Mark Noll: 50 years ago, evangelicals were a sideshow of American culture. No more.
[Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the author of numerous books, including The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina).]
... In retrospect, it is clear that the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century had greatly weakened American Protestantism, leading to an intellectual collapse. By the 1950s, specific Christian influence of any sort was rare in the nation's leading universities or in first-level discussions of public policy. Fundamentalists had lost the battles against evolution and the higher criticism of Scripture. So they had angrily opted out of mainstream academic life. Modernists had made their peace with the dominant paradigms of the secular university, but were left with little to offer that was explicitly Christian....
Evangelicalism was by no means dead. But its capacity to shape national mores or to influence national agendas in politics, the media, and intellectual life seemed spent. One could not wonder if perceptive observers at the time predicted increasing irrelevance for America's evangelicals. Some might have anticipated selected outposts of evangelical strength fueled (especially in the race-divided South) by resistance to the secularizing trends of national life. Few, however, could have predicted the resurgence that actually occurred.
Why did this resurgence happen? It is possible to sketch some of the important forces at work, even if assessments of cause and effect and judgments about theological merit remain hotly debated, especially among evangelicals themselves. Here I briefly highlight two specific developments and three diffuse movements. I then consider one overarching characteristic of recent evangelical history that may explain a great deal about these unexpected happenings.
The two specific developments are ones that evangelicals did not seek and that some actively opposed. First was the ethnic transformation of the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Second was the successful implementation, through federal legislation and the courts, of civil rights.
The two specific developments are ones that evangelicals did not seek and that some actively opposed. First was the ethnic transformation of the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Second was the successful implementation, through federal legislation and the courts, of civil rights.
1. Immigration reform. Since the loosening of immigration restrictions in 1965, the United States has once again become the most ethnically diverse nation on the planet. Conventional wisdom understands that the dramatically increased presence of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and adherents of other faiths has created unprecedented religious pluralism. But as sociologist R. Stephen Warner has pointed out, the new immigration is surprisingly—even overwhelmingly—Christian. Warner has called the outcome of recent immigration "the de-Europeanization of American Christianity." Because so many of the Hispanic, Korean, Nigerian, Chinese, Eastern European, Filipino, Ghanaian, and Brazilian newcomers are evangelicals, often of a Pentecostal cast, the result has also contributed to the re-evangelization of America.
2. Civil Rights. The civil rights revolution began in African American churches during the 1930s and 1940s when more and more black Americans began to explore applications of biblical faith in an all-righteous God, which had sustained them through slavery and segregation, to the nation's structural racial injustices. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, white evangelicals mostly remained ambivalent. They could recognize strong biblical convictions in the black church folk who were driving the revolution. But they were frightened by elements like Gandhi's pacifism and the socialism of A. Philip Randolph.
Without much white evangelical support, the civil rights movement nonetheless moved ahead with passage of a federal civil rights bill in 1957. Then came the landmark legislation of the mid-1960s: civil rights (1964), voting rights (1965), and open housing (1968). By this time white evangelicals, even in the South, were beginning to accept the inevitability of civil rights for blacks, and a few intrepid evangelicals, such as Frank Gaebelein of Stony Brook School (and a CT co-editor), actively joined in the struggle (though, it must be acknowledged, with significant internal opposition at CT). It was, however, President Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and a host of African American leaders and followers who pushed the revolution through.
The spinoffs for American evangelicals were immense. First, evangelical acceptance of civil rights did not mean that evangelicals accepted the means used to secure them—federal power, which soon expanded well beyond civil rights. Sociologists Robert Wuthnow and Steve Bruce have demonstrated how resentment against intruding national authority—especially on sexuality, the family, and public schools—fueled evangelical attachment to the Republican Party, as putatively the party of small government.
But once legally enforced racism was gone, the great impediment that had restricted the influence of Southern religion was also gone. Stripped of racist overtones, Southern evangelical religion—the preaching, the piety, the sensibilities, and above all the music—became much easier to export throughout the country....
