he also is looking athow do we reform the nation
and the nation internallyto think about the new
pressures that were emergingcoming outta the Nixon era.
But also he's looking aheadin a way, he's a very sort of
forward thinking president.
He is looking ahead and heis trying to rehabilitate

(06:07):
America's standing withinitself an internal like
reassessment, self-assessment,but also it's standing in
the international community.
And that all comes fromwho he is as a person.
Mr. Carter was born in1924 in Plains, Georgia
which is in Sumter County.
And he, he's the son of apeanut farmer and peanut broker.
He is a, but he and he'svery much like others

(06:29):
in his generation.
I think these, this group ofsoutherners that came of age or
that become kind of progressivesoutherners that come of age.
They're born in their earlytwenties, mid twenties.
They come of age in the fiftiesand sixties, and then they go on
to push, to push the country ina couple of interesting paths.
Some are good and some are bad.
Mr. Carter's legacy, I tendto be more optimistic about

(06:51):
his legacy than some peopletraditionally have been.
But I, even within that, I'mstill happy to say there's some
things that he did as presidentthat I do disagree with.
And I think most historianswould agree with that.
But, and so I think the twobig things that he always
highlighted, Jimmy Carter alwayshighlighted as he's coming into
the White House, was his faithand his understanding of of

(07:11):
how that faith was shaped byplace, but then also how faith
and place were shaped by race.
So for me, when we asked thequestion about how does Carter
relate to the South in generalthe mood of the nation right
now or even zoom, weigh intight on our home here in the
Ozarks, those things I thinkare really important for us.

(07:33):
So we talked a little bitabout the last time last time
we talked about the natureof race in the Ozarks, and
you've had other guests who'vetalked a lot about that.
Mr. Carter is coming of agein a very different racial
environment than we are, right?
By the time Mr. Carter is oldenough to think about voting
and to be running a business orthings like that the, the racial
components in Georgia were verydifferent than they are here.

(07:56):
Here, by this point, we'rerelatively lily white, right?
So we're not asking aracial question here, like
they're asking in Georgia orelsewhere in the deep south.
And then when we do askthe question, the racial
question in the Ozarksis more about maintaining
that mythic purity, right?
That was never real,but was always imagined.
And it's kinda this likepost KKK kind of thing.

(08:16):
But in, in Georgia, they'rereally asking the question
about segregation in avery real lived sense.
And they're asking the questionabout economic control.
And they're using Jim Crow as amethod for control, not a method
for shoving everybody out.
They don't want every,they can't afford to have,
black sharecroppers leave.
They can't afford tolose that labor force.
There's not enough peoplethere to do the work

(08:37):
otherwise, and but in thatcontext and in the status of
his family, he is similar.
I guess in a way to othernotable figures that kind of
come of age in the seventies,like Wendell Berry who comes
to my mind in that they bothhave this conversation about
how they're able to thinkabout race in a different way
than other folks had been ableto because they grow up with

(08:58):
the children with the blackchildren of the workers who
are working for their familyor in and around their family.
And that gives them afamiliarity with race and the
sort of the quote unquote raceproblem that maybe was unknown
or not recognized prior to that.
Now, I would, before I wentany further down that line,
what I would say is that'snot necessarily, I would say

(09:20):
that's not necessarily thebest way to, to approach that.
I understand what they'resaying, and they're not
uncommon in that idea.
But it assumes that a whiteperson in a position of
relative privilege is ableto fully empathize with a
black person without any ofthose systems of privilege.
And so we already knowthat's not the case, the
systems of Jim Crow ensurethat cannot be the place.

(09:43):
But nevertheless, Mr.
Carter does have a, of a,somewhat of an understanding
of what race means.
He understands theproblems between white
and black communities.
His family, even thoughthey're in the Jim Crow South
was, they're not, they'renot as progressive as you're
gonna see up north maybe insome of these conversations.
But there's more familiarity,more ease of passage between

(10:06):
the two communities in theirtight little area than maybe
you would see elsewhere.
You can listen, you can go backand read his memoirs and he'll
describe what's happening withhis father and his mother, miss
Lillian and these other folks,and you get, get a picture of
what he's trying to talk about.
So that's, thatracial side of it.
But religion, he grows up aBaptist and importantly for us,
he grows up a Southern Baptist.
And we've talked a littlebit about this before and
I'm sure other folks haveas well, but Southern

(10:27):
Baptist are a unique breed.
They, on the one hand,they're very Baptist, right?
So they shoot all thosebasic Baptist tenants.
So they're relativelyCalvinist or reformed.
They're they are a relativelyindividualistic the Southern
Baptist Convention, especiallyat that time, the time
that he's coming of ageforties, fifties, sixties.
It is a veryindividualistic, thing.
So there's the conventionthat sort of passes down these

(10:48):
edicts, but it's up to everyindividual congregation as to
whether they're gonna accept'em and then to what degree
they're gonna accept them.
And that still causesthe SBC a problem today.
How they govern their body.
They don't have a, theydon't have a presbytery,
like the Presbyteriansdo or things like this.
But in, in that SouthernBaptist kind of world or in

(11:08):
that and just generic Baptistworld he very much, has this
idea the in Baptist theology,it's called Soul Competency.
But you could, for our purposes,we can think about it as
individual self-determination.
And so he, and this isa lesson that he takes
very early on in life.
And it'll really develop for himlater on in, in the sixties by,
but especially but the essentialidea here is that the individual

(11:31):
is totally free to maketheir own spiritual choices.
So it's a weird, and if youthink about Calvinism or Yeah.
Don't seem like they'realigning real quick.
Exactly.
But this is really importantfor Mr. Carter because.
Baptists, like most reformationProtestant communities,
and here I might make somepeople mad, but they hold
competing views at one time.
They're dualists, right?
That's okay.
We could, humans are bynature are this right?

(11:53):
And what Baptists do maybe more formally than other
folks is put that is enshrinedthat, that kind of idea.
So on the one hand, you'reCalvinist, so you're,
like predestination isa big deal, but on the
other hand you can choose.
So it's this whatdo you do with it?
But interestingly for Carterthe hinge point of choice
is the idea of justice.
And for him it's often, this isoften boiled down, too far in,

(12:17):
in people's discussion of him.
But for him,justice equals love.
And that justice equals love.
Coming out of his Baptistupbringing which is a very
different take than what we'reseeing elsewhere in the church
in the south at this time.
Even though the BaptistConvention is saying we should
figure out a way to integrate,the Baptist churches are not
doing this right almost to acongregation they don't do this.

(12:38):
And, but Carter is taking adifferent lesson outta this
and then he's gonna applythat to his understanding
of race as he goes through.

mike rusch. (12:47):
Okay.
I have 400 questions.

dr. jared m. phill (12:48):
Ask 'em all.
That was a whole lot in a hurry.
And I could, I could,we could go off on any
number of tangents.
'Cause we've essentially inthe timeline of Mr. Carter.
We haven't, he hasn't evengone back to Georgie yet,
after the na He hasn'teven gone to the Navy yet.
We're just in the Yeah.
Ephemeral.

mike rusc (13:01):
Maybe we, like, let's start with his upbringing.
Yeah.
I mean, He grew up inthe south, in Georgia.
Yep.
Yep.
In a southern Baptist space.
But it feels like, from myunderstanding, there are points
in his life where he is theother, in that situation as
it relates to issues of race,issues of caring for community
and not that Southern BaptistConvention people weren't caring

(13:23):
for other people, but yeah, heseems to self identify himself
in some ways, as being people,didn't agree with me when I
moved towards issues, especiallyaround the issues of segregation
and trying to use his influenceor his family to I'm trying
to understand the root and theorigin of how someone growing up
in that environment may come toa different conclusion and yeah.

(13:44):
Yet still stay inthat environment.

dr. ja (13:45):
Yeah, that's a great que So a lot of that, we'll
start with his grandfather.
His grandfather was apopulist in the old school
sense, the word populism.
So not the stuff that wetalk about today that I give
my students lectures aboutabout using, making sure
they use the word correctly,but populous in the old
agrarian democracy, economicjustice use the government
on behalf of people, but in arelatively, but still maintain

(14:06):
relatively decentralizedcommunities, right?
So we don't wanna centralizepower too much but we want
to have some measure ofuseful power on behalf of
the people because populistsare coming, populists are
part of that gilded age storyinto the 20th century story.
And so we're trying to push backagainst the consolidation of
agriculture, the consolidationof rail lines, all these,
the big monopolies, right?

