Jim Hunt’s Cross to Bear

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Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. didn’t need a script or a microphone when he began preaching on the grounds of the Black Jack Free Will Baptist Church in March 1984. Hunt testified to his faith in God, his adherence to “biblical truths,’’ and his belief in Jesus’ love before leading the group in prayer.

“Although it’s been said you can’t go home again, having grown up in a Free Will Baptist Church, I want to tell you that I do feel at home tonight,’’ Hunt, who was running for the U.S. Senate, told the outdoor family festival at the rural church in Pitt County.

“You are my kind of people, the kind of people I grew up with, and am part of, and there’s no place I’d rather be,’’ Hunt said.

On Election Day eight months later, Hunt was stunned when a young mother at a Charlotte polling place said she was voting for his opponent, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms. “We like you, but we’re voting for the Christian,’’ Hunt later recalled.

During his 16 years as governor, Hunt wrestled with how to be a Democratic leader of faith amidst the rise of the Religious Right, a powerful political force that emerged in the early 1980s and helped fuel the growth of the modern Republican Party.

Religious conservatives thwarted his aspirations to rise to the national stage—the Senate and maybe even the presidency. They would also repeatedly hinder Hunt’s efforts to push for programs to help the poor and disadvantaged. 

Hunt tried different approaches with mixed success. A consensus-builder, he sought repeatedly to accommodate religious conservatives and bring them under his political tent. Hunt tried to assuage them with his own Bible-belt upbringing. When that didn’t work, he slammed what he called “extremists’’ who were seeking to undermine his agenda.

Hunt, who died last month at 88, left office in 2000. But the Religious Right continues to be an unspent political force in the Republican Party, which has controlled the state legislature for 15 years. Religious conservatives have helped shape policy on tax-paid vouchers for private schools, on abortion, on gay and transgender rights, and a raft of other issues. 

It’s a political puzzle that Democrats are still trying to solve.

Grape Juice at the Executive Mansion

If any Democrat should have been immune from attacks from the Religious Right, it should have been Hunt.

It is often said that the country is now divided into two political cultures: Republican “red states” and Democratic “blue states.” But Hunt grew up in a world where conservative values and liberal politics melded together.

Before religious audiences, Hunt would recall his evangelical youth in the Marsh Swamp Free Will Baptist Church—singing in the choir, earning a Bible as a reward for memorizing scripture, getting baptized in a farm pond when he was 13. His father had been an elder in the church, which was so strict that men and women sat separately. 

Hunt would remain an active Christian all his life. A teetotaler, he was famous for serving grape juice at Executive Mansion functions.

“My life was changed because of my personal faith and commitment to God through Jesus Christ and all those words about being salt, light and leaven are the main reasons I wanted to be governor.’’

Jim Hunt, 1981

Hunt’s church ties were not unusual. North Carolina is the seventh-most religious state in the country, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 study, which measured factors such as religious service attendance, frequency of prayer, and belief in God. North Carolinians are more religious than those in such Deep South states as Alabama and Georgia.

The state’s religious fervor has long influenced its politics. Tar Heel residents have been skeptical about the sale of alcoholic beverages, the lottery, casinos, and gay and transgender rights. The state balked at expanding women’s rights, rejecting constitutional amendments giving women the right to vote in 1920 and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

When Hunt first ran for governor in 1976, many religious conservatives still voted Democratic. That year, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, an openly devout Christian and Sunday school teacher, easily carried North Carolina on his way to the White House. Carter’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was a faith healer living in Fayetteville.

When Carter visited Hunt’s hometown of Wilson in 1978, his presidential motorcade was greeted by a hand-painted wooden sign leaning against an idle tractor on a tobacco farm, reading: “Jesus Loves You, Jimmy.’’

But religious conservatives soon soured on both Carter and Hunt. After years of little political involvement, the Christian Right would emerge as a powerful force.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, fundamentalist churches experienced explosive growth across the South. The Southern Baptist Convention’s flock grew by 16% during the 1970s, and that of the Assemblies of God by 70%; meanwhile, the United Presbyterian Church declined by 21% and the Episcopal Church by 15%.

The growth in evangelical churches was fed by a belief, in the words of scholar James A. Reichly, that American society was experiencing a “pervasive social sickness.’’ That included a rise in divorce, unwed mothers, recreational drug use, pornography, and violent crime. 

