The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America - Hardcover

FitzGerald, Frances

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439131333 ISBN 13: 9781439131336

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Synopsis

* Winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award
* National Book Award Finalist
* Time magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year
* New York Times Notable Book
* Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017

“A page turner...We have long needed a fair-minded overview of this vitally important religious sensibility, and FitzGerald has now provided it.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Massively learned and electrifying...magisterial.” —The Christian Science Monitor

This groundbreaking book from Pulitzer Prize­–winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America—from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election.

The evangelical movement began in the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known in America as the Great Awakenings. A populist rebellion against the established churches, it became the dominant religious force in the country.

During the nineteenth century white evangelicals split apart dramatically, first North versus South, and then at the end of the century, modernist versus fundamentalist. After World War II, Billy Graham, the revivalist preacher, attracted enormous crowds and tried to gather all Protestants under his big tent, but the civil rights movement and the social revolution of the sixties drove them apart again. By the 1980s Jerry Falwell and other southern televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, had formed the Christian right. Protesting abortion and gay rights, they led the South into the Republican Party, and for thirty-five years they were the sole voice of evangelicals to be heard nationally. Eventually a younger generation of leaders protested the Christian right’s close ties with the Republican Party and proposed a broader agenda of issues, such as climate change, gender equality, and immigration reform.

Evangelicals have in many ways defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Frances FitGerald’s narrative of this distinctively American movement is a major work of history, piecing together the centuries-long story for the first time. Evangelicals now constitute twenty-five percent of the American population, but they are no longer monolithic in their politics. They range from Tea Party supporters to social reformers. Still, with the decline of religious faith generally, FitzGerald suggests that evangelical churches must embrace ethnic minorities if they are to survive.

About this title

About the Author:

Frances FitzGerald is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and a prize from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam; America Revised: History School Books in the Twentieth Century; Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures; Way Out in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War; and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Evangelicals INTRODUCTION

WHEN JIMMY CARTER, a liberal Southern Baptist, ran for president in 1976, the pollster George Gallup estimated that fifty million Americans were “born-again” Christians, and Newsweek magazine ran a cover story, “Born Again! The Evangelicals,” explaining who these millions of people were.1

Four years later the Christian right emerged in force, declaring holy war against “secular humanism” and vowing to mobilize evangelicals to arrest the moral decay of the country. Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist pastor, Pat Robertson, a televangelist, and conservative Southern Baptists led the charge against the gay rights movement, abortion, and the banning of school prayer. At an enormous rally in Dallas Ronald Reagan became their standard-bearer, and won the presidential election with the help of evangelical votes.

The sudden appearance of the Christian right shocked most political observers. Who were these people, and where did the crusade against “secular humanism” come from? Journalists wrote furiously about these questions until the mid-1980s, when the movement seemed to die away. The Christian right was forgotten for several years, as were evangelicals generally, until the telescandals of Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Then evangelicals were forgotten again. The pattern continued. As the veteran journalist Joe Conason wrote, the political coverage of evangelicals was “a cycle of neglect followed by sensationalism and then more neglect.” Rick Warren, the best-known of evangelical preachers, told journalists in 2005, “It’s a funny thing to me that every five years American journalism reintroduces evangelicals to America. It’s like starting with Carter—you know there’s a headline, ‘Who are Evangelicals?’ Well, it’s not like they’re a fringe group.”2

Even the well informed tend to have very short attention spans when it comes to evangelicals. Many equate evangelicals with fundamentalists or the Christian right when only a minority belong to either group. Others dismiss them as a marginal group doomed to extinction with the process of modernization. In fact evangelicals compose nearly a quarter of the population. They are also the most American of religious groups, and during the nineteenth century they exerted a dominant influence on American culture, morals, and politics. By the mid-twentieth century the United States was becoming a more secular nation, but since 1980 many evangelicals, led by the Christian right, have struggled to reverse the trend, and while they have not entirely succeeded, they have reintroduced religion into public discourse, polarized the nation, and profoundly changed American politics.

The category “evangelical” is, of course, not a political but a religious one. The word “evangelical” comes from the Greek “evangel,” meaning the “good news,” or “the Gospel.” While the word could be claimed by all Christians, evangelical became the common name for the revivals that swept the English-speaking world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In America the series of revivals, known as the First and the Second Great Awakenings, with their emphasis on simple Bible preaching and immediate conversion, touched virtually all Protestant denominations. For most of the nineteenth century almost all Protestants would have called themselves evangelicals in the sense that they believed they had been born again in Christ and had a duty to evangelize, or spread the good news of the Gospels in America and abroad.