(14:27):
So we're pushing backagainst this kind of stuff.
His granddad is a populist.
And then that, that will passand this is on his mother's
side and his mother, missLillian, will receive all
that kind of populist propro little guy kind of idea.
If you want to, we're gonnagrossly boil populism down,
but if we want to grossly boilpopulism down it's essentially
pro-little guy, anti bigguy, but also a little bit

(14:48):
of let's smash the big guy.
Some of the more wildrestraints of it, populism is
just as flawed as everythingelse that's coming out in
the 19th century so the bighero in the in the household
would've been Tom Watson.
He was a North Georgia populist.
And in his early days hewas relatively moderate on
race for the 19th century.
I won't, he was not aprogressive racially at all.
But by the end of his career,Mr. Watson becomes quite

(15:10):
segregationist but earlyon, and probably somewhere
where these formative lessonsand what populism are when
they hit the household, thatCarter's gonna come of age in.
It's this kind of idea.
So there's this, and thenthe second thing would be
his father was for the mostpart, a new deal, Democrat.
With one exception we'll talkabout here in a second, but
but during the New Deal, Mr.

(15:33):
Carter's father during theDepression New Deal the Carter
family had been very debtaverse, which was unusual in
agriculture then it was unusualin agriculture in the seventies.
Unusual.
It's just unusual period.
And so because the Carterfamily was relatively, if
not totally free of debt,at least debt in a way that
would endanger the familylivelihood, they were able to
amass peanut brokerage interestessentially and farm ground.

(15:54):
And so by the time when theycome out of the depression
the Carter family, and this ishappening as Mr. Carter, this
is in the thirties, throughthe forties, Mr. Carter's
family becomes a family ofdecent to heavy standing
in the community, right?
Because they own the brokerage.
They are they haveall this farm ground.
They employ all these differentpeople, white and black.
And so they become a person,they become a family that

(16:16):
is listened to, right?
They were already a respectedfamily, but they become even
more so they become centralto the economic health or at
least very important to theeconomic health of the county.
So there's this, and then Mr.
Carter is gonna go to the Navy.
And while he's in theNavy he's going to become
a nuclear engineer.
He's gonna serve onthe USS Sea wolf.
So this is the beginningof the nuclear age, but

(16:38):
importantly other than thefact that he's an engineer
and he has that kind of mindthe, he is serving in the Navy
right after Harry Truman hasdesegregated the armed forces.
So Harry Truman is gonnabegin this big process
of desegregation thatwill well begin the armed
forces that we're gonna seedesegregation orders coming
down from the Supreme Courtthrough Brown V Board.

(17:00):
And I should say it's notthat Harry Truman starts
civil rights, right?
It's that the culminationof activity, it's been
occurring since the end ofthe Civil War is finally
pushing people to action.
And Mr. Truman will desegregatethe armed forces just as Jimmy
Carter's going into submarineduty, and he's on an integrated
crew and they're down inthe British Virgin Islands.
And they're asked, the crew isasked to go to the consulate

(17:23):
or to the British Embassy orwhatever it is, one of the
big government houses downthere for a fancy dinner.
But their black crewmate was not invited.
And the whole crewwill refuse to go.
And Mr. Carter's position then,and his position later in life
was like we're all like you.
We can't see that stuff whenwe're on a submarine crew.
We can't see that stuff whenwe are wearing the uniform.

(17:44):
We wear the uniform.
And then we sort allthat other stuff out.
Now he's unique that crew isa little bit unique there,
unique crew because of thestation that they have.
And this is not to saythat there were not tons of
problems with integration inthe armed forces elsewhere.
There were but in thismoment, integration in the
armed forces, coupled withthat earlier kind of exposure
that builds the capacity forempathy I think is part of

(18:06):
what allows him to make that,be a part of that decision.
Now, his dad will, thisis one of the few fights
he and his dad get into.
His dad is not as, his dadis quietly centrist on race,
but it makes sense if, whenwe go back, so I said his
dad was a new deal Democratat the beginning until Henry
Wallace and the AgriculturalAdjustment Act will force him
to plow under cotton fieldsand kill hogs just like we

(18:27):
see happening across the farmsthroughout the nation, while
there are people in Breadlinesand while people needed work.
And so after that pointMr. Carter's father will
no longer vote Democratin presidential elections.
Only in he'll votestate ticket down.
He'll vote Democrat all theway till he dies in 1953, but
at the national ticket, he'llnever vote Democrat again.

(18:47):
But that's another part ofthat southern evolution that
we're gonna start to see.
We're gonna see southernersacross the region, start
splitting their ticket beginningin the forties and fifties
partially as a result ofthe New Deal backlash to it,
partially as a backlash againstcivil rights, partially as
a backlash against Vietnam.
And so that by the time weget into the 1970s when he's
coming of age as a politician,it is entirely common to see

(19:10):
counties and states splittheir ticket in that way.
It'll be a straight Democratticket at the local level
and a straight or mixedRepublican ticket at the
national level, which is oneof the weirder conversations
that you can think about.

mike ru (19:22):
Yeah, I would probably, that's probably a rabbit trail.
I don't know if that'sworth going down or not.
We do it

here.
That's a, it's a thing thathappens here in the olac.
We start, it's not uncommon.
Split tickets really quickly.
Yeah.
Yeah.

Maybe I'll ask you to keep going in this.
Yeah.
I don't know if youwould consider him a
man of his time or not.
He seems to growing up inGeorgia, growing up in the
south, but having a position,especially within, he was
growing up in Southern Baptist,but growing up in those spaces
with this idea of the pursuitof, to your point, justice and
his views on segregation, right?

(19:53):
He still progresses into moreand more political offices,
obviously the governor.
How does that ascension workgiven some of the, how big some
of these issues really were.

Brown V Board honestly, so that Supreme
Court decision was so impactful.
A series of SupremeCourt decisions.
So Brown V Board in, in 54,then Baker v Carr in 1962,
which, that's the decisionthat kind of formally states
out that one person, onevote, one man, one vote idea.
So we've always had that asthe mythology of America.
That actually makesit real, right?
Which is really important forunbalancing segregationist

(20:28):
political power.
And it's part of one, thepart of the reason why urban
areas become so powerfulin national elections
compared to rural country.
I know everybody gets upsetabout red, the red blue divide,
and how all these big statesin the middle that are red
have so child-sized power.
When you really look at it ata person to person level, they
don't, and that's because ofBaker v Carr before, before
it was the other way around.

(20:48):
And but what happens is inBrown View Board we have
the desegregation decision,but the kicker about that
court case that people oftendon't remember, is that the
court said that this has tobe done with all deliberate
speed, but they didn't botherto define what that meant.
And so this is a thing that probthis gives us problems from the
Supreme Court all the time, isthey never, they don't always
define the really importantstuff in their rulings.

(21:09):
And in part I think itwas 'cause they understood
that what they had ruledwas gonna be a thing.
We're gonna have a problem now.
And so what will happenacross the south and the north
because every, the north,the south is not the only
racist space in American life.
But mostly across the Southwe're gonna see the development
of white communities pushingback in a lot of different ways.

(21:30):
One of those ways is gonnabe white flight, and so we're
gonna see the hollowing outof the nation's urban centers.
And so this is most famouslywe can think about Atlanta.
So this is gonna bereally important in the
story for Mr. Carter.
Atlanta, Memphis little Rock allthese, all the big urban centers
in the south are gonna seemiddle class and upper middle
class and upper class whitefamilies leave the nation's

(21:53):
centers go to the periphery andbegin to start private schools.
And so there's gonna be aboom in private education in
the fifties and sixties asa response to Brown V Board
because if it's private,then you can restrict
theoretically who can comein and outta your school.
And so this way we canensure that little Susie
and little Johnny don't goto school with black kids.

(22:13):
And and I know that many lovelypeople have come out of those
schools without any knowledgeof that, but that's, it's
like understanding where theSouthern Baptist come from.
This is that, thatkind of thing.
So there's this kinda idea,but then there's also the
development of this thing calledthe White Citizens Councils.
They're all over the country.
They're heavilysituated in the south.
Sometimes they'remasks for the clans.
Sometimes they're not.
They're openly clan members.
Sometimes they're just citizensopposed to segregation.

(22:36):
Sometimes there's citizensthat are opposed to
segregation that fast.
It's this should happen,but let's make it happen a
little bit slower or whatever.
But the point is that the cruxof all of it is that they are.
They are not wanting to haveBrown v Board implemented
with all deliberate speed.
And this is important in Mr.
Carter's case, every whitecitizen in Sumter County is
gonna join the White CitizensCouncil of Sumter County
except for Jimmy Carter.

(22:58):
The chief of police and othercommunity members are gonna
come, says peanut brokerage.
They're gonna ask him,they're gonna beg him to join.
And he is, 'cause he's justcome home 1953, his father dies
and he's, so he will design hiscommission in the Navy and he'll
move back home to Plains totake over the family business.
And he and Rosalyn are takingit over from Miss Lillian.
And it's a fledgling business.

