In the early 1970s certain white evangelicals found themselves politically homeless. As the article below suggests, many in the North had found a political identity with the Republican Party (voting Democratic, at least, was “untenable”), but identifying with the corrupt President Richard Nixon seemed “contrary to Christian conscience.”
What was a good Christian to do? According to Myron Heckman, a student from St. Paul Bible College (now Crown College) in Minnesota in 1973, you could support a political party run by evangelical celebrities. With Billy Graham, Nixon’s confidant, as president; Bill Bright as attorney general; Bob Jones as secretary of state; Oral Roberts as secretary of agriculture; Dino as postmaster general; and Senator Mark Hatfield nowhere to be found, what could possibly go wrong?
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