With the passing of Jimmy Carter on Sunday, we have lost one of our last surviving connections to a hinge moment in American political history—a time when a majority of evangelical Americans voted Democratic in a presidential election. Yes, you read that right: Carter, a born-again Southern Baptist, outpolled mainline Episcopalian Gerald Ford among fellow evangelicals in 1976, albeit by a narrow margin of 51 to 49 percent. At a time when Caligulan GOP crime lord and accused serial sexual assaulter Donald Trump—whose religious affiliation and observance could charitably be described as erratic—commands well over 80 percent support in the same voting bloc, this seems like extraterrestrial lore, right up there with Carter’s own reported encounters with a UFO and a killer swamp rabbit. But Carter’s appeal among the true-believing Protestants of the 1970s—and his subsequent rapid descent into pariah status among the same group—reveals instructive portents (or signs and wonders, if you prefer) of the unshackled resentment politics that in remarkably short order secured the hard-right political profile of modern American evangelicalism.

No one could have foretold this turn of events at the time of Carter’s inauguration—even after Carter outraged some evangelical critics by confessing to Playboy interviewer Robert Scheer that he had sometimes regarded women outside his marriage with “lust in his heart.” Running as a post-Watergate reformer who pledged that he would never lie to the American people, Carter seemed like the political equivalent of a revivalist preacher, calling a sinful nation to a renewed sense of purpose and hard-won redemption. Evangelicals were drawn to Carter’s 1976 candidacy by a direct sort of spiritual identification. “Carter certainly came in with a sense that he’s one of us—a Southerner, a Baptist, and a Sunday school teacher,”says Calvin University historian Kirstin Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “He could speak in a language that resonated with evangelicals; he was very pious and very kind, and so authentic. It was a moment when the country was really searching for that after Watergate.”

Evangelical voters “were very much in play” during that election cycle, says University of West Georgia historian Daniel K. Williams, author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. “When Carter presented himself as someone who was a devout Christian from the deep South and therefore could be perceived as someone who represented them, a lot of evangelicals, including a few who were Republicans, voted for him, especially in the South.… And I think especially after Nixon and the Watergate scandal, an overwhelming number of evangelicals said they were interested in a candidate’s character. You look at all the leading Christian magazines back then—Christianity Today, Eternity, Christian Life—they all stressed a candidate’s character.”

What changed this virtue-driven consensus? There were, of course, the vanguard forces assembling at the frontiers of the overheated confrontations over morality and culture that now go by the shorthand pundit designation of “the culture wars.” All these emerging nodes of resentment were strung together in a number of key works of millennially minded prophecy and cultural exhortation. “Evangelicals took up the narrative that all this could be attributed to secular humanism, in the catchphrase of the time,” Williams notes, pointing to books like Francis Schaffer’s book How Should We Then Live? and Tim LaHaye’s Battle for the Mind. “Also you had Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth, which blended the premillennial theology popular among conservative evangelicals with an analysis of political and cultural decline that tended to be intensely anticommunist, anti-Soviet and militaristic.”

The Late Great Planet Earth was indeed the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, and while it antedated the formal rise of the new religious right, it was firmly ensconced in mainstream religious discourse “so that when someone warned about secular humanism in 1976, people who read The Late Great Planet Earth found this very believable,” Williams says.

Before this sustained propaganda barrage, however, many of those questions had not yet acquired any hard-line partisan or denominational coloration—indeed, in 1973, when the US Supreme Court handed down its decision sanctioning the individual right to abortion, Roe v. Wade, Carter’s own Southern Baptist conference issued a statement supporting the ruling. Instead, Carter became vilified among religious conservatives for several specific policy decisions. One of them was a rule approved by the IRS in 1978, denying tax exemptions to private religious schools that weren’t racially integrated. The ruling—which Carter hadn’t even known about in advance—proved to be a rallying cry for conservative evangelicals far more galvanizing than scriptural assessments of individual character in public life. It sparked widespread indignation among religious parents and educators not only because of the threatened loss of a critical tax subsidy; they also bridled at the charge that schools instructing children in their preferred brand of morality were racist—even though many of these institutions, known as “segregation academies,” had indeed been founded to combat the desegregation of schools in the Jim Crow South.

