Carter, Catholics, and the Politics of Family

For many conservative Christians the libertine culture of the 1960s appeared a direct threat to the nuclear family, a cornerstone of a successful culture blessed by God. This threat appeared as more than simply issues such as drug use, but included growing acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and feminism. Roe v. Wade, the battle over ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the attempts to pass civil rights protections for gays and lesbians joined with more traditional concerns for education to divide many Christian denominations, the Catholic Church included. By the Carter administration, theological debate had manifested itself in the political arena, helping to form the modern “Religious Right.” This paper explores how the American Roman Catholic Church reacted to the dynamism of the new family politics. It examines how the Carter administration’s agenda united many conservative Catholics and Protestants, and concludes that the Carter years were pivotal in shifting Catholicism’s place in the established political and theological orders.

In 1978 Lawrence Lader, president of Abortion Rights Mobilization, warned that a “religious right-wing alliance” was taking shape in American politics, combining elements of fundamentalist evangelicalism, strong in the South, with conservative Catholicism, strong in the Midwest. This new unity would “revolve around all issues presumably posing a threat to the American family.”¹ Lader’s plea, while impassioned, largely fell on deaf ears, the historic rift between Catholics and many conservative Protestant denominations presumably too wide to bridge. Indeed, while born of the Reformation, the rift in America had widened as a result of massive Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century. From anti-Catholic riots and the Know-Nothing Party of the middle of the nineteenth century to the Ku Klux Klan at the beginning of the next, some Protestant denominations had developed what author Garry Wills termed a “chronic anti-Catholicism.”² The most overt sectarian strife had ebbed by the middle of the twentieth century, but any accord still seemed remote. John Kennedy’s presidency had confirmed Catholics as a reliable constituency of the Democratic Party while many fundamentalist Protestants had retreated into pious separatism, withdrawn from most political activism.³ Put simply, an alliance of conservative Catholics and Protestants under the banner of the Grand Old Party still appeared to be most unlikely.

As Lader recognized, however, an historic shift had begun during the presidency of Jimmy Carter and promised a new Religious Right that not only reactivated politically conservative evangelicals, drawing them into the Republican fold, but also broke down their historic animosity toward Catholicism. The cultural turmoil of the 1960s provoked new political controversies involving feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, gay and lesbian rights, and, most prominently, abortion rights. Taken together, the libertine acceptance of these issues worried many Americans across traditional sectarian lines. They appeared a threat to the nation’s very core, the nuclear family. As Lader spoke, Carter wrestled with this new political dynamic, trying desperately to balance traditional mores and modern civil liberties and to cultivate his natural appeal to conservative evangelicals while maintaining his party’s critical alliance with Catholics. Ultimately this proved a difficult task, the new “family issues” and Carter’s reaction to them dividing faiths and uniting conservatives in a way unimaginable before. By 1980 the “religious right-wing alliance” that Lader predicted hardly claimed all American Catholics. It had, however, emerged distinct from its Religious Right antecedents, actively cultivating Catholics and finding at least some degree of success. While scholars have recently traced the roots of the modern Religious Right to the early twentieth century, it was the Carter years in the end that transformed Catholicism’s place in the established political and theological orders.⁴

By the time Carter ran for the Oval Office in 1976 the foundations for this new reality already existed, as many religious leaders complained that the government was interfering with religious education. First, the Supreme Court case Engel v. Vitale held that voluntary recitation of nondenominational prayers in public schools was a violation of the First Amendment’s “establishment” clause. This was followed by the mandate for sex education in...