(23:19):
It's a changeover.
There's the fifties area big time of shakeup
in American agriculture.
And they're trying to figureout how to make this thing work.
And Jimmy is not signingthe signing onto the
citizens council.
They're offering the and this isa big deal because this is the,
these are the other economicpower brokers in the county.
And they're telling him, they'recoming into his office and
they're telling him, if youdon't do this is gonna hurt your

(23:39):
family and hurt your business.
You might go bankrupt.
Like we might end up runningyou outta the county for this.
They even offer to pay the$5 registration fee for him.
And he got so angry that hetakes the application or like
the membership form, tearsit up, goes to the toilet
in the back of his officeand flushes it down the
toilet, tells him to get out.
And it's, it hurts.
It hurts his economicfortunes for a little while.

(24:01):
And it's at that moment thathe starts to really think about
what if I mean what I say aboutmy faith if, I mean what I say,
if I take the words of Jesusseriously then my faith has
to go into action in some way.
And if, I mean that justice islove and I, I put on a uniform
for fight to, to fight for that.
If the need arose, but now Idon't wear that uniform anymore,

(24:23):
where did service for me lie?
And so that's when hebegins to think about.
Politics.
And so he'll start runningfor State House first.
He'll lose that.
And then in 1970 is whenhe's gonna be, he's gonna
run for governor andhe'll be elected governor.
And he's gonna be part of aninteresting group of people
that is elected in 1970.
In 1971 Time Magazinewill run a cover story.
He'll be the coverphoto on the magazine.

(24:44):
But they're gonna talkabout what, what's
called the class of 70.
And Arkansas's not left out.
This is when Dale Bumpers isgonna be elected governor best
lawyer from a one lawyer town.
And but Jimmy and Dale and ahost of other young southern
Democrats look like they'regonna change the way the
nation perceives the South.

(25:04):
Because up until this point, theonly southerners the nation has
seen in the national spotlightare either people like Orville
Faubus 57, hammering at peopleand yelling and being horrible.
Or, Strom Thurmondis coming of age.
Then Dick Russell out ofGeorgia, so this is contemporary
of Mr. Carter politically.
The heavily anti-communist,heavily segregationist, I

(25:25):
mean they are old school.
Even Jay William Fulbright, as cosmopolitan and urbane
as Mr. Fulbright wasat the end of the day.
He signed the SouthernManifesto- Pro segregation.
You can't, it doesn't matter.
You just, that's JimmyCarter's not that guy.
Dale Bumpers is not that guy.
And even when we stack himup against the only southern
president that we'd reallyhad in, in the 20th century,
which would've been atleast in the recent, history

(25:45):
would've been Lyndon Johnson.
Mr. Johnson was a weirdo.
He's got all of the Vietnamstuff is attached to him, plus
he's got all these conspiracytheories swirling around him.
And then because he was abig, loud, crass, wickedly
smart, and like vindictive,almost kind of president.
The Eastern establishmentdidn't know what to do with him.
Probably one of the mosteffective legislators that the

(26:07):
United States has ever had.
And I think, when we and Mr.
Carter will agree with most ofthis as well, but, and so will
most, most historians that whatthe great society that Lyndon
Johnson puts in place is gonnaset the foundation for so much
of what becomes the norm inAmerican middle class life.
They take, he takes that Newdeal project and completes it

(26:28):
as best as it can be completedin that moment, right?
But those are theexamples of southern
politicians that we have.
And then in comes this guyJimmy Carter, in comes Dale
Bumpers and Dale Smooth andsophisticated and, he's in
Little Rock and he's not Faubus.
And then Jimmy Carter comesin, and importantly for the,
for his kind of evolutionhe has begun to really think
about what the applicationof faith means in politics.

(26:52):
And he, in the sixties, afterhe gets hammered in his,
because his election runfor State House was abysmal.
Like he just, he was a nonamelike person at the state level.
And he was running.
He just, he didn't runa very good campaign.
It just didn't workout very well for him.
But after this, he startsto pick up and read the work
of an old theologian by thename of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Mr. Niebuhr was ason of the Midwest.

(27:13):
He'll end up at UnionTheological ser seminary in
Boston, and he became one ofthese kind of iconic public
intellectuals at the time.
Every, he was a householdname at the time, but
he was a household namethat had a lot of heft.
It's a little bit likepeople today talk about CS
Lewis and there's a culturalfluency with him, or like JRR
Tolkien or people like this.

(27:33):
But they haven't actually readdeeply in the catalog, right?
And so when people startto get excited about CS
Lewis and then when theyread a little bit deeper,
they're like, wait a minute.
He said that.
Yeah.
So Mr. Niebuhr is a littlebit like this as well.
He's a very trickyguy to nail down.
But what he does for Carter ishe offers a philosophical or
theological roadmap to applyhis understanding of justice

(27:55):
and love in the defense ofthose who are defenseless.
And that becomes the core.
This what Niebuhr callsChristian realism or
Christian pragmatism, thatbecomes the core of how Mr.
Carter begins to think aboutpolitics first in Georgia and
then at the country level.
And it's in that momentwhen he walks into the
Governor's house in 1971and he, that he starts to

(28:16):
immediately, not just quietly,but he visibly does this.
He hangs Martin LutherKing Jr's portrait in
the Capitol building.
He removes, people from theboard of trustees of the
University of Georgia systemthat were openly segregationist
and doesn't just replace themwith moderates, he replaces
them with black civic leaders.
And, he starts to visiblyreshape Georgia politics to

(28:38):
match what he's been talkingabout and to try and move
Georgia beyond segregation tomove it beyond Jim Crow because
he very firmly agrees withthe idea that how Mr. Niebuhr
puts it is that the, it's oftenthe sad duty of government
to coerce the population.
And it sometimes that coercioncan often feel like tyranny
to the people being coerced,but it's, it might be the,

(29:00):
might the right thing todo and that's how he sees
the civil rights movement.
That's how he'll seehis human rights agenda.
That's how he'll see mosteverything that he does is
gonna be through that lens thathe develops in Georgia as he's
trying to figure out how to putfaith into action in politics.
Importantly though, he nevertakes a stand and says,
this is Baptist theology, orthis is Niebuhr's theology,

(29:23):
therefore it is now policy.
He's always trying to figureout, okay, if our country and
is saying these are the thingsthat we stand for, these are
the morals, this is the systemthat we want to have, then
what does that look like to me?
How do I interpret thatas a person of faith?
And then how do I understandwhat I can apply without
overtly utilizing the languageof my religious system?

(29:45):
Because Mr. Carter does, youmentioned this earlier, he
does very much believe in theseparation of church and state.
Mr. Carter does not thisis something that's gonna
get him into trouble later.
He does not personallyagree or did not personally
agree with abortion.
He believed that was a problem.
However, that was thelaw of the land by the
time he was president.
That court case is in 72, 73.
And that's whathe has to enforce.

(30:07):
And he, that's my job.
I'm the president.
My job is to enforce the lawof the land, not to change it,
to match what my understandingof religion should be, because
I understand he'll say morethan, once again, hearkening
to an interesting understandingof what that soul competency
kinda idea is that thenotions of good and evil are
somewhat flexible over time.

(30:27):
And not that like the extremesare flexible, but the way that
we understand how to apply thosebecomes flexible over time.
And because of that,it is not a good idea.
He would argue to use any onereligious system no matter
what it is, as the means bywhich we define everything.

mike rus (30:44):
It's super interesting because you have this
man who grew up in thiskind of evangelical world
who I believe I've readit, that he's identified
himself as evangelical,but not fundamental.
You've got someone who uses hisfaith in a way to understand
what his role is in the world.
Yet he had a very strongbelief between that separation
of church and state.

(31:04):
And how does that start toform and shape, the work
that he does in the world?
Because it's not holdingthose two things in a duality
or in a dual state seemsreally complicated, but he
seems to carry them well, ifI'm not, if I'm not wrong.

dr. jared m. (31:21):
I think so others would disagree with me.
And I, I think I, at the endof the day, he's an engineer
and I think that he's justable to like sort information.

There you go.
I'm an engineer too.
Yes.
So that's why it makes sense.
There you go.
Yeah.
I should be president, right?

Yeah, exactly and I, I think I.
I think it's an evolutionover time and he doesn't
get it right all the time.
And one of the things that hetries to do, and he doesn't
always do it well, but oneof the things that he tries
to do through the course ofhis political career is to be
very pragmatic and understandthat I have this ideal, like
of what I want to see happen.
Here's why I thinkI, it should happen.
Here's how I justifyit from my religion.

(31:56):
Here's how I justify itfrom without my religion.
But he also understandsthat sometimes it's gotta
shove because whateversomething happens, right?
And so I think there's thatside of him, which I think
is a little bit does, isactually a little bit of
the engineering him of thefarmer background in him.
It's like sometimes you canhave all the ideals in the
world, but there are law,there are fundamental laws

(32:16):
of nature that don't changeor there's fundamental crises
that don't change, right?
And so you just have tobe ready to be adaptable.
So I think that's part of it.
I think he's.
He comes of age, when he decidesto run for the president in 75.
And, he has runs this campaignand he and he wins surprising
everybody that he's gonnabecome the contender and
then that he wins in 76.