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In a grim foreshadowing of today’s cultural skirmishes, the image of Washington bureaucrats dictating how and where Christian children could be educated was a powerful template of political and cultural resentment that unleashed the evangelical right as a national force in politics. One only has to look to the MAGA right’s multifront war on alleged race-and-gender brainwashing in schools and universities to grasp the enduring power of this evangelical right-wing origin story. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of the vanguard leaders of this moral panic, has at once claimed to reassert the central authority of parents in setting educational agendas and exultantly played the “how dare you call me racist?” card.

The IRS fight “came down to the authority of parents—in this case white Christian parents—to control the education of their own children, as well as the broader cultural influences on them,” Du Mez says. “And that was an increasingly urgently felt need in these communities, because of the sense that American culture was turning against them. In the ’50s, evangelicals felt that things were great. They had Billy Graham, and Eisenhower in the White House. There was a sense that evangelicals could actually lead, and were moving into the centers of power.”

For evangelical parents, seeing one of their own move into the ultimate center of power, only to preside over what seemed to them an all-out siege on their most fundamental mission—to transmit the Christian faith to the next generation—was more than a standard-issue moment of political disappointment; it was greeted as a personal betrayal, something very close to an act of war. “They think if we can’t even have our own institutions, if the government is going to be interfering with their rights as to how and where their children are going to be educated, they need to get out and fight,” Du Mez says. “It’s about the IRS, but it gets defined as a battle over religious liberties.”

The battle soon moved on to other fronts. As the Carter White House was inundated with outraged letters and telegrams over the IRS rule—and as evangelicals came to DC from across the country to transform the agency’s public hearing over the rule into a virtual revival meeting—a new mood of belligerence set in among evangelical leaders now primed to reclaim cultural and political authority. “The Carter administration had been the focus of growing anxiety in the 1970s, both among evangelicals and conservative Catholics who believed that the sexual revolution, the second-wave feminist movement, and legalized abortion were all threats to the family, taking the country in the wrong direction,” Williams says. “White evangelicals, in the thinking of the time, could argue the country had abandoned God, and it was important to recapture the nation for God.”

In this environment, Carter sponsored a year-long White House Conference on Families, running from 1979 to 1980, that became another organizing flashpoint for the evangelical right, right down to the pluralistic adoption of “families” in the event’s title—no small provocation to a movement organized around a singular idealized conception of “the family.”

“When you listen to the proceedings of that conference, no one could even agree on how to define a family,” Du Mez recalls. “That absolutely blew up in his face. And it was just four weeks later that conservative evangelicals had their own conference on the family—[James] Dobson, [Jerry] Falwell, [Timothy] LaHaye—they all came together for that, and helped launch a national movement around it.” These leading lights of the seventies evangelical right were also building on an important Carter-era precedent: the 1977 National Conference on Women’s Rights in Houston that produced a militant counterdemonstration from the anti-feminist forces on the right organized by Phyllis Schlafly. Both events were spectacles of resentment, harnessing a new brand of identitarian rage among white and patriarchally minded evangelicals.

This new confrontational mood encompassed foreign policy as well. “There was just this mounting sense of everything going wrong” in world affairs among the nascent culture warriors of the religious right, Du Mez notes. “Christian evangelicals were so staunchly anti-Communist in their political formation, going back to Billy Graham and others: fiercely anti-Soviet Union, carrying a big stick.… I think on Carter’s first day in office, he pardoned a draft dodger, then he handed over the Panama Canal. You had the Sandinistas coming to power in Nicaragua, and of course the hostage crisis in Iran. All these things matter for the Christian right.… They become obsessed with the betrayal of American power—and when they’re talking about American power, they’re talking about the defense of Christian America. For conservative evangelicals, one of their core political values was a military defense of Christian America against foreign threats, and Carter was seen as weak in these conflicts.”

The newly roused evangelical insurgency embraced an unlikely prophet in the person of Ronald Reagan, a divorced former movie star with a demonstrably equivocal track record as a parent and believer alike. But the bitter lesson of the Carter presidency for evangelical voters seemed to be that holding out for a political candidate’s elevated character was like swapping your paternal blessing for a mess of pottage. Indeed, the Carter-Reagan contest in 1980 was its own prophetic foretaste of the 2016 presidential contest between devout Methodist Hillary Clinton and louche reality-TV baron Donald Trump. More than four decades later, it seems as though the cultural and religious climate of the American republic remains stuck on its 1980 factory settings. “What’s often overlooked is that Carter’s presidency revealed factions among evangelicals that even evangelicals didn’t know existed,” Williams says. “In 1976, most evangelical voters tended to think that if a candidate identified as born-again, that meant he was one of us. By the end of Carter’s presidency, that wasn’t true.”