【Ireland】

Editor's note: This is Irelandthe 39th entry in the writer's project to read one book about each of the U.S. Presidents in the year prior to Election Day 2016. Follow Marcus' progress at the @44in52 Twitter account and the44 in 52 Spreadsheet.

Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when religion wasn't such a big deal during the race for the White House.

Outside of a few instances (John Adams' supporters claiming Jefferson was an atheist, fears over JFK's Catholicism), I haven't encountered much in the way of religion affecting an election during this project.

Not until I got to Jimmy Carter.

Randall Balmer's Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carterfocuses on Carter, religion, and the rise of evangelicals as a rising segment of the voting population.

It was also a book I listened to while driving cross-country. That big move, which I first mentioned in my Nixon post, finally got underway as I wrapped up Ford. My traditional wariness of audiobooks went out the window for Redeemer, partly because there was nothing to distract me from listening as I drove mile after mile.

There were two particular threads that caught my interest. The first came early in Carter's political career: after losing a bid for Georgia governor in 1966, he used racially-charged politics to capture the same position in 1970 -- aligning himself with segregationist Democrat George Wallace.

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It's startling to hear about such a campaign by a man who has come to represent liberal compassion. Balmer doesn't relent on his criticism of Carter's decisions here.

When you run a campaign that's comparable to George Wallace... jeez. Ballmer uses the phrase "prostituting" to describe how Carter won

— 44 in 52 (@44in52) September 30, 2016

Never realized the depths he went to in order to win the office. Even he was sick of himself for that. Whatever it takes...

— 44 in 52 (@44in52) September 30, 2016

But neither does he ignore the guilt that Carter felt -- and the way Carter atoned for his pro-segregation stance. It seems the ongoing guilt from that effort pushed Carter to emphasize his liberal slant in later years.

The other thread is more closely tied to the religion angle. Balmer outlines how a Democrat like Carter was able to ride a wave of religious revival into the White House -- before evangelicals made the shift to the right that we're now familiar with.

There's plenty on the infamous Playboyinterview in which Carter admitted to feeling "lust" in his heart (someone take a time machine to 1976 and show them this year's election rhetoric). But it was the description of how evangelicals abandoned Carter over the course of his single term in office that had me hooked.

Balmer lays out the rise of Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly -- and how they led a semi-revolt against Carter for being soft on Communism and abortion, often cited as the reason why evangelicals turned against Carter in favor of Reagan in 1980.

But Balmer argues it was a court case over perceived segregation in religious schools that really turned the tide against Carter: Coit v. Green(later Green v. Connally). The Supreme Court upheld a decision that revoked the tax-exempt status of private religious schools -- if they practiced racial discrimination.

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What's even stranger is that both the decision and the IRS' effort to enforce it on Bob Jones University both happened before Carter took office. Yet Carter became the target for evangelicals like Falwell and Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, who opposed the ruling.

I take all of this about Carter to heart because he's a fellow Southerner, one of a string of Southern presidents in my lifetime (particularly if you count George W. Bush's Texas as the "south" -- although Texans may disagree with that, because Texas is its own universe).

The South and religion have always been tightly bound together. That a Southern evangelical Democrat could win the Presidency seems almost impossible in 2016. As my wife and dog slept and the road kept flying by, I couldn't help but think of my native South and wonder if such a thing would even be possible again.

Days to read Washington: 16Days to read Adams: 11Days to read Jefferson: 10Days to read Madison: 13Days to read Monroe: 6Days to read J. Q. Adams: 10Days to read Jackson: 11Days to read Van Buren: 9Days to read Harrison: 6Days to read Tyler: 3Days to read Polk: 8Days to read Taylor: 8Days to read Fillmore: 14Days to read Pierce: 1Days to read Buchanan: 1Days to read Lincoln: 12Days to read Johnson: 8Days to read Grant: 27Days to read Hayes: 1Days to read Garfield: 3Days to read Arthur: 17Days to hear Cleveland: 3Days to read Harrison: 4Days to read McKinley: 5Days to read T. Roosevelt: 15Days to read Taft: 13Days to read Wilson: 10Days to read Harding: 3Days to read Coolidge: 7Days to read Hoover: 9Days to read FDR: 11Days to read Truman: 14Days to read Eisenhower: 11Days to read JFK: 10Days to read LBJ: 6Days to read Nixon: 6Days to read Ford: 4Days to listen to Carter: 2Days behind schedule: 9