Today white evangelicals are a very diverse group that includes, among others, Southern Baptists, Mennonites, Holiness groups, Pentecostals, Dutch Reformed groups, and a number who belong to nondenominational churches. Many have little in common except for the essentials of their faith. As the religious historian George Marsden writes, “Evangelicalism today includes any Christians traditional enough to affirm the basic beliefs of the old nineteenth-century evangelical consensus: the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible, the real historical character of God’s saving work recorded in Scripture, salvation to eternal life based on the redemptive work of Christ, the importance of evangelism and missions, and the importance of a spiritually transformed life.”3

This book is not a taxonomy or attempt to describe the entirety of evangelical life, but rather a history of the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents that have emerged in recent years. It purposely omits the history of African American churches because theirs is a different story, mainly one of resistance to slavery and segregation, but also of the creation of centers for self-help and community in a hostile world. Some African American denominations identify as evangelical, but because of their history, their religious traditions are not the same as those of white evangelicals. Only long after the success of the civil rights movement did some black churchmen begin to enter the story of the white evangelicals and their internal conflicts. What is important to stress is that the white evangelical world has always been changing, though it has retained many of the characteristics acquired during its history. In any case, no movement, including the Christian right, has ever been static or completely coherent. Evangelicals have had some influential leaders, but in essence their world is decentralized and difficult to lead, much less to control.

The book begins with the two Great Awakenings, the first in the late eighteenth century with the end of Puritan society, and the second in the decades after the American Revolution. The first, led by Jonathan Edwards and the English revivalist George Whitefield, helped make a nation out of the disparate colonies by crossing the colonial boundaries and spreading the evangelical faith from north to south. The separation of church and state in the Constitution, though only a federal law, permitted evangelical denominations, such as the Methodists and the Baptists, to evangelize freely in spite of the established churches in states such as Connecticut and Virginia. It created a marketplace of religion, giving all denominations and sects an incentive to increase their flocks, and beginning a process that made America the most religious country in the developed world. The Second Great Awakening, which began a decade or more afterward, was in essence a revolt against the Calvinist establishment that led to the disestablishment of the last state-subsidized churches, and made the United States a more egalitarian society.

Many of the revivalists of the Second Awakening were lay preachers, who, working on the frontiers, created a populist religion focused on conversions that introduced an anti-intellectual strain into evangelicalism. The more established preachers began reform movements in areas such as education, health, temperance, and criminal justice. In the North some, such as Charles Finney, were abolitionists, whose campaigns against slavery led indirectly to the first feminist movement.

The Second Great Awakening inaugurated a period of evangelical hegemony, or what the religious historian Martin Marty calls the Evangelical Empire. For most of the nineteenth century, in spite of increasing Catholic immigration, evangelical Protestants dominated all cultural institutions, including the public schools and the universities. In this period there was no real distinction between religion and politics. Still, it was not the Golden Age the Christian right looks back to with nostalgia. For one thing, a series of divisions rent Protestant society. In the first part of the century northern and southern evangelicals parted company over slavery. The southern defense of slavery extinguished the reformist zeal, affected evangelical theology, and made the South a closed society. Meanwhile many new intellectual currents flowed through the North. After the Civil War, Darwinian evolution and other aspects of modernist thought, such as German biblical criticism and a new epistemology, divided northern evangelicals between liberals, who embraced modernist thought, and conservatives, who rejected it. At the same time industrialization and urbanization elicited different reactions from the two: the modernists sought structural reform to help labor in its conflict with capital while the traditionalists continued to believe that the conversion of individuals and prayer would heal the rift between the two. Evangelicals today debate these issues, but many of those Protestants who identify with modernist thought and social reform no longer call themselves evangelicals.

Toward the end of the century conservative ministers associated with the great evangelist Dwight Moody formed Bible societies to defend the traditional religion against what they saw as the apostasy of the modernists. Taking from the Princeton seminary the idea that every word of the Bible was “inerrant,” or absolutely and literally true, and from John Nelson Darby, the English sectarian, the prophecy that civilization was in an inevitable decline and was heading toward the great battle of Armageddon in which Christ would return to restore His kingdom in Jerusalem, they fashioned an essentially new religious amalgam that eventually became known as fundamentalism.

The fundamentalist-modernist conflict that erupted after World War I took place among the Baptists and Presbyterians but affected all Protestant denominations and profoundly marked the fundamentalists, who lost and had to leave their denominations. After the Scopes trial in which the great lawyer Clarence Darrow defeated William Jennings Bryan in a rhetorical battle over evolution, most informed people thought fundamentalism dead. To the contrary, it grew mightily in the North, through the work of separatist pastors, radio preachers, and tent revivalists, who preached to rural Americans and to those who migrated to the fast-industrializing cities in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.