(32:38):
The Christian world in,or the Protestant world, I
should say in America wasat a bit of a crossroads.
And I think that's, I thinkthat's why they, he gets their
support or at least part ofit because that distinction
that you made about him, Aokay, a second ago, being
an evangelical, but not afundamentalist is very important
because he very much was anevangelical, he believed in the
Southern Baptist Mission Board.

(32:59):
Like by the time we get intothe seventies, like the,
they're sending out and thisis a, like a funky little thing
within the Southern Baptist.
They're, the mission boardchanges its position on
how it's gonna approachinternational evangelical work
or international mission work.
And they begin to thinkmore about human wellbeing,
the physical stuff.
And so really you could thinkabout 'em as a, at the forefront

(33:19):
of of utilizing economicand community development as
a vehicle by which they'regonna go in and do stuff.
And and he was all about that.
Carter's all about, theygo, he and his family go on
multiple trips to Latin America.
And they, they're boughtin and and they're part
of a broader community offaith that's doing this.
And so that impulse thoughis was like it's surging

(33:41):
in the 1970s and it's gonnafracture and break by the
end of his presidency.
And I think what what we seehappen is that the evangelical
world becomes an evangelicalworld that, that doesn't
just think about sharing goodnews through good actions or
sharing good news just shareit through, sharing good news.
But it becomes a worldthat is, there is a
fundamental set of beliefs.

(34:03):
About not just what we thinkof in, in, the, in the Bible,
in the New Testament, in theOld Testament, whatever, but in
how we understand what cultureis and how we understand what
morality is and that thosethings equal evangelicalism.
And Carter did notsee that, right?
That's not where he sawthat happening, but he
was like, I am not that.
I don't have that sin offundamentalism that's there.

(34:25):
And fundamentalism isthis like longer story in
American religious life thathad always been somewhat
present, but it really comesto a head right around the
same time that he's born.
So with the Scopes monkeyTrials is our most famous
early example of this.
When we see the idea ofwhat will become Christian
fundamentalism in theUnited States, 'cause
there's other versions of itelsewhere begin to coalesce.

(34:46):
But until the seventies,for the most part.
Christians, ChristianEvangelicals, Protestants were
not really thought of as apolitical force because they
had chosen to not be, theyhad chosen to retain that.
So you'll see, I mean itwasn't that Christianity was
not a part of the politicalsystem, it's just that you
don't see them uniting insuch an open way, right?

(35:09):
But the 1970s is changes.
This everything is changing.
So I often tell students thateverything that everybody thinks
is exciting about the 1960sactually happens in the 1970s.
Part of that's my bias 'causeI research and write a lot
on the 1970s and I like it.
But some of it'sbecause it's true.
'cause you have all thisstuff that's happening in the
sixties that really is justsetting a foundation for the
meat and potatoes of the 1970s.

(35:30):
And and really, the kind of,the quick story is that the
1960s we see not just thecivil Rights revolution, right?
Which is gonna becomethis huge mobilizing force
throughout the American South.
And as much as, I hate tosay it, Protestants in the
American South, were just aslikely, if not more likely
to be segregationist thanintegrationist in the South.
And then you also have the sortof the sociocultural revolution.

(35:51):
So you've got hippies anddrugs and free love and all
this other kind of stuff.
And then you've got rockand roll, and you've got
the anti-war proteststhat are surging by
the end of the decade.
All of these things, amountto what, Nixon is gonna
capitalize on in the beginningsof his southern strategy
and to steal the southfrom the Democratic party.
And he's gonna do itthrough, talking about law

(36:11):
and order and Christianity.
Protestantism is gonnabe the vehicle for that.
Or a prime vehicle for that.
And this is where everybody'sthinking, okay, Carter might
be, as governor of Georgia,maybe we can see what this
guy what it looks like to havethis openly Christian Guy.
'Cause he's, he is, even thenhe was, very publicly active
in his church in Plains andleading Sunday school and
all the things that we knowand love about Mr. Carter.

(36:32):
Then that Roe v Wadedecision comes down.
And so you have all theseother cultural battles
that are happening.
You've got the expansionof communities of
color visibly into theworkplace, into education.
You've got women visiblyexpanding outta the home.
You have sexual freedom thanksto, 'cause the pill is now an
active part of American life.
And then now abortion hits.

(36:54):
And so the conservativeworld, the social, socially
conservative world, and here I'mgonna use, I wanna distinguish,
so Big C Conservative.
So as an organized group thatyou can point to different
communities within state.
That's what we mean by this.
Not like a little c.
Everybody's a little bitconservative in that they don't
like change kind of thing.
This begins to reallygalvanize them.
So this is people like PhyllisLafley and the Eagle Forum

(37:15):
and all these other things,all these other communities,
the American heritage, a ai,American Enterprise Institute.
All these groups are forming atthis point as a counterbalance
to what the left had seen,what the liberals had developed
in the fifties and sixties.
And they start to reallymobilize as a political force,
but they're not really theyhaven't figured out who their
champion is gonna be yet.
Ronald Reagan at the timeand Barry Goldwater and some

(37:36):
of these other guys seemlike they might be, but they
were all extreme, when evenJohn Wayne is coming out and
telling Ronald Reagan to sitdown and be quiet, then you
know, that like, all rightwe're okay, this is too much.
But when Jimmy Carter inthe 76 campaign says, I'm
a born again Christian.
Because this is the firsttime in American life
that's been attached openly,willingly by a politician
seeking the oval office.

(37:57):
There hadn't even reallybeen a notion of born again
Christians as we think ofthem today until the 1970s.
There'd been this kind of kindof discussion about them, but
nothing like we see today.
It wasn't a culturalforce until then.
So everybody gets excited'cause we got a Southerner.
So he's clearly gonna beconservative 'cause southerners
are nothing if not conservative.
And he's a born again Christianand he's a Southern Baptist.
Clearly this is the guy, right?

(38:19):
But then in the campaign theyI'm always amazed when I go
back and look at stuff whythey didn't see the, that he
was gonna be trouble for them.
Because they as such asthey're organized, they
come around him, right?
Some of them don't, the moreones that are more out on
the fringes because they,because of other particular
issues 'cause of hisstance on race or whatever.
But he does a couplethings in the campaign
that that, that kind.
Shock people a little bit.

(38:40):
So for example, he givesan interview with Playboy
magazine and he talks aboutall kinds of stuff in there
that no self-respectingpresidential candidate had
ever talked about before.
Or Southern Baptist.
Or Southern Baptist.
And so he gets he, yeah,he gives warning signs,
so he's not their guy.
But nevertheless, hebecomes their guy.
And then very quickly hebecomes not their guy, by
the midterms of 79, 78 he'svery quickly not their guy.

(39:03):
Yeah.

Maybe to that point then where do you think that
turning mark or that turningpoint is for him because he
ascended to the presidency?
Yeah.
At some point there isthis awareness, does it
come down to his views onjustice or race or like what,
or all kinds of stuff?
Honestly, I, there'snot a simple answer.

(39:26):
Or is it may, maybelet me ask you this.
Maybe it's to, to me, is like,is this the first showing
that we have of that what maybe the people that got him
or helped get him elected?
It wasn't, I don't know, wasit about religion or was it
about power and influencewithin federal government?

dr. jar (39:44):
That's a good question.
I think I thinkit's complicated.
So I but I am a professionalacademic and so I'm
obliged to say it.

Sure, that's fine.
I'll agree with you.
It's complicated.
Yeah.

So a couple things are happening.
I think number one bythe end of the 1970s.
So midway through his termin office, the evangelical
political world whichis different than like
rank and file peoplethat sit in pews, right?
So I want to be clear that whenwe're talking about evangelicals
as a political force, eventhough most people in church

(40:13):
might actually vote in thesame way, there's a difference
between the churchgoerand the machine, right?
So this is the distinctionthat we should make
between Christendomand Christians, right?
And so Christendom as apolitical force in history
is maybe not always thebest thing, but your average
Christian has no real bearingon that necessarily, right?
So this is what we'retalking about here.
But this evangelical kind ofthing with a capital E begins

(40:36):
to concentrate itself in acouple of different ways.
And so probably one of thebest options to think about
would be this idea of the moralmajority with Mr. Falwell.
You can also think this isright when we're starting
to look at the developmentof stuff like focus on the
family and James Dobson andall these different things.
And they start to, wagea they begin to wage a
culture war, essentially.
And and I think theywould be open with that.

