Born again

Jimmy Carter has a lot to answer for. It was he who made evangelical Christianity part of America’s political vocabulary back in the 1970s. Carter was running for president. During the course of his campaign, he got the bright idea to give an interview to Playboy magazine — sort of his generation’s version of Clinton going on MTV — in which he said, among other things having to do with policies foreign and domestic, that he had been “born again.”

This created quite a stir in those days. Not so much because Carter had experienced a spiritual awakening as because he chose to talk about it publicly — and in Playboy, no less.

At the time, it appeared to be an interesting political strategy. Carter was running in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Given the chicanery and corruption of the Nixon Administration, ethics was an important theme of Carter’s campaign. But Carter’s ethical stance wasn’t just about Nixon. From disaffected hippies to violence in the streets, the sexual revolution to rampant use of drugs and alcohol, Carter recognized a deep unhappiness in America, a creeping sense that American culture was going sour.

Nixon, of course, had seen this, too. His approach, though, was to call for more law and order. To crack a few heads, if necessary, and regain the discipline that he attributed to what he called “the silent majority.” This worked for him twice — in 1968 and again in ’72. But then, rather than the solution to the country’s ills, Nixon himself became part of the problem, falling prey to the lust for power and the paranoia that plagued America.

Carter identified the problem as a “spiritual malaise.” And so, in what seemed a daring move for an otherwise strait-laced Southern gentleman, he did the Playboy interview, aiming his message directly at the belly of the beast. And people all over the country began talking about what it meant to be born again.

This turned out to be a very big deal.

Before Carter trotted out his story about accepting Jesus as his Lord and Savior, most politicians in this country soft-pedaled religion. To a great extent, this was born of a desire to let sleeping dogs lie. An accepted fact of American domestic life was that you didn’t discuss religion or politics in polite company. Since politicians were, by definition, stuck with the latter, they chose to cover the former with a few platitudes and move on to more promising material — like character assassination, say, or the demonization of foreigners.

Other considerations also came into play. For one thing, the founders of this country made a point of emphasizing the separation of church and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “… it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Governance, Jefferson went on to say, was about “reason and free enquiry.”
Or, as Jesus put it, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Our politics and government were regarded as material, rational inventions, and to be dealt with accordingly.

But beyond that was an abiding sense, seemingly shared by most people, that life was divided into two, distinct compartments, the public and the private. People in public life willingly exposed themselves to a certain amount of scrutiny, sure. But there were also aspects of their existence that were nobody’s business. Public figures might have chronic diseases, fondnesses for people they weren’t married to or a generous taste for drink. As long as these peccadilloes didn’t interfere with the performance of their duties, they remained nothing more than loose talk and insider gossip.

One’s religion fell into this category. To drag it out for public viewing, apart from ritual occasions, was considered exhibitionistic, eccentric or plain weird. Prior to Carter, the only presidential candidate who had felt compelled to talk openly about his faith was John Kennedy — and that was to assure everyone that his Catholicism would not interfere with his ability to serve the national interest.

When Jimmy Carter declared that he was born again, he breached the wall between public and private life. In effect, he was saying that even if it’s possible to separate the two (and it probably isn’t), it’s not honest — and dishonesty isn’t healthy for individuals or the communities they live in (hence our malaise).

All of this still sounds reasonable today. But then Jimmy Carter is nothing if not a reasonable man. Ironically, his decision to make a story of personal spiritual experience part of American political discourse was probably based on the rational perception that our politics needed an ethical dimension if it was going to make sense again. Not because this is what some like to call “a Christian country.” But because our republican form of government is so decidedly secular that without a lively ethical component it is easily given to hypocrisy. Talking about being born again was simply Carter’s way of presenting his bona fides.

Sadly, what we learned from this is that when you make the private life public, all you do is make public life bigger. Honesty remains elusive; rather than an ethical guide, the religion of politicians and public figures is just another club in the arsenal of power.