Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism

Epilogue

Epilogue The evangelical left also left behind a legacy. Seeds of social justice took root in unnoticed crevices of North American evangelical structures, sometimes sending up shoots in unexpected quarters from thinkers and leaders who had been nourished by progressive evangelicals. Even the voices of individuals who took part in the 1973 Thanksgiving Workshop continued—and continue among those still living—to speak prophetically from the edges, often playing the role of gadfly, public conscience, and counterweight to the rightward postwar direction of the broader movement. Carl Henry, already a neo-evangelical elder statesman and perhaps the most conservative delegate at the Workshop in Chicago, continued in those roles. He collected honorary degrees and served on the boards of many evangelical organizations. In 1983 he published the final installment of his magisterial six-volume theological work God, Revelation, and Authority. Like most establishment evangelicals, Henry viewed both the evangelical left and the religious right with profound ambivalence. He lauded the attention each movement paid to issues of social concern. But he criticized partisan excess and decried political, cultural, and theological fragmentation. His political instincts, however, became more recognizably conservative. He actively participated , along with Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus, in the Institute on Religion and Democracy. In addition, he saw the work of his son Paul Henry, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a rising star in the Republican Party, as carrying on some of his vision. Paul died tragically of a brain tumor in 1993, and Henry died a decade later at age ninety. Fifty years after Henry’s critique of obscurantism in The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism , movement leaders lauded him as an indefatigable champion of evangelical respectability. “Few people in the twentieth century,” reported Christianity Today in its obituary, “have done more to articulate the importance of a coherent Christian world and life view.” 256 Epilogue John Alexander, evangelical promoter of racial justice, more clearly embodied the sensibilities of the Chicago Declaration. He expanded The Other Side’s civil rights platform to include other progressive issues such as global justice, gender equality, communal living, and simplicity. Jubilee Crafts, for instance, was one of the first American nonprofits to sell fairly traded third world goods. The Philadelphia offices of The Other Side and Jubilee Crafts became something of an unofficial East Coast regional headquarters for the evangelical left. The magazine rented out office space to socially moderate and leftist organizations such as Evangelicals for Social Action, American Christians for the Abolition of Torture, Clergy and Laity Concerned, the Center on Law and Pacifism, Coalition for a Simple Life-Style, the Nuclear Moratorium Project, and the Central America Organizing Project. The unpretentious Alexander , who for years wore the same cream-colored (originally white, his colleagues thought) sweater with big holes, remained the face of the organization . In the early 1980s The Other Side enjoyed an outsized reputation and influence . Alexander’s domain, however, rapidly fell apart as the organization fragmented over personality conflicts and the issue of homosexuality. In 1984, Alexander was forced out of the very magazine he had founded two decades earlier. He moved to San Francisco, attended Church of the Sojourners, wore tie-dyed tee shirts, and fell off the evangelical map. On Good Friday 2001, Alexander died of leukemia. In 2004 The Other Side ceased publication. Other civil rights activists remained more securely in the evangelical fold. John Perkins, son of a black Mississippi sharecropper, served on the boards of World Vision and the National Association of Evangelicals. He wrote half a dozen significant books and founded as many influential ministries, including the Christian Community Development Association (now with over 500 institutional members), Mendenhall Ministries, Voice of Calvary, the John Perkins Center at Seattle Pacific University, and the John Perkins Foundation for Reconciliation and Development in Jackson, Mississippi. Perkins, known as “Grandpa John” to his many young colleagues, mentored a burgeoning new generation of urban evangelical activists in the 2000s. Tom Skinner, Harlem gang leader turned civil rights advocate, continued work as an evangelist. In the 1980s Skinner became chaplain of the Washington Redskins and a much sought-after motivational speaker for church groups and corporations. When he died in 1994 at age fifty-two, dozens of celebrities, including politician Jesse Jackson, poet Maya Angelou, and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, attended his funeral. Epilogue 257 Jim Wallis, former SDS activist, continued to labor on the...