Politically neutral as in the crowds were apolitical, or politically neutral in that evangelicals could be found amongst a wide spectrum of republicans and democrats?

Both. Carter, for example, was memorably an evangelical; but also, even major evangelical orgs like the Southern Baptist Convention expressed support on issues like abortion rights before the current state of ultra-fucked behavior came around.

If you mean the latter (which I think you do), I think that a big part of that would be the stereotypical “Southern Democrat”; which is to say that they were still pretty conservative.

Most Southern Democrats were evangelicals, but most evangelicals weren’t Southern Democrats. It’s important to remember that mainstream Protestantism only dominated in New England, the Rust Belt, and the West Coast - vast swathes of the American Midwest and West have traditionally been evangelical, but vote in a way that was more-or-less either liberal or were viable swing-demographics.

Not only that, but Appalachia has pretty much always been deeply religious in the evangelical tradition… but up until the 90s remained reliably liberal-voting, even in elections like '68.

(Apologies if your image has an explainer on this, its not loading for me).

Nah, just a classic “I wonder if this [gun] is loaded” (puts the gun in his mouth, click, click, click; disappointed look) “No.”