(40:58):
They believed that Americanlife, the American way
of life was first andforemost a Protestant one.
And then that it wassecond becoming, it was
heavily under fire by bysome form of liberalism.
And they're unclear as towhat that means, but but
that's the general gist of it.
So they begin to mobilize andthe moral majority and focus on
the family and all these othergroups that are becoming, that

(41:20):
are coming into being, theybegin to mobilize advocacy and
lobbyist campaigns essentially.
And they begin to do allthe things that we think
of them doing today.
They begin to helpwrite legislation.
They begin letter writingcampaigns, they phone call
trees, all this stuff, right?
Because you, I told studentsthis earlier this year.
Think about it like this.
If you've got a group ofpeople in rural and mid-sized
churches across the nation.

(41:40):
Especially, we can just pickon the south, especially
in the south, what happensif somebody gets married,
goes to the hospital, dies.
The very first thing thatwe do is we set up a phone
tree and a prayer chain.
We can mobilize and get theword out to people and activate
people to use fancy languagetoday to faster than probably
anybody since until BarackObama figures out community
organizing in Chicago.

(42:01):
Honestly, right?
Like the, it's a real thing.
The real thing.
It's a real, it's a this, andthis is one of the reasons
why I say people need to takereligion in the South seriously.
Not just in how we thinkand believe, but in
how deeply embedded itsmechanisms are in the way
that we just approach life.
Because it doesn'tmatter if you're a
Presbyterian, a SouthernBaptist, or a holy roller.

(42:21):
We potluck the same, wephone tree the same, it's
a similar language across.
And so people like Falwell.
They figure out how tomobilize that against abortion.
They figure out how to mobilizethat against affirmative action.
They figure outhow to mobilize it.
And so this is and frankly,the Carter administration
was not ready for it.
Because I, Mr. Carterbelieved the best in people.
I think, I, he certainly didpost presidency and I think he

(42:44):
did pre enduring presidency.
I think he became disabusedof that, some of that
during his presidency.
But and I think it was hard forhim to understand why people
couldn't see where he was at.
So you have this kind offorce mobilizing against him.
But then you also haveexternal factors, right?
They elected him, the Americanpeople, put him in the White
House because they weretired of how Republicans had
been running the country.

(43:05):
The economy in the 1970swas the worst economy we
had since the depression.
And we talk about thisthing called stagflation.
So the economy was stagnant.
We had rising inflation, right?
By the time Mr. Carterwalks into office inflation
and unemployment is in thedouble digits, and stay.
It's there almostthe entire decade.
And Carter, part of thereason why he was sent
there was to fix it.

(43:25):
And he doesn't fix it.
In part because it wasn'this, like how do you fix it?
Like it's, it wasn't reallyanybody's problem necessarily.
It was a macro problem.
The global economy had changedand with that then came
negative impacts to the UnitedStates and it was our fault.
Like we had pushed a bunchof these changes and so
now we were reaping therewards of that, right?
And this is the beginning of howconservatives be conservatives

(43:48):
as a political unit, begin tothink about economic populism
as a tool that they can utilize.
Not to actually fix stuff,let me be quite clear on that.
But as a way to get voters.
So this is gonna happen.
And then Carter willhe'll make farmers mad.
He'll piss him off royally.
Because what he will do wewere in the middle of, so
historically, especially bythe 1970s, but historically,

(44:10):
American agriculture is oneof the most, if not the most
productive agricultural forcein the world in history,
which is a problem becausewe can't eat all that stuff.
And most of what's beingproduced isn't actually
like farm to tablekind of stuff anyways.
It's commodity grains.
And, but what wecould do is export it.
And what we were doingwas exporting it to

(44:31):
the Soviet Union.
And it was a way that theNixon administration and the
Ford administration and evenCarter in the first year
or so have been trying tofigure out a way to maintain
a fragile piece between us.
But essentially relations sourbetween Washington and Moscow
and Carter embargoes this.
This is a big problem in theag country because Mo, because

(44:52):
the surpluses ag country,just like everybody else was
experiencing the poor economicconditions of the time, but
with the added pressure ofincreasing debt load because
USDA policy from the 1950son, but especially underneath
secretary of Agriculture,Earl Butts who had been the
ag secretary for Nixon and forFord had really prioritized
this idea of go big or get out.

(45:13):
And the way that you dothat was to take on debt.
Right now when interest ratesare low, that's no big deal, but
interest rates are now reallyhigh because the way that Carter
decides to fix the economy wasto bring in a guy named Paul
Volcker to be head of the Fed.
And Volcker decided to put theeconomy on tough love, which
over the long haul provedto be the right thing to do.

(45:34):
'cause it will, by the timewe get into the middle of
the 1980s it will begin toturn the tide on the economy.
But it hammers farmers.
And in 1977 and 19 78, 79, we'regonna see a massive farm crisis.
Farmers are not gonna haveanywhere to send their grain.
And we're gonna start to beginto see the ripple effects of
what becomes the iconic farmcrisis of the 1980s that gives
us farm aid and stuff like that.

(45:55):
That begins in the late 1970s.
And it be, and it beginsfrom Jimmy Carter, who
was a farmer himself.
So he understood whatwas gonna happen here.
But he did it anyways.
And that he, I mean thathits, the whole country,
not just the south.
And that createsthis huge backlash.
And so 78, 79, there's thisgroup called the American

(46:17):
Agricultural Movement.
A bunch of guys, someof these guys are still
alive and kicking.
But what these guysdo for the most part,
they're not small farmers.
They're usually mid andlarge scale farmers.
They drive tractors across thecountry and go to the National
Mall, tear up the National Mall.
They cause a million dollarsin damages or whatever.
'cause it's muddy inWashington in the winter.
As the way to protest,and they're farmers from
Arkansas are farmers fromthe Ozarks are going.

(46:38):
As a part of this.
People were mad.
So there's this that'shappening, right?
And then there's Iran.
You can't Iran, we have thisIslamic caliphate as emerging
and they capture a bunch ofAmericans and there's a failed
rescue mission and all theall, I mean everybody, like the
history of the war on terror.
Most, a lot of people start thatstory with Iran in the modern
moment and that, that's all ofthese things come together and

(47:00):
it's important to note here thatit's not just that evangelicals
abandoned Carter in 1980.
It's that Americaabandoned him in 1980.
Those election resultsare in are stunning.
When you go look at him, likethe depth of victory that Reagan
has is really astonishing.
It's this mirrors reallyonly what we see FDR getting,
like it's total victory.
And and that's what sends Carterhome to Plains, in, in 1980, 81.

(47:22):
It.
Yeah.
Everybody likes to push itonto the evangelical system
and that is a big part of it.

Yeah.
I was gonna ask Yeah.
Like where how does thatfactor into, obviously
these are problems that areprobably not rooted in a
conservative political Yeah.
Election group, if youwill, out and about.
Yeah.
But this support of him waningand I don't know if it's fair
to say shifting into Reagan, canyou put that in perspective of
how big of a role that played

it?
It plays a big role.
I think it's more importantas Reagan goes on.
You could, I haven't lookedat the polling numbers in a
little bit, so I don't have'em off the top of my head.
But evangelicals are gonna startto noticeably swing to Reagan
in the 1980 election, but.
What's important is thatthere were plenty of,
this is Evangelicals plusfundamentalists, right?

(48:09):
So it's that hybrid.
I don't know if we wanna come upwith a fancy word for that, but
but there are plenty of folksthat are moderate or on the left
end of the evangelical spectrumthat still stick with Carter.
Because Carter had createda human rights office in
the Department of State.
First time we'd ever had one.
He said this is the, ifAmerica's gonna say that
this is who we are, thendadgum it, we're gonna do it.
And he starts the Countryreport system, which has

(48:31):
been taken apart, mostrecently by the current
occupant in the White House.
And so all this kind of,these legacy programs that
we, that had rebuilt America'scredibility in the world, a lot
of people in the middle of theevangelical spectrum and on the
left, and even some that weremaybe opposed to some of his,
abortion stuff or whatever, say,Hey, that's a net win for us.
That's good.
That's a good thing.
It'll be the midterms of 82are gonna be when we really

(48:53):
see the Evangelicals comingout hardcore for Reagan.

So after, after his time in the White House,
as he returns back toGeorgia, what do we see?
Is he the same man thatwent to Washington?
How does this, how doeshis life become different
from that point forward?

He's the same man in some ways, I know.
I was just shaking my headno there for a second.
But he's also prettymad for a little bit.
Which is fair.
I think I would be too becauseit's one of those things.
That's it.
It feels unfair when you lookat what, how 80 shakes out.
And the role that the hostagecrisises plays and some of
the kind of the theories aboutwhy that happens and all that.
It's, it feels deeplyunfair to Mr. Carter.
It's a presidency thatwas half finished.

