Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America

2. Campus Ministry at America’s “Trojan Horse”

Campus Ministry at America’s “Trojan Horse” 2 After deciding to found Campus Crusade for Christ, Bright wrote potential supporters to outline his vision, which fused spiritual and political concerns and objectives. He asserted that “the average collegian is spiritually illiterate” and—probably not counting Catholic or Jewish students—“estimated that less than five percent of the college students of America are actively engaged in the church of today.” After noting that virtually all American colleges and universities “were founded as Christian institutions,” he lamented that “many of our state universities and colleges and other institutions deny the deity of Christ, the Bible as the Word of God, and offer not so much as one Christian course in their curriculum.” Furthermore, Bright believed that the campus would resolve the question of “Christ or Communism—which shall it be?” “Communism has already made deep inroads into the American campus ,” he warned in a bulletin promoting his newly formed organization, “and unless we fill the spiritual vacuum of the collegiate world, the campus may well become America’s ‘Trojan Horse.’” While Bright’s primary focus was evangelism , he viewed the work of Campus Crusade through the lens of Cold War geopolitics. “Win the campus today,” Crusade ’s motto promised, “win the world tomorrow.”1 When historians identify groups of Americans discontented with the status quo of the 1950s, they typically discuss beatniks , overburdened housewives, and people excluded from the material abundance of the American dream. Evangelical leaders, however, also sharply criticized the postwar status quo. Despite the heady publicity surrounding Billy Graham and other manifestations of religious revival, many evangeli- [42] AT AMERICA’S “TROJAN HORSE” cals remained worried about the direction of American society and their place in it. Evangelical leaders applauded the material prosperity of the postwar boom but cautioned that it alone could not satisfy spiritual yearnings . Like many Americans, they were disconcerted by crime, juvenile delinquency , and real and perceived communist threats at home and abroad. Evangelicals in the 1950s were on the march, battling the domestic and international demons that threatened their vision of a Christian America. In keeping with the militaristic tone of American culture that affected everything from politics to literature to swimwear, some evangelical activists conceived of themselves as soldiers primed for spiritual combat. Henrietta Mears had established an annual “briefing” conference to prepare collegians for battle against campus secularism. Bright launched a “Crusade” that featured evangelical “invasions” of allegedly hostile university campuses . A number of men who joined the Campus Crusade staff in the 1950s recall thinking of themselves and their colleagues as the “shock troops” of a Christian army. Such militaristic imagery had, of course, long been standard fare for American Protestants, yet the intensity of militaristic rhetoric in the late 1940s and 1950s suggests evangelicals were not at peace in postwar America. Religious conservatives focused a sizable portion of their postwar anxieties on the nation’s university campuses. Although fundamentalists in the 1920s gained notoriety for their efforts to expunge evolution from public school curricula, conservative Protestants in the early 1900s also expressed horror at the evolution of American higher education. Fundamentalists alleged that modernist professors were importing dangerous German philosophies into American lecture halls, turning pious Christian students into what Bob Jones termed “campus shipwrecks” and state universities into—in the words of William B. Riley—“hot-beds of skepticism.” Still, only a small percentage of Americans went to college in the early twentieth century, and most fundamentalists who pursued postsecondary education attended denominational colleges or Bible institutes. By midcentury, however, fundamentalist worries had advanced into more widespread evangelical alarm about the state of American colleges and universities. The number of Americans resident at institutions of higher education jumped by nearly one million between only 1946 and 1950. Over two million veterans utilized the higher-education benefits of the G.I. Bill. As public universities expanded rapidly, their enrollments began to outnumber those of private institutions. This tidal wave of students—many of whom were first-generation collegians—attended universities and colleges AT AMERICA’S “TROJAN HORSE” [43] that had gradually divested themselves of the most pronounced aspects of their denominational heritage, such as required chapel attendance.2 As enrollments skyrocketed, evangelical concerns about campus secularism intensified. In God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley—a Yale alumnus and a Catholic—portrayed his alma mater as an “institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian...