How Evangelical Voters Became Republican Voters Between 1976 and 1984

In 1976 the most visible evangelical in American politics was a Democrat, which ruins a few cable segments before they start. Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school at his Baptist church in Georgia, talked openly about being born again, and ran for president as a Southern Democrat. He carried every Southern state but Virginia, and the weekly newsmagazines of that year declared it the year of the evangelical.

Eight years later a Republican, a former Hollywood actor and union president, won more than 58 percent of the popular vote and 49 states, and evangelical Christians were widely understood as one of the pillars of his coalition. Something happened between those two elections. The people who tell you it was simple, either a plot by rich men or a spontaneous awakening, are leaving out most of the story.

I want to give you the real sequence. It has religion in it, it has law in it, and it has some history that conservatives should look at squarely, including parts that are uncomfortable. The shift was a decision made by millions of people for reasons they could state, and you can't understand American politics since 1980 without understanding them.

Where evangelicals started

In the early 1970s American evangelicals were not a single political bloc. Many were Southern Democrats by family and region. Many held the old view that a Christian's first job was to preach the gospel and not to run a lobbying campaign. Some leaders openly discouraged pastors from entering politics.

Their attitudes on questions that now seem fixed were also more mixed than people remember. Abortion is the best example. When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in January 1973, the reaction among Catholic leaders was immediate and fierce. Many Protestant voices were slower, and in the early 1970s the Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions that were more permissive on abortion than the position it holds now. It took the rest of the decade for most evangelical leaders to move to the pro-life position. By 1980 the Southern Baptists had moved there, too.

That is not a criticism. It is a description of how a movement forms. People who had been busy building churches and schools realized, over about a decade, that the government was making decisions that affected both.

Step one: the Christian schools

The first thread runs through schools. After the Supreme Court's rulings in the early 1960s that struck down state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools, a number of evangelical families concluded that the public school was no longer neutral about religion. Christian schools multiplied through the 1960s and 1970s, many of them attached to local churches. Our post on five school-day situations and what the prayer rulings really decide explains what those rulings did and did not decide, and School Prayer, Bibles and the Ten Commandments, Eleven Questions Answered answers the questions parents still ask.

Then came the government. In 1970 and 1971 federal courts and the Internal Revenue Service moved against private schools that discriminated by race, and the IRS began to deny tax-exempt status to them. (How the tax rules treat churches themselves is a separate subject, covered in Do churches pay taxes? Eleven questions about churches and the tax man.) This was right, and the principle was never in doubt: a school that excludes students for the color of their skin should not receive the privileges of a charity. The uncomfortable part is that some of the private schools that appeared in the South after desegregation were founded by families who wanted to avoid integration. Historians of the period, and some evangelicals among them, have said so plainly. Any honest account of this history has to include that fact.

At the same time, many Christian schools had been founded for other reasons, to teach the faith, to teach discipline, to teach what parents believed. In August 1978 the IRS proposed a rule that would have forced private schools to prove they were not discriminating, and would have required them to show a minimum minority enrollment. Church schools with no history of discrimination felt targeted. The agency received a flood of letters, a very large number by the standards of any agency proposal, and Congress stepped in and blocked the rule from taking effect.

Conservative organizers who were present at the time, notably Paul Weyrich, have said this fight, more than any other, taught pastors that Washington could reach into their schools. Some historians disagree and give more weight to abortion, to the Equal Rights Amendment and to the broader sense of cultural change. I think the right answer is that several things happened together. The government's treatment of religious schools was one of the sparks, and it landed on dry ground. The Supreme Court settled the legal question in 1983 in Bob Jones University v. United States, ruling that the IRS could deny tax-exempt status to a school with a racially discriminatory policy. That outcome is worth stating without hedging. The principle was sound.

Step two: Roe as a mobilizer

The second thread is Roe v. Wade. Roe did not turn evangelicals into a voting bloc overnight. What it did was give every pastor and every church a concrete moral issue that was national in scope and that could not be settled by a local vote.

Over the late 1970s Catholic bishops and the pro-life movement built political organizations, and evangelical leaders joined them. In 1979 the theologian Francis Schaeffer and the future Surgeon General C. Everett Koop produced a book and a film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, aimed at evangelical audiences. By 1980 the Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment to protect unborn life, and for the first time in decades it did not endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. That was a shift, and the evangelical vote responded.

The pro-life case itself, and why many who hold it also support families after birth, is covered in the pro-life argument in four premises and where each one gets attacked. What matters for our timeline is that abortion gave evangelicals something no school fight could: a cause that Catholics shared.

Step three: the Moral Majority

By 1979 a group of conservative organizers, among them Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Richard Viguerie and Ed McAteer, went looking for a leader who could reach evangelical pastors. They approached Jerry Falwell, the Baptist pastor of a large church in Lynchburg, Virginia, who already had a national audience through his television ministry. Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979.

In the 1960s Falwell had preached that ministers should stick to the gospel and stay out of political marches. By 1979 he had changed his mind, and he said as much. His new organization did three practical things:

1. It registered voters. Pastors who had never talked about voter registration began to do it from the pulpit and in church lobbies.
2. It lobbied on a short list of issues. Abortion, school prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, and what it called the defense of the traditional family.
3. It gave evangelicals a way to be Republican without feeling they had betrayed their roots. The group's membership included Catholics, Jews and Mormons, not only Protestant evangelicals.