(49:30):
He had set up in motiona bunch of things.
He's an engineer, so heworks longitudinally, right?
And so he's setting in motiona bunch of things from ag
to education to environment,whatever, that he needed four
more years to really play out.
And so he felt, he always feltthat he was cut short in that.
But I think he was in a uniquesituation because we had no

(49:50):
other president that had thatlong of a post presidency.
He was so young comparatively.
And so when they go, when theyreturned home to Georgia in 81,
he and his family had to thinkabout what will our legacy be?
And again, it goes backto justice and love.
The whole crux of theCarter Center which is, most

(50:11):
presidents set up a set upsomething after they're done.
It's usually apresidential library.
Very few of them have set upthese sort of outreach centers
in the way that he's done.
And so then he setsthe standard, he sets
a new model, right?
President Clinton's gonnado the similar thing.
The Bushes are gonna dosimilar things, but Carter's
really the first one that,that thinks about utilizing
his legacy as a human rightsadvocate, as a person interested

(50:33):
in justice and love as atool for good in the world.
And so he just, he essentiallydecides I can't be president
anymore, or I'm not gonna,I'm not gonna try that scene.
'cause he also understandsespecially when we're looking
at the nature of his defeat andlooking at the disarray that
the Democrats found themselvesin the 1980s, which is very
similar to the disarray we seethe Democratic Party in today.
The disarray was total.

(50:53):
You, you can't, whetheryou love President
Reagan or not, that man.
Could give a speech, hecould bring a crowd together.
He's a trained actor.
He knew what he was doing.
He was very good at it.
And you can't, there wasnobody in the field for
the, there's just nobody.
And this is part, JimmyCarter, bless his soul.
He was many things, but he wasnot a stirring speech giver.
I liked listening to himtalk 'cause I liked hearing

(51:15):
old school southern accents.
But if you're not prone toliking that, you're not gonna
necessarily wanna sit down here.
And then, he scoldedthe nation a lot.
Put on your sweatersand turn the heat down,
this kind of stuff.
And Reagan was like,we're not gonna do that.
Like this morning in America,this is, we're gonna make,
he's the originator of thisMake America great idea, right?
And this is what we're gonna do.
It's gonna be awesome.
And it was the eightiesand so it was awesome.
Carter in the meantime though,is figuring out what to do.

(51:35):
And so he decideswe're just gonna, we're
gonna love the world.
We're gonna find the peoplethat are defenseless.
We're gonna go backto that old idea.
Of how do we take care ofthe, of these core things
that we think about?
And one of the missions ofthe Carter Center will become
the protection of democracy.
Democracy for Carter is not thebest form of government but it's
the best form we had so far.
And so let's figureout how we protect it.

(51:56):
And so the Carter Centerwill be, become engaged
in monitoring democraticelections, not just in,
developing countries, but herein the United States, they'll
go over and they'll monitorstuff in the Cherokee Nation.
They'll monitor countyelections throughout the south.
They, he puts his money wherehis mouth is, then they'll do
all, they'll eradicate Guineaworm, he'll send malaria nets
out, he'll help with education.
All these things that werehallmarks of his faith and

(52:17):
hallmarks of his long careerbefore the White House are
allowed to come back becausehe doesn't have to think
about national security.
He doesn't have to think aboutwaging partisan battles in
Congress and all this stuff.
He's allowed to beJimmy Carter again.
And I think in that may have bemaybe one of the more powerful
statements of his league.

(52:38):
'cause he could have chosena different path, right?
He could have gone to warwith the Republican party.
He could have gone to warwith the Democratic party.

He could have tried to get reelected.

dr. jared m. phillips (52:45):
He, yeah.
He didn't, he said,you know what, this is
what I'm gonna do now.
And I think there's alwayslessons in Mr. Carter's life.
But I think that's areally powerful one.
Is he took a defeat on thechin, took it, and took
it badly for a little bit.
He was quite angry andwithdrawn for a little while.
But then he picked himself upand said, let's keep making
the world a better place.
That's the job.
That's the job.

And and I read in his autobiography.
He went back and remaineda Sunday school teacher.
Yep.
Into his nineties.

Until he, he was still leading Sunday
school until he was, untilthe very, the bitter end.
Yeah.

mike rusch (53:13):
Which is remarkable.
Yeah.
Anyways, yeah.
Okay.
Let me, can I swing thistowards modern day a little bit?
Yeah.
I may throw you acurve ball here.
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
I there's so much moreto Jimmy Carter's life.
I'm not, I don't wanna moveon from that, but I do want to
maybe swing it back a littlebit towards, here, let's
get proximate back with herewithin Northwest Arkansas,
because the world that we'vebeen talking about, Jimmy

(53:35):
Carter and Georgia growingup, Southern Baptist, that was
not the tradition here or theway that Northwest Arkansas
developed or grew at that time.
And but maybe today we havea stronger influence there.
So I'm like, maybeset the stage for.
Northwest Arkansas and whatwas the context from a religion
in the South perspective thatwe maybe started with here?

d (53:58):
Yeah, that's a good question.
That's a very vague question.
Yeah.
No, but it's interestingthough, right?
So yeah, I'm, I, so I'll prefacethis by saying I'm not an
expert in southern religion.
I think, I don't know.
I think what I would say isthat oh, it's complicated.
But I think a couplethings are happening.
So one the pervasiveness ofSouthern of a Baptist theology
and Baptist thought in the deepSouth begins to, you begin to

(54:20):
see Baptist becoming a thingin the hill country, here in
Missouri or Arkansas, evenAppalachia, by mid-century.
The, like, all things, likedenominations come and go
in faddishness, and so they.
By the seventies thetraditional strongholds of
Methodists and Presbyteriansof various varieties had begun

(54:41):
to be diluted a little bit.
The population ischanging Northwest
Arkansas in particular.
Though the Ozarks areexperiencing a massive
population shift, the NorthwestArkansas area is beginning to
foreshadow what will becomethis really dynamic place.
And with that comes ina bunch of people that
are not Presbyteriansand Methodists, right?
And so we're gonna startto see a reconsolidation of

(55:02):
Catholicism in the place.
And so the Catholic world hadalways been pretty strong out
in the Tontitown region with theItalian immigration in there.
But as we move through theseventies and into the eighties,
we're gonna start to see anincreasingly strong contingent
of folks coming up out ofCentral America and Mexico.
And so they're gonna bringwith them their understandings
of Protestantism, butthey're also their
understandings of Catholicism.
And so that's gonna start toshake up stuff a little bit.

(55:23):
But then you're gonna startto see Baptist churches of
become that who were here.
We had Baptist churches.
I don't want to givethe impression we didn't
have any Baptist all Thensuddenly they appeared.
We had them, but theybegin to take on more and
more importance, I think.
And I think some of itis denominational, I
think in structure, soPresbyterian structure
and Methodist structure.
And I'm speaking as a, soI grew up Southern Baptist,

(55:44):
but I'm a Presbyterian now.
My and my impression from,having served on, on session and
all these different things in myPresbyterian church is that as
a rule of thumb, Presbyteriansdon't like the limelight.
They're the oddones out, of course.
But as a rule of thumb, asa denomination, they would
rather do good work and be seenfor that than than talk about
doing good work and not dothings or just be loud, right?

(56:06):
They tend to just be aquieter bunch of people.
I think a lot more of theliturgically driven communities
are that way a little bit.
The Baptist community as awhole has always been because
of the individualist natureof it, has been a more fiery
visible brand of Protestantism.
And I think the 1970s and 1980sevolution of the population,

(56:28):
the social concerns that we'retalking about nationally, which
we're seeing here as well thatthose kinds of leaders in the
pulpit are gonna be attractiveto people because this is a
population of people in theseventies and eighties that's
looking for answers of any kindto try to understand what in the
world is happening right now.
And you've got a staid, quiet,slow liturgical system, or

(56:50):
you've got a fire in brimstone,young preacher who can tell
you the truth and do it witha Bible verse and then we're
gonna, it has a point of view.
It has a point of view, andthat's a really, that's a really
interesting thing at the time.
It's just an evolution ofhow we're doing religion,
in, in the country.
And I don't know that'sa good or a bad thing.
I just think it's anevolution that's occurring.
I think it has consequencesthat are both good and bad for

(57:10):
the nation and for the region.
I think out of that, we're gonnasee this, and this is a part of
that community of people that'sgonna play into the development
of the moral majority atthe local level, right?
Those phone trees and stuffI was talking about a minute
ago, Falwell doesn't justcall people and have Billy
Graham just call people.
He puts out the word tothe church leaders and the
church leaders put that outinto the community, right?

(57:30):
And so the churches becomemore linked into this world.
And I think it's wehaven't talked much about
Billy Graham but we can'tignore Billy Graham.
Yeah.
He's such a Absolutely.
He's such a complicated figure.
I. Yeah.
And I grew up listening toBilly Graham, on TV and on the
radio and like so many of usin the south did and the nation
did, but the seventies and theeighties is the beginnings of

(57:52):
the megachurch world, right?
This is what this is coming fromand it's the beginnings of a,
of an unrooted church world.
And so by that no longer firmlyassociating with a denomination.
And I think some of thatinfluence is actually coming
out of the Baptist worldand out of the Southern
Baptist world becauseSouthern Baptists are loosely
affiliated with the convention.
But at a practical level,they live their own life,
within their church, and theymake their own decisions and

(58:13):
all that without, they don'trun everything back up to
the head of the convention.
What that means then is thatthere becomes a flexibility in
how you apply the separationof church and state, how you,
and at the local level, atthe city council level, right?
I think that story reallybegins at the city council and
the county commission level,and then it begins to work
its way up, is most things inAmerican life tend to do that.
And I think that'swhat we see here.

