Mid-century evangelicals boycotted voting as politics belonged to Satan

Evidence

In the short term, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, evangelicals were largely apolitical; they did not participate in politics, certainly not in any organized way. Yes, there were a few evangelicals who made their voices heard—Fighting Bob Shuler, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire—but they were fringe characters. Many evangelicals during this time, drawing on their premillennial beliefs and their convictions about the corruptions of American society, refused to register to vote. Politics was the realm of Satan, they reasoned, and besides, this temporal world was condemned and careening toward judgment. Why bother? — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 70

Categorization

• QUESTION: If evangelicals refused to register to vote out of premillennial fatalism in the mid-century, what shifted during the 1970s to pull them back in? Balmer presumably answers this later.
• XREF: connects to: Institutions built for withdrawal later enabled evangelical political reentry; Unorganized evangelicals voted for Carter before the Religious Right existed — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 83; Evangelicals conspired against Carter’s reelection secretly (+3 more)

Related

• Premillennial belief made evangelicals refuse even to vote for decades. (similarity 0.88)
• Unorganized evangelicals voted for Carter before the Religious Right existed (similarity 0.85)
• Evangelicals conspired against Carter’s reelection secretly (similarity 0.84)
• Institutions built for withdrawal later enabled evangelical political reentry (similarity 0.82)
• Progressive evangelicalism peaked in the mid-1970s with Carter’s election (similarity 0.81)
• Politics, abortion, and school prayer failed for two decades to rouse evangelicals (similarity 0.80)
• Evangelical conspiracy against Carter began well before his reelection campaign. (similarity 0.80)
• Evangelicals’ turn against Carter was rooted in racial segregation defense, not abortion (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Unorganized evangelicals voted for Carter before the Religious Right existed #contradicts (0.85) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 83
• Politics, abortion, and school prayer failed for two decades to rouse evangelicals #qualifies (0.80) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 104
• An anti-war evangelical candidate was rejected by evangelical voters in 1972 #exemplifies (0.78) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 109
• Evangelicals conspired against Carter’s reelection secretly #corroborates (0.75)