Read entire article at Christianity Today
... In retrospect, it is clear that the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century had greatly weakened American Protestantism, leading to an intellectual collapse. By the 1950s, specific Christian influence of any sort was rare in the nation's leading universities or in first-level discussions of public policy. Fundamentalists had lost the battles against evolution and the higher criticism of Scripture. So they had angrily opted out of mainstream academic life. Modernists had made their peace with the dominant paradigms of the secular university, but were left with little to offer that was explicitly Christian....
Evangelicalism was by no means dead. But its capacity to shape national mores or to influence national agendas in politics, the media, and intellectual life seemed spent. One could not wonder if perceptive observers at the time predicted increasing irrelevance for America's evangelicals. Some might have anticipated selected outposts of evangelical strength fueled (especially in the race-divided South) by resistance to the secularizing trends of national life. Few, however, could have predicted the resurgence that actually occurred.
Why did this resurgence happen? It is possible to sketch some of the important forces at work, even if assessments of cause and effect and judgments about theological merit remain hotly debated, especially among evangelicals themselves. Here I briefly highlight two specific developments and three diffuse movements. I then consider one overarching characteristic of recent evangelical history that may explain a great deal about these unexpected happenings.
The two specific developments are ones that evangelicals did not seek and that some actively opposed. First was the ethnic transformation of the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Second was the successful implementation, through federal legislation and the courts, of civil rights.
The two specific developments are ones that evangelicals did not seek and that some actively opposed. First was the ethnic transformation of the United States following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Second was the successful implementation, through federal legislation and the courts, of civil rights.
1. Immigration reform. Since the loosening of immigration restrictions in 1965, the United States has once again become the most ethnically diverse nation on the planet. Conventional wisdom understands that the dramatically increased presence of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and adherents of other faiths has created unprecedented religious pluralism. But as sociologist R. Stephen Warner has pointed out, the new immigration is surprisingly—even overwhelmingly—Christian. Warner has called the outcome of recent immigration "the de-Europeanization of American Christianity." Because so many of the Hispanic, Korean, Nigerian, Chinese, Eastern European, Filipino, Ghanaian, and Brazilian newcomers are evangelicals, often of a Pentecostal cast, the result has also contributed to the re-evangelization of America.
2. Civil Rights. The civil rights revolution began in African American churches during the 1930s and 1940s when more and more black Americans began to explore applications of biblical faith in an all-righteous God, which had sustained them through slavery and segregation, to the nation's structural racial injustices. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, white evangelicals mostly remained ambivalent. They could recognize strong biblical convictions in the black church folk who were driving the revolution. But they were frightened by elements like Gandhi's pacifism and the socialism of A. Philip Randolph.
Without much white evangelical support, the civil rights movement nonetheless moved ahead with passage of a federal civil rights bill in 1957. Then came the landmark legislation of the mid-1960s: civil rights (1964), voting rights (1965), and open housing (1968). By this time white evangelicals, even in the South, were beginning to accept the inevitability of civil rights for blacks, and a few intrepid evangelicals, such as Frank Gaebelein of Stony Brook School (and a CT co-editor), actively joined in the struggle (though, it must be acknowledged, with significant internal opposition at CT). It was, however, President Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and a host of African American leaders and followers who pushed the revolution through.
The spinoffs for American evangelicals were immense. First, evangelical acceptance of civil rights did not mean that evangelicals accepted the means used to secure them—federal power, which soon expanded well beyond civil rights. Sociologists Robert Wuthnow and Steve Bruce have demonstrated how resentment against intruding national authority—especially on sexuality, the family, and public schools—fueled evangelical attachment to the Republican Party, as putatively the party of small government.
But once legally enforced racism was gone, the great impediment that had restricted the influence of Southern religion was also gone. Stripped of racist overtones, Southern evangelical religion—the preaching, the piety, the sensibilities, and above all the music—became much easier to export throughout the country....