(58:34):
Because, I can rememberwhen I was a kid here.
The rumor was that, and myunderstanding of it at the
time was whether it wasactually, a hundred percent
true or not, is I don'tknow that to be the case.
But was that the reason wedidn't have MTV and VH one
in Springdale was becausethe pastor of the Big Baptist
church did not want us to.
And having grown up inthat church, I'm like,
that, that checks out, man.
Like garbage.

(58:54):
Maybe do a fact check on that,but it wouldn't surprise me.
Yeah.
Because the staying wasgarbage in, garbage out.
And that was, thatstuff was garbage.
Michael Jackson andMadonna was garbage.
And yeah, so I think Ithink that's a part of
the evolution of it.
I think the eighties, thesixties and the seventies called
into question for more Americansin the middle and lower ranks

(59:15):
of America's economic life thewellbeing of their system, of
their cultural system, and.
That push that when people'sdefinition of self-worth,
of culture, of community isthat sharply assailed because
that's, that, that is boththe real and the felt thing

(59:37):
that's happening there.
It's not necessarily assailedfor the reasons that were
being identified, but thefact of the matter is that
working class people's livesgot worse in the 1970s period.
If you were somebody whobelieved very strongly in
these sort of old school mythicAmerican cultural values, those
things were being torn apart.
Those structures thathad put them together

(59:59):
were being torn apart.
Now I think that's a goodthing for the most part, right?
But the people that livetheir lives according to
that, felt very threatenedby that and endangered by it.
And you have these, youhave this resurgent.
Or not even a resurgent, youhave a new form of Protestantism
emerging by the 1980s and intothe 1990s that says, we're

(01:00:19):
gonna not just go to bat foryou on Sundays and Wednesdays.
We're gonna go to bat for you inLittle Rock and in Washington,
and we're gonna make the countrywhat we always thought it was.
And that's the kind of theevolution that we're gonna see.

mike rusch. (01:00:32):
Yeah, so maybe it's interesting because as we
talk about Jimmy Carter andreligion in the South, and it
rooted in the Southern Baptistnarrative, which wasn't the
dominant faith tradition herein northwest Arkansas, now we
fast forward today, and in 2016we have a church whose Lead
pastor was the president of theSouthern Baptist Convention.
And so to me, we have this,it feels like this growth and

(01:00:54):
this change of religion andpolitics and then being in
northwest Arkansas to see thiseconomic growth and explosion
and economic power grow.
We feel like some of theseworlds start to come together.
Yeah.
And so I think I'm, I don't knowif that's true, you can agree
or disagree with me or not, butI'd love your perspective on how

(01:01:15):
should we think about this shiftor this evolution and is this
unique to Northwest Arkansas oris this something we may see,
in other places across the us?

dr. jared m. phillips. (01:01:24):
Yeah, I think, I don't know that it's
unique to northwest Arkansas.
I actually think that we'remaybe late to the party.
I think we saw, when youlook at the history of
megachurches and evangel,sort of non-denominational
evangelicalism in the nationwe see these concentrations
of whatever that nexus ofpower is around a mega church
pastor occurring elsewhere.

(01:01:44):
Years before Dr. Floyd bringsFirst Baptist, now Pinnacle
or cross church, whateverit's called now, cross church
into what it is, right?
And he models that church offof some of these other churches.
So I remember, the comparisonsbeing made to big churches
in Texas, big to wherehe's from, and big churches
in, in Tennessee and bigchurches in California.
Those churches had beenthere for a long time.

(01:02:04):
They had been, and they had beenand there they had been modeled
off of other big churches.
And so I think anywhere whereyou have this, the confluence
of all these demographic trendsthat we're talking about and
charismatic faith leadershipthat is interested in.
Stepping forward in that way.
'cause not all charismaticfaith leaders are interested
in that kind of step, right?

(01:02:25):
Because you seedifferent models, right?
So in the realm of charismaticfaith leaders we've got
the mega church guys, wehave a Jerry Falwell style.
We have people that becomelike Dr. Floyd does, but
then we also have Dr. Kingwho's very different, right?
We have Reinold Niebuhr,who's very different, none of
them shoo the limelight, butthe reasons for taking the
limelight are very different.
Maybe, and I'm speaking a littlebit, hypothetically because I,

(01:02:46):
I don't know Dr. Floyd, I've,never spoken to him deeply
about anything in my life.
And I shook his hand once.
That's about all I've got,and I think but I think that
what makes this place uniqueis that so while we're late
to the party, we're uniquein the party, I think.
And I think the reason isthat the same time that we
see the system that becomesCross Church, Fellowship

(01:03:06):
Bible Church, New Heights.
Some of these other, the largebooming Baptist churches.
Yeah.
Baptist or Baptist style.
'Cause, churches emerging inthe region is at the same time
that we see the concentratedeconomic impact of Walmart.
We're asking more andmore of its people to

(01:03:29):
come into the region.
We see the concentratedeconomic impact of the
poultry industry and we seethe concentrated economic
impact of the university.
And so for very differentreasons, they all become
magnets that are bringing peopleinto this place that become.
That maybe not all of them are,but many of them are coming
from church homes, that aresim that are in that megachurch

(01:03:51):
world or in that kind of, space.
And they're looking forthat here because that's
what they're familiar with.
And you want to go back towhat you were interested in.
And then they, and so they'regonna, they're gonna go help
swell those ranks, and thenthose various churches become
the hot things in the region.
And those pastors becomemore and more visible within
the community, within countyleadership within not that

(01:04:11):
they're leading counties,but they become more visible.
They become, because they causeparking issues on Sundays,
or because they're buildingbig buildings that have big
stormwater runoff issues.
And so they just because ofreality have to become known.
To, and then I thinkthe turning point really
is gonna be the when.
The First Baptist Church decidesto build its second campus and
they build it in Benton County.

(01:04:31):
And it becomes quite clear quiteearly on that church, at least
an outward appearance, I don'tknow about inside, but at least
an outward appearance was builtto serve the economic elite of
northwest Arkansas and not toserve the small little country
church that Dr. Floyd came tooff just off of Emma Street, in
the early days of his career.
And that to me speaks tothis change because this is

(01:04:55):
a, this is now an economic,there's an economic engine
driving religious interest.
Whereas before Baptists are,as a rule of thumb, they
are, they're anti power.
They don't, they wantdecentralization.
They don't want to benext to power centers.
They are, especially in thepoor south, like we are, as a
rule of thumb, like these aregonna be some of the loudest
guys in the room at a countymeeting where they feel like

(01:05:15):
they're getting ready to beimposed upon, and now they're
going and seeking out the folksthat are creating imposition.
And that's a shift.
That's a, that I don't thinkanybody's really fully reckoned
with or fully teased outall that, all that's there.
I, and I don't know that Iwould say that any one of
those church leaders any oneof these churches that I named,
took a second and made thisconcentrated decision, I'm gonna

(01:05:38):
do this thing because of X, Idon't think that's the case.
But I think that.
At least in some of theseleadership places you see where
power has clearly become avery important thing for them.
And so as Dr. Floyd moves fromSpringdale to the presidency
of the convention, at thesame time that he's doing

(01:05:58):
this, he's having to deal withnot just the perception that
increasingly the population hereat home has of what he's about
and what his church is about.
But he also then walks into theSBC is they're dealing with yet
another sexual assault scandal.
And the way that the sbcommunity deals with that
particular one, which willultimately result in him
resigning from his leadershipis telling, I think, and

(01:06:21):
understanding how largereligious structures are
now thinking about therelationship with power in
the era of in the era of thisresurgent heavily right driven,
christian nationalism really,for lack of a better phrase.
I was trying to get aroundthat phrase, but that's, I
think that's where we have togo, when you think about it.

mike rusch. (01:06:39):
Yeah I think this is, this is a big
conversation, right?
And we're not, we'rejust, we'll probably won't
dive fully into that.
Maybe we can save thatfor another season or
something like that.
I don't know.
Let's wrap, back aroundto Jimmy Carter, right?
Yeah.
Because this life that helived and obviously passed
away here recently and whatthat stood for and maybe where
we are today as a state ora region or even a country,

(01:07:01):
if you wanna go that far.
What lessons do we drawfrom Jimmy Carter, the way
he lived his life and it, Ithink for me, it's hard to
get my head around because onone hand he lived this life,
which was of great faith.
Yet the power structuresultimately decided not to
continue to keep him in aplace of power politically.
And yet he goes on to live thislife in a very consistent way.