After World War II, when Americans poured into churches and synagogues, Billy Graham, then a fundamentalist, attracted enormous crowds to his revivals. In the 1950s he became a celebrity, well known in Washington, and a confidant of important men such as the oil baron Sid Richardson and Richard Nixon. His preaching evolved, and in the hope of bringing all Protestants into his big tent, he broke with the fundamentalists, and called himself an “evangelical.” The term, which had gone out of use, he and fellow moderates defined as a conservative Protestant who had been “born again.” For many years not all conservative Protestants used it, but eventually the term stuck in part because pollsters, journalists, and academics used it in order to describe the confusing set of conservative denominations and independent churches. Fundamentalists then became a subset of evangelicals, and most of them were separatists who had left their denominations.

Graham and his mentor, Harold Ockenga, the Presbyterian pastor of the Park Street Church in Boston, knew the importance of creating institutions. Ockenga, who had helped found the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, formed the National Association of Evangelicals to gather conservative Protestants and create an alternative to the liberal National Council of Churches. Graham started a magazine, Christianity Today, as a rival to the liberal Christian Century. Both flourished, but soon developments within other sectors of conservative Protestantism changed the balance of power in the evangelical world. One was the explosive growth of Pentecostalism, and the spread of Pentecostal beliefs to the liberal Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church. The second was the integration of white southern evangelicals into the life of the nation for the first time since the Civil War. Of the two, the first was more surprising, but the second was more politically significant.

Pentecostalism had begun among the poor, black and white, in a Los Angeles mission in 1906. The movement had spread quickly across the South and Southwest, and segregated denominations formed, but in the 1920s and ’30s white Pentecostals, like their black counterparts, remained largely poor farmers, or people working in marginal jobs in the cities. Their distinctive belief was that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, like speaking in tongues, prophesying, and healing, were available to believers today as they were to the apostles at Pentecost. Before World War II most Protestants looked down on Pentecostals, calling them “snake-handlers” or “Holy Rollers.” In the 1950s, however, many Pentecostals became middle-class, and one of the tent revivalists, Oral Roberts, left his tent to preach on radio and television, to build a university, and to make Pentecostals respectable. In the 1960s, a time of spiritual experimentation, some of the Pentecostal beliefs caught on with liberal Protestants and Catholics, who integrated them into their own church doctrines and practices. The so-called charismatic renewal movement took on a life of its own, spreading even to conservative Protestants.

In the same period white southerners, including evangelicals, emerged from the isolation they had proudly suffered since the Civil War. By then the dominant religious force in the South was the Southern Baptist Convention. Its theology had been untouched by modernism, and Southern Baptists thought it to be the pure Gospel of the New Testament. Until the Second World War the SBC had stood as a bastion against social change, championing states’ rights, white supremacy, and the existing economic order. In the villages the church reigned supreme as the arbiter of morals, the social order, and the truth of the Gospel. The arrival of northern industry, highways, and federal regulations therefore came a as shock to the system. The growth of cities, improvements in education, and involvement with the rest of the country created a cosmopolitan elite. Some of the heads of the SBC belonged to it and became more theologically and politically moderate. In 1954 the SBC’s Christian Life Commission persuaded the Convention to accept the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education, and three years later its chairman acted as mediator between President Dwight Eisenhower and Governor Orval Faubus in the conflict over admitting black students to Little Rock Central High School. What did not change was the commitment of SBC leaders to evangelism. When southerners moved out of the South, many to Southern California and the cities of the Midwest, where industry was booming, they formed their own congregations, and the SBC followed, building churches at an astonishing rate and moving out across the country until there were Southern Baptist churches in every state. The SBC’s office in Washington thus became a power to reckon with.

The 1960s and early 1970s—the so-called Long Sixties—saw the election of the first Catholic president, the Supreme Court decision banning prayer and Bible reading in the schools, the civil rights movement, the protests against the Vietnam War, and the Roe v. Wade decision. Surprisingly, only the fundamentalists objected to all of them. Other evangelicals took moderate stances on many of them, and the period passed quietly. It even saw the growth of a small evangelical left in the colleges.

The reaction came later, first with the upsurge of fundamentalism in the South, and then with the appearance of new leaders. Billy Graham, who had associated himself with N...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1439131333
• ISBN 13: 9781439131336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 752