“If this be modernity, how much more could the nation take and survive?’’ Reichley wrote in his book Faith in Politics. Many blamed the moral decline on “secular humanism,” which rejects religious dogma and embraces human reason and shared values.

The Rise of Televangelists

The rise of the Religious Right was fueled by cable television and the creation of religious networks associated with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. 

Falwell, in particular, began defining the political debate not as a contest between two governing philosophies, but in apocalyptic and civilizational terms. 

“The war is not between fundamentalists and liberals,’’ Falwell said one Sunday in 1980, “but between those who love Jesus Christ and those who hate Him.” 

The issue that spurred the Religious Right was the regulation of private schools.

“What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer or the ERA,’’ Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Religious Right, once said. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.’’ 

In 1978, the IRS announced plans to revoke the tax exemption for private schools that did not meet certain standards of racial integration. The ruling caused a backlash, and Congress, the Carter administration, and the IRS were inundated with hundreds of thousands of letters of protest. The Carter administration backed off its proposal.

There was a related backlash in North Carolina.

Hunt promised to make secondary and elementary schools more accountable, and pushed through a law in 1977 requiring new testing. The estimated 80 Christian schools in North Carolina demanded that they be exempted from the testing and other regulations, saying it was a violation of their religious liberty. They refused to send reports to the state and filed a lawsuit.

The number of Christian schools had grown rapidly, driven by opposition to racial integration and parents who wanted religious instruction in the classroom. In 1964, 13,000 children attended 126 nonpublic schools in the state; by 1981, the number had grown to 58,000 students enrolled in 377 independent schools.

“The message is clear,’’ said the Rev. Daniel Carr of Winston-Salem, a leader of the Christian school movement. “Our churches are targets, and there is a plan to wipe us out,’’ referring to federal and state actions affecting church-run schools. Put simply, Carr said, “This state has disobeyed God.’’

Hunt and the legislature backed down. They removed most of the state controls, and moved the office overseeing private education from the Department of Public Instruction to the governor’s office.

There were other reasons why the Christian Right soured on Hunt. He had supported state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and backed state-funded abortions for poor women. Carr said Hunt “smelled like a humanist in the woodpile.’’

The culture wars had begun.

Falwell-Helms Alliance

Hunt’s childcare initiative, called “Raising A New Generation,’’ passed the legislature with little controversy in June 1979. But the consensus didn’t last.

The seven-page act created a New Generation Interagency Committee chaired by the governor that included the heads of several state agencies. There was an accompanying 75-page booklet, “A Child Health Plan for Raising a New Generation,’’ written in bureaucratic language by a committee of pediatricians and health officials.

Hunt argued that new government efforts were needed to address deep-seated problems. He noted that North Carolina ranked 47th in the country in infant mortality; that for every 100 high school graduates, 40 dropped out; and that 48% of North Carolina children had nutritionally inadequate diets. 

But the Christian Right painted the controversy in conspiratorial terms. The New Generation booklet, they said, included the logo of the International Year of the Child that could be traced to a communist feminist group. They expressed fear that the government was going to replace the family in raising their children. One flyer even described the plan as “neo-Nazi.’’

Falwell, the televangelist, held an “I Love America’’ rally on November 2, 1979, at the State Capitol that drew more than 2,000 people, many of them connected to Christian schools. He encouraged conservatives to become politically organized. 

Falwell formed a close alliance with Helms. Helms’s political organization, the National Congressional Club, provided office space for a new conservative church group, called Churches for Life and Liberty, at its North Raleigh headquarters.

Falwell said the Moral Majority considered the re-election of President Ronald Reagan and Helms as their two most critical races in 1984. “We consider Jesse Helms a national treasure,’’ Falwell said. The Moral Majority employed a full-time coordinator in North Carolina during the campaign, working with 2,400 pastors.

“The Christian Right rapidly became to the Republicans what Blacks had been to the Democrats: the people who could be counted on, who did the work of turning up at meetings, knocking on doors and getting voters to the polls,” wrote journalists John Micklethait and Adrian Woodridge in their book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America.

Church Deacon

Hunt may have been a Christian, but he was not the right kind of Christian for the emerging Religious Right. The Charlotte Observer once described Hunt as “a hybrid preacher-politician, proclaiming social gospel to North Carolina and symbolizing New South politics to the nation.’’

As an adult, Hunt joined the progressive mainstream First Presbyterian Church in Wilson, where he would serve as a church deacon, elder, and Sunday school teacher. 