(01:07:23):
And and we watched the evolutionof power and religion in our
country over the next 40 years.
Take on Yeah.
A new a new dimensionin so many ways.
And so I think, I'm tryingto understand maybe how do
we think about this legacyof Jimmy Carter in an era
where maybe the things that herepresented were not the things
that were valued at the time.

(01:07:45):
And, I'm wanting to understandhow they're valued today.

Yeah.
I think there's a coupleof ways that we can apply
Carter's legacy, if you will.
I think one would be tonever discount the fact that.
He was a southerner.
And I mean that in the sortof the truest sense that
he's a son of the South.
In that, I was talkingearlier about other sort
of southern presidents,or southern politicians.
But when you think about him inthe context of other, all these

(01:08:11):
other presidents from the south,there's only one other president
that you can say is honestto God, a son of the South.
I'm sorry, two.
One is Lyndon Johnson thatwe've talked about before.
Son of the East TexasHill country and, went
to teacher's college, youknow, ardent new dealer.
I mean, he was, He was aman of the people, right?
And that's part of thereason why he fought the
way that he did, is hefought for the people.
The other one wouldbe Bill Clinton.
The boy from Hope.

(01:08:32):
Man, you know that guyhe but Carter is not
like either one of them.
Because to wanna be president,you gotta have an ego to
assume that you have what ittakes to lead this country.
You have to have an ego.
But the way that, but Carter'sego, I think was an ego similar
to the ego of the Ozarks.
This is this might be alittle bit of a stretch.
This is kinda howI think about it.

mike rusch. (01:08:51):
No, I don't know, but run with it.
I've never heard anybodytalk about this before.

dr. jared m. p (01:08:54):
So what I Carter you could be the first,
this could be your next PhD.
Oh, gosh, no.
Carter believed very muchthat the way forward was
to take care of everybody.
He gets that from his theology.
He gets that fromhis upbringing.
He gets that from day one.
We talked about hisgrandfather was a populace.
His mother cared deeply aboutthese things even though he
fought with his dad aboutrace, that his dad was a

(01:09:17):
part of that same household.
His dad administered that.
His dad gave him the workethic to do that kind of work.
And and Carter took beingfrom a place of little.
Even though his familywas unique in that he, it
was a place of little hetook that very seriously.
And he never during his timein the State House, during his
time in Washington and afternever diminished other places.

(01:09:38):
He saw the valuein what was there.
And the Ozark is a place thathas always had to find the
value in what is here becausewe're too poor to do otherwise.
And it's a very different thingthan I think what we see a lot
of folks coming in intentionallyor not coming in because a
lot of the driving energy thatwe see in the region today
are more bush like or Clintonlike in their southernness.

(01:09:59):
And so the bushes bush, theelder and Bush the younger are
both from Texas, but not really.
I don't know that we could,we can call them Texans
because that's where theylived in, and died and all
these different things, butthey're Texans a little bit in
the way that the heirs to theWalmart fortune are Arkansans.
Now they, they're from here,but they're not from here.
Carter never forgot that hewas from Plains, Georgia.
We don't have, because henever had the luxury of it.

(01:10:20):
That's a privilege tobe able to forget where
you're from in a way.
And we here in the hillcountry, in, in Arkansas
and in southern Missouri, wedon't have that privilege.
For the most part, wedon't have that flexibility
and that mobility.
And the lesson that Cartergives us is to be proud of that.
The lesson that Cartergives incomers is to say,
Hey, wait, there's value.
Don't dismiss this becauseit's different and poorer or

(01:10:42):
remote or muddy or whatever.
To be like Carter in this spaceis to recognize the value of
this space and to recognize thateven though this space is poor.
Even though this space ishard scrabble, it is still
a place of that beauty andwonder and joy and love and
justice can be found, right?
So that's one thing.
And then the other thing I wouldsay is that his insistence,

(01:11:04):
his insistence upon justice.
And that in that insisting uponjustice was the truest form
of love that that people offaith can bring into the world.
He has a, he has anexpansive view of justice.
He does not have aretributive view of justice.
He has a restorativeview of justice and that.
In the conversations thatwe're having in northwest
Arkansas right now, asking thequestions about how do we grow

(01:11:25):
as a place, how do we thinkof, how do we reconcile the
past of of trying to forciblyremove not just native people,
but communities of color,former enslaved communities.
How do we deal with childlabor and processing plans?
How do we deal with thefact that the, the majority
of workers, the majorityof households in northwest
Arkansas are barely atthe ALICE threshold.

(01:11:46):
So asset limited, incomeconstrained, yet employed.
So they're barely able, eventhough they have good jobs
and they do everything they'resupposed to do, they still
can't quite make it work.
How do we deal with that?
That's a, that's not aretributive question.
That's a restorative question.
That's a question that says,I love you as my neighbor.
How do I come alongside youand help this burden be easier?
That's the lesson thatJimmy Carter gives us.

mike rusch. (01:12:10):
Yeah, I, I will add nothing to that other
than just say thank you.
Yeah.
I think that's yeah, that's acommunity I could, I am for.

And I think that more people than
not, when you put it in thosekinds of terms, you say,
okay, this is what take awaythe fact that Jimmy Carter
was a Democrat, take awaythe fact that he didn't want
to vote against abortion.
Whatever.
Take all you Just say that.
Just say that, that's, to methat's, I'm not much on sitting
in a church and talking aboutthe gospel or anything anymore.
But if you wanna talk aboutthe gospel, that's the
gospel right there, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's the sermon on themount and application.

(01:12:39):
In, in so many different ways.
And so I think that's thelesson I think from, yeah.

mike r (01:12:44):
All right, Dr. Phillips.
Jared, thank you for your time.
Yeah, thanks for havingme out to the farm.
And anytime once again, I'm justhumbled to be able to sit and
I'm gonna let that swim aroundin my brain for a long time and
it's probably not gonna settle,so probably be back here again.
Knocking on yourdoor at some point.
Call whenever you like.
All right.
Yeah.
Thanks so much.
Appreciate you.

dr. jared m. philli (01:13:01):
No problem.

mike rusch. (01:13:04):
Well, a deep thank you to Dr. Jared Phillips
for walking us through thismoment in history when Southern
Evangelical Christianitybegan to shift its posture
towards political power.
In tracing the rise of JimmyCarter, we're not just learning
about a single presidency.
We're learning about theemergence of a new political
theology in the South, onethat redefined the role of
religion and public life.

(01:13:24):
This episode helps us askwhat happens when faith
moves from the marginsto the center of power?
When churches no longerspeak from that prophetic
edge, but from within themachinery of politics.
And how did those shiftslay the groundwork for
the moral and culturalbattles that still shape our
political discourse today?
As Dr. Phillips remindedus, Jimmy Carter was a

(01:13:45):
complicated figure, devoutself-reflective and earnest
in his faith, but also unableto escape the gravitational
pull of Southern expectations.
His presidency marked aturning point, not just for
evangelicalism, but for howreligion and region intersected
in the broader American story.
And as we've looked at thesilence that seems to surround
so many injustices todayfrom immigration to labor

(01:14:08):
conditions, to racial exclusion,we have to ask, what role
does the church play now?
What does it mean wheninstitutions rooted in
the teachings of Jesus?
Say so little about thesuffering around them.
To answer that, we'll needto continue following that
story, and I can see thatin our future, because
faith in the South hasnever been a single story.
It's always been contested,shaped by race, by land,

(01:14:31):
economics, and power.
We are closing in on our finalepisodes for this season,
and that is gonna start toreturn us to where this season
began on a gravel road inWestern Benton County that
overlooked a cemetery longforgotten in our history.
We're gonna return to the originstory of Benton County, to the
story of the Anderson family whofirst arrived here in the 1830s.
With them, theybrought approximately

(01:14:52):
32 enslaved people.
in that interview with thedescendants of Hugh Allen
Anderson, the original Andersonto come, I asked if they had
any knowledge of the descendantof the people that were
enslaved by their ancestors.
Their answer was no.
But the reality is that thedescendants of some of those
enslaved people are stillhere in northwest Arkansas.
This is the story andperspectives that will

(01:15:13):
close this season out.
Those descendants of someof the earliest enslaved
people brought to northwestArkansas, they will have the
last voice in this season.
Can't wait to share this storywith you because this story is
truly the work of belonging.
Hopefully the work towardsrepair and ultimately
the work of wholeness.
I wanna say thank you forlistening and I wanna say
thank you for being themost important part of what

(01:15:34):
our community is becoming.
This is the underviewan exploration and the
shaping of our place.

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.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}the president & religion in the south with Dr. Jared Phillips (ep 2, 34).

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the president & religion in the south with Dr. Jared Phillips (ep 2, 34).

Stuff You Should Know