None of this meant evangelicals were of one mind. Plenty stayed Democratic. Some Christian leaders openly opposed the Moral Majority. But the organization turned a scattered set of grievances into a lobby that candidates had to consider.

A region and a faith moving at once

One more complication, and a fair one. Most evangelicals lived in the South, and the South was already changing its partisan habits. In 1964 Barry Goldwater carried five Deep South states, a first for a Republican in modern times, and in 1972 Richard Nixon carried every Southern state. Carter's 1976 sweep of the region was, in this sense, the high-water mark of the old Democratic South. We tell the Goldwater story in The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future.

So when you ask why evangelicals became Republicans, you are partly asking why Southerners did. The two groups overlapped so heavily that it is hard to pull them apart, and a careful historian will tell you the answer is a mix: region, religion, class and the 1970s economy all pushed in the same direction. That is not a weakness in the explanation. It is how large political changes happen, with many streams running into one river.

Step four: Dallas, August 1980

The moment a lot of historians point to came in the summer of 1980. In August, a group called the Religious Roundtable held a gathering in Dallas, which drew thousands of pastors and laypeople. Reagan, already the Republican nominee, addressed them on August 22. He told the ministers he knew they could not endorse a candidate, but he wanted them to know that he endorsed them.

It was a clever line, and also a sincere one. Reagan's own religious life was less conventional than Carter's, and critics have been quick to point that out. But he understood what the audience cared about, and he spoke to them as people whose concerns deserved a hearing, not as an interest group to be managed. Carter, who shared their faith and their vocabulary, struck many evangelical leaders as having failed to deliver on their agenda. That is a judgment, and a fair one, though it is the judgment of those leaders and not a settled fact.

What the votes showed

The results were lopsided, in the end. In 1980 Reagan defeated Carter in 44 states, winning 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49. In 1984 he won 49 states and 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale's 13, with 58.8 percent of the popular vote. (The arithmetic holds: 489 plus 49 is 538, and so is 525 plus 13.)

How much of that was evangelicals? Scholars who study the survey data of the period disagree about the size of the shift, and I will not hand you a number I cannot defend. They agree on the direction. White evangelical Protestants, who had given Carter substantial support in 1976, voted decisively for Reagan in 1980 and again in 1984. A realignment that large rarely rests on a single cause. Inflation, the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the general sense of a country drifting played a part for everyone, evangelical or not. Reagan's first-term policies on taxes and defense mattered. For evangelicals specifically, the religious questions were the extra reason that made the move easier.

Catholics and evangelicals learn to work together

One of the least noticed changes of this period is the cooperation between Catholics and evangelical Protestants. For most of American history these two groups had been wary of each other, and in some places hostile. The pro-life movement and the school-choice movement gave them a reason to stand together. Schaeffer used a phrase for it, co-belligerents, meaning allies in a particular fight who do not have to agree on everything else.

This is a political fact with long consequences. It created a religious coalition that was larger than either group, and it linked Southern white evangelicals to the Catholic ethnic voters in the industrial North who were already moving toward Reagan, as described in The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides.

The Reagan administration kept some of its promises to this coalition and not others. In 1983 Reagan published an essay called "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation." In 1984 he signed the Equal Access Act, which requires public secondary schools that let non-curricular student clubs meet to let student religious groups meet on the same terms. But the broader goals, a constitutional amendment on abortion, a constitutional amendment on school prayer, did not pass, and many activists were disappointed. The effort to overturn Roe took until 2022, and the legal route is described in What the Dobbs decision actually decided, step by step and in plain English.

The strongest objection

Critics make one argument I should answer. They say the story of evangelicals becoming Republicans is simply a story about race, or about power, or about political manipulation: that pastors were mobilized by strategists who used social issues to win votes.

Here's the strongest version, which says the movement's organizers were political operatives who found that cultural issues could deliver a voting bloc, and that the school-and-tax fight began with segregation.

The honest reply is three points. One, the history of segregation academies is real, and I have said it plainly above. Two, the great majority of Christian schools and of evangelical voters were not motivated by it, and treating a whole community as though they were is not an argument; it is a smear. Three, the claim that voters were manipulated insults the voters. People who put time and money into church schools, who gave to the pro-life cause, who took pamphlets door to door in the late 1970s, did not need a strategist to tell them what they cared about. Organizers gave them an outlet. They supplied the convictions.

The bottom line

• Evangelicals were not a Republican bloc in 1976. The shift between 1976 and 1984 came from several things: the school and tax-status fights, Roe v. Wade, the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, and the 1980 campaign.
• Be honest about the uncomfortable part. Some private schools grew in response to desegregation, and the Supreme Court was right in 1983 to let the IRS deny them tax exemption.
• Catholics and evangelicals learned to work together, and that alliance is one of the lasting facts of modern Republican politics.
• If you attend church and want to take part in public life, start local: school boards, county parties and voter registration drives are where these movements began.
• Respect your neighbors who see it differently. A coalition lasts when its members argue for their beliefs and don't demean those who hold others.