As Hunt told one religious group in 1981, “I learned early that God was as concerned about prejudice as drinking, as concerned about pollution as profanity. For me, Christian life did not just consist of a few don’ts. Nor did it center on just a personal lifestyle. Personal and corporate morality became a tandem which is of great concern to me today. One without the other is totally inadequate … My life was changed because of my personal faith and commitment to God through Jesus Christ and all those words about being salt, light and leaven are the main reasons I wanted to be governor.’’

But Hunt was leading the state at a time when there was a realignment transforming religion and politics. In 1979, conservatives took control of the Southern Baptist Convention—the state’s most prevalent religious denomination—and they’ve continued to hold it.

Preparing for the Hunt-Helms Senate race in 1984, the Moral Majority launched a two-day, five-city program to register white fundamentalist voters. Democrats were also conducting voter registration drives, particularly the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. But the voter registration drive among white fundamentalist voters was much larger. 

“The Christian Right rapidly became to the Republicans what Blacks had been to the Democrats: the people who could be counted on, who did the work of turning up at meetings, knocking on doors and getting voters to the polls.”

John Micklethait and Adrian Woodridge, in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America

Ned Kennan, a former Israeli intelligence officer, was one of the consultants the Hunt campaign hired. He conducted focus groups in North Carolina to gauge attitudes about Hunt and Helms. 

After the focus groups, Kennan announced: “The campaign is all about religion!’’ wrote Hunt aide Gary Pearce in his biography of the former governor. “Hunt, he concluded, was the prim and proper minister at the local church, delivering the weekly sermon and ministering to the sick and aging in the congregation. Helms was an evangelist, condemning sin and evil and calling on all to repent.”

The election was about much more than religion. Racial politics and the Reagan landslide were hugely important to Helms’ 52% to 48% win.

But most analysts said that Hunt lost because of his poor showing among working people in the Textile Belt, an area from Durham to the South Carolina line where there is a strong evangelical following. 

Fighting Back

Despite the loss, Hunt was not finished. After eight years out of office, Hunt ran for a third term as governor in 1992. 

Once again, the Religious Right mounted a vigorous opposition, headed by the Christian Coalition, which had succeeded the Moral Majority as the main vehicle for Christian conservatives. The Christian Coalition distributed 1.2 million voter guides in North Carolina during that election, not only in churches, but in shopping centers, grocery stores, and at football games.

Hunt handily defeated Republican Jim Gardner, but his challenges with the Religious Right continued. The centerpiece to his third term was his early childhood program, Smart Start, designed to get young children from impoverished backgrounds ready for school through better child care, nutrition, immunizations, and family services.

Hunt attempted to co-opt conservative opposition by making Smart Start a public-private cooperative program run by local committees and putting some of the programs in church day care centers.

But that did not placate some religious conservatives who saw a government plot to undermine their day care centers. Twelve Christian radio stations from across the state carried a public-service message from Rep. Connie Wilson, a Charlotte Republican, who warned that Smart Start “could threaten a church day care’s right to teach the song, ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.’”’ 

Hunt decided to fight back. He said “a deliberate campaign of deception and disinformation has been launched by a small group of political extremists who want to cripple our efforts to make quality childcare available to every family that wants it in North Carolina.” 

He recorded a commercial for Christian radio. “I’m a devout Christian, and my wife Carolyn had headed up our church’s day care center in Wilson, which all of my children attended,’’ Hunt said. The legislature passed his Smart Start program.

Tar Heel political leaders have often included religious references in their appeals. Some Helms TV ads ended by describing him as a “Christian gentleman.’’ Sen. Elizabeth Dole often spoke as much about her strong religious beliefs as her background as a Harvard-trained lawyer, White House adviser, and U.S. cabinet secretary for two presidents. 

But it has been tricker for Democrats, who must appeal not just to the religiously inclined, but also to voters with more secular beliefs.

Democrats have found different ways to signal their religiosity. Mike Easley, the state’s first Catholic governor, frequently attended Mass during the week. Josh Stein, the state’s first Jewish governor, invited cameras into the Executive Mansion to record his family’s celebration of Hanukkah last month.

Looking back, Hunt said that it was a strategic error to allow his foes to grab the mantle of Christianity while he largely avoided discussion of religion in public life.

“I have a far better understanding now of how important that is to other people,” Hunt said in 1994. “I’m a Christian and I believe in God and Jesus and I set store in things like stewardship. Where I once might have been reticent or reluctant to talk about it, I feel very strongly that it is important to talk about it now.”