Mainstream media treated Carter’s lust admission as scandalous though evangelicals found it unremarkable.

Evidence

On October 14, just weeks before the election, Playboy magazine hit the newsstands. Carter had intended that his interview would dispel any notion of smug self-righteousness on his part, but the media picked up on his statement about lusting after women other than his wife. For evangelicals, that statement was utterly unremarkable—let us remember Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount—although a fellow Southern Baptist, picking up on another quote from the interview, allowed that, “well, ‘screw’ is just not a good Baptist word.” The media had a field day. One editorial cartoon depicted the Democratic nominee staring at the Statue of Liberty in a state of undress, and Carter dropped fifteen percentage points in the polls. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the media-evangelical culture gap reversed from what one might assume — evangelicals were the biblically-grounded moderates here. — connects to: Mainstream media framed religious devotion as contrary to normative male sexuality. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 940

Related

• Mainstream media framed religious devotion as contrary to normative male sexuality. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Mainstream media framed religious devotion as contrary to normative male sexuality. #exemplifies (0.85) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 940