Introduction

Jimmy Carter originally intended to begin his inaugural address with a passage from Second Chronicles (7:14) about the need for people to humble themselves and turn from their wicked ways (Morris 1996), but he was talked out of it, replacing it with Micah 6:8. The first passage would have been more appropriate – especially with respect to Carter's number one domestic policy priority: energy. To confront the energy problem, Carter often said, at least implicitly, Americans would have to become better people. Energy was to be “the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation.…On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence,” taking “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.” People needed to turn from their (wicked) profligate use of energy resources, resources that were rapidly running out; profligacy was mortgaging the country to hostile oil producers, threatening “our free institutions.” Only through humility and shared sacrifice – a “national ethic” of sacrifice – could the nation be healed, and the “American spirit” reborn.

Carter did adopt the prevailing energy narrative; he referred to the “intolerable dependence on foreign oil” and advocated energy self-sufficiency as the solution. Yet Carter's message was an austere sermon and the solution not a statement of technological optimism as it had been for Nixon, but rather a necessary corrective to the moral failings of the nation.