Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism

1. Carl Henry and Neo-Evangelical Social Engagement

CHAPTER 1 Carl Henry and Neo-Evangelical Social Engagement There is no room here for a gospel that is indifferent to the needs of the total man nor of the global man. —Carl Henry in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism Evangelicals reemerged in the mainstream political consciousness in the year of the nation’s bicentennial. With the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, himself a born-again Christian, evangelicals had captured the White House. At the time, more than 50 million Americans claimed to be born again. Major news magazines ran cover stories on the recent surge in evangelical political and cultural power. Newsweek even dubbed 1976 the “year of the evangelical.” Evangelist Dave Breese told the national gathering of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), “It no longer fits to picture us as redneck preachers pounding the pulpit. Evangelical Christianity has become the greatest show on earth. Twenty to forty years ago it was on the edge of things. Now it has moved to the center.” Future presidential candidate John B. Anderson told NAE delegates that “evangelicals had replaced theological liberals as the ‘in’ group among Washington leaders.” Within a few years, the Moral Majority emerged and was instrumental in the election of Ronald Reagan, capping a conservative evangelical ascendancy. This image of a forceful evangelical politics stood in stark contrast to its public perception half a century earlier. Not even the most optimistic fundamentalist evangelical in the 1920s would have predicted that the movement would again stand as a significant factor in American life. Indeed, for 14 Chapter 1 many decades after the disastrous 1920s, when theological modernists took over mainline denominational structures, fundamentalist evangelical politics was profoundly incoherent. On the populist left, plainfolk evangelicals in southern California supported New Deal policies. Pentecostal laborers, joining the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, harnessed the democratic potential of evangelicalism against commodity agriculture. On the right, many evangelicals opposed the anti-Prohibition, Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928 and supported Barry Goldwater’s run for the White House in 1964. On the far right, a handful of conspiratorialist fundamentalists such as Fred Schwartz, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis mobilized in support of a rabid anti-communist agenda. In the middle of the political spectrum, Billy Graham cautiously promoted racial integration in the South as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Featuring a range of political agendas at mid-century, evangelical politics was characterized by uncertainty. Evangelical apoliticism, often overshadowed by a much louder (though marginal) far-right fundamentalism, compounded this uncertainty. The Fundamentals , a twelve-volume set of articles published from 1910 to 1915 that repudiated the Protestant modernist movement, warned against getting too caught up in politics, and most fundamentalists generally limited their haphazard political interests to votes for Prohibition and nonactivist sentiments against evolution and communism. Political activism during the 1930s “went into eclipse,” according to historian Mark Noll. From the 1930s to the 1960s, fundamentalist evangelicals devoted much more time to congregational life, holy living, and missionary work than to partisan politics. Those who came to associate with Billy Graham crusades in the 1950s (usually called “new” or “neo” evangelicals to distinguish them from their fundamentalist evangelical cousins) also largely retreated to a quietist stance. They either eschewed social engagement altogether or manifested social conservatism in ways that precluded overt politics. During this period the overwhelming majority of articles in the magazine of the college ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were devoted to topics such as evangelism , hard work and discipline, devotional and inspirational literature, holiness , prayer, Bible-reading, and sexual purity. With significant exceptions, fundamentalist evangelicals did not mobilize on behalf of political candidates nor tie their faith closely to their politics. As late as the 1960s, according to political scientist Lyman A. Kellstedt, data showed that evangelicals were “less likely to be interested in politics, less likely to vote in presidential Carl Henry and Social Engagement 15 elections, and less likely to be involved in campaign activities than other religious groups.” Concern for theological orthodoxy and piety subordinated politics, which would emerge finally in the 1970s as a more salient characteristic of evangelicals nationwide. No figure embodied the vital shift to political engagement more than Carl Henry, a theologian, editor, and architect of neo-evangelicalism. A leader in many key evangelical institutions—Wheaton College, Fuller Theological Seminary, the National Association of Evangelicals, and Christianity Today—Henry helped drive evangelicalism from its marginal position...