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Reviewed by:
  • Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America
  • Joshua Brahinsky
Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. By John G. Turner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 304 pp. Softbound, $19.95.

The ambivalence shines from the image on the front cover: thousands of college students fill a football stadium, many drenched in sweat and looking to the sky, demonstrating what appears as a collective sense of freedom and ecstasy, yet one energized by an appeal to extreme conservatism, individualism, and the preeminence of free markets. Their mix of long hair, beards, and other contemporary symbols would seem at home in most youth gatherings from the late 1960s onward except for the highly Christian context. This kind of gathering boldly challenges scholarly pictures of Fundamentalism as backward looking and simply reliant on rigid readings of ancient texts. Recently, however, some have begun to recognize the creative processes that mold even the most ostensive atavism. This paradox of evangelism, the vital impulse toward cultural renovation and revival that simultaneously sponsors and challenges a powerful conservatism sits front and center in John Turner’s rich and lively portrayal: Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ. [End Page 264]

Bill Bright is not as well known as many other recent evangelists, but Turner makes the case for his tremendous role in the development of a potent, wealthy, and activist Christian Right. From Bright’s founding in 1951, the Campus Crusade for Christ becomes the largest non-philanthropic evangelical parachurch organization, with about $500 million in annual revenues and nearly 30,000 staff. Initially aimed to combat growing secularism among college students, Crusade is now a global engine for conservative Protestant conversion efforts.

Turner emphasizes the innovation by which Crusade staff members raise their own salaries, a practice now standard among missionaries. For Turner, this approach suggests decentralization, pushing against depictions of the Christian Right as top down and homogeneous. Yet, he also describes a particular elite sensibility which deeply links business and religion. At first uncertain about fund-raising, Bright eventually develops a stable of wealthy businessman happy to sponsor a blend of Christianity and conservatism. The matter engaged but elided here is, perhaps, the most critical and confusing issue facing scholars of contemporary Christianity in the U.S.: the recent revival of a dynamic relationship between free market economics—neoliberalism—and Christian evangelism. For Bright, in fact, Christianity is key to the defense of market economies against communism and state projects like welfare. His alarmist rhetoric is as much about economics as the supernatural. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, for Bright, is one version of God’s will. Tracing this logic, scholars have argued that neoliberalism and conservative Christianity form a web of interdependent discourse and politics. By contrast, Turner’s clear discomfort with Bright’s right wing excesses lead to the portrayal of Crusade’s economic-political agenda as secondary to their real work of evangelism.

The marriage of Evangelicalism and conservative politics, however, was not preordained. Jim Wallis, Jimmy Carter, and others wedded evangelical beliefs to a liberal agenda. But, while Turner does little to help us understand the possibilities for a progressive evangelicalism, he does show Campus Crusade borrowing from other youth organizing projects, especially progressive ones. For instance, Crusade appropriates New Left imagery, music, and rhetoric and finds Berkeley’s free speech platforms useful for culturally conservative Christian advocacy.

Turner follows this tendency to blend seemingly incompatible practices in Crusade’s trajectory from a separatist fundamentalism to a proliferating cultural hybrid in which the final arbiter is evangelism. In fact, when Bright joins with Billy Graham’s eclectic Evangelicalism, Fundamentalists, like Bob Jones, perceive a violent disloyalty by which Bright rejects true Christianity in favor of immediate popularity. Although Jones tries to destroy the fledgling parachurch group by systematically contacting participants and encouraging rebellion, Crusade [End Page 265] sticks to its mixed approach which does realize tremendous success revitalizing Christianity on college campuses.

For Turner, Bright’s focus on conversion instead of theology may provide a kind of ethical consistency. However much Crusade intervenes in the crass world...

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