At his second National Prayer Breakfast as president, in 1978, he remarked that “the words ‘born again’ were [now] vividly impressed on the consciousness of many Americans who were not familiar with their meaning.” Indeed so. A decade earlier, if a president had been Carteresque in this way—indeed, if any famous or powerful nonpreacher had been so religiously out of the closet—most people would’ve been weirded out.
