NEw Evangelicalism (jan 1, 1960 – dec 31, 1989)

Description:

For three centuries, American history has seen intermittent periods of intense religious revival — some of which historians have called Great Awakenings (Chapters 4 and 10). These phases saw a rise in church membership, the appearance of charismatic religious leaders, and religion — usually of the evangelical variety — reshaping society and politics. Between the 1960s and 1980s, one of these cycles took hold. Like its predecessors, the “New Evangelicalism” of those decades had complex causes and divergent aims, but one central feature was a concern with the family.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many mainstream Protestants had embraced the wider reform spirit of the era. Some of the most visible Protestant leaders were social activists who condemned racism and opposed the Vietnam War. Organizations such as the National Council of Churches — along with many progressive Catholics and Jews — allied with Martin Luther King Jr. and other African American ministers in the long battle for civil rights. Many mainline Protestant churches, among them the Episcopal, Methodist, and Congregationalist denominations, practiced a version of the “Social Gospel,” the reform-minded Christianity of the early twentieth century.

Meanwhile, evangelicalism survived at the grass roots of American spirituality. Evangelical Protestant churches emphasized an intimate, personal salvation (being “born again”); focused on a literal interpretation of the Bible; and regarded the death and resurrection of Jesus as the central message of Christianity. These tenets, fervently cultivated in a handful of evangelical colleges, Bible schools, and seminaries in the postwar decades, set evangelicals apart from mainline Protestants as much as from Catholics and non-Christians.

No one did more to keep the evangelical fire burning than Billy Graham. A graduate of the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois, Graham cofounded Youth for Christ in 1944 and then toured the United States and Europe preaching the gospel. Graham shot to national fame with a stunning 1949 tent revival in Los Angeles that lasted eight weeks (see “Religion and the Middle Class” in Chapter 25). His success in Los Angeles led to a popular radio program, but he continued to travel relentlessly, conducting old-fashioned revival meetings that he called “crusades.” A massive sixteen-week 1957 crusade held in New York City’s Madison Square Garden made Graham one of the nation’s most visible religious leaders.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Graham and other evangelicals laid the groundwork for the New Evangelicalism. But a startling combination of events in the late 1960s and early 1970s dramatically magnified the evangelical revival. First, rising divorce rates, social unrest, and challenges to prevailing values led many to seek the stability of faith. Second, many Americans regarded feminism, the counterculture, sexual freedom, homosexuality, pornography, and legalized abortion not as distinct social issues, but collectively as a marker of moral decay. More and more people in response turned to evangelical ministries, especially Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, and Assemblies of God churches.

Demographics tell part of the story. As mainline churches lost about 15 percent of their membership between 1970 and 1985, evangelical church membership soared. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination, grew by 23 percent, while the Assemblies of God grew by an astounding 300 percent. Newsweek magazine declared 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” and that November Jimmy Carter became the first evangelical president. In a national Gallup poll, a robust one-third of Americans answered yes when asked, “Would you describe yourself as a ‘born again’ or evangelical Christian?”

Much of this astonishing growth relied on the creative use of television. A new generation of preachers brought religious conversion directly into Americans’ living rooms through broadcast sermons. These so-called televangelists built huge media empires through small donations from millions of avid viewers — not to mention advertising. Shows such as Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, and Jim and Tammy Bakker’s PTL (Praise the Lord) Club and preachers such as Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart turned the 1970s and 1980s into the age of Christian broadcasting.

A primary concern to the New Evangelism was the family. Drawing on Bible passages, evangelicals saw the nuclear family, and not the individual, as the fundamental unit of society. Their vision of the family was organized along paternalist lines: father was breadwinner and disciplinarian; mother was nurturer and supporter. “Motherhood is the highest form of femininity,” the influential evangelical author Beverly LaHaye wrote. Another popular Christian author declared, “A church, a family, a nation is only as strong as its men.”

Evangelicals spread their ideas about the Christian family from the pulpit and television screens, but they did not stop there. They founded publishing houses, wrote books, established foundations, and offered seminars. Helen B. Andelin, for instance, a California housewife, produced a homemade book called Fascinating Womanhood that eventually sold more than two million copies. She used the book as the basis for her classes, which by the early 1970s had been attended by 400,000 women and boasted 11,000 trained teachers. The message of Fascinating Womanhood led evangelical women in the opposite direction of feminism. Whereas the latter encouraged women to seek independence and equality, Andelin taught that “submissiveness will bring a strange but righteous power over your man.” She was just one of dozens of evangelical authors and educators who encouraged women to defer to men.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, pictured here with Phyllis Schlafly, supported Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party with “I Love America” rallies around the country. Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, helped to bring a new focus on “family values” to American politics in the late 1970s. This was a conservative version of the emphasis on male-breadwinner nuclear families that had long been characteristic of American values.


Evangelical Christians believed that strict gender roles could ward off the influences of an immoral society. Many activists were especially concerned with sex education in public schools, the proliferation of pornography, legalized abortion, and the rising divorce rate. For them, the answer lay in strengthening what they called “traditional” family structures. By the early 1980s, Christians could read from among hundreds of evangelical books, take classes on how to save a marriage or how to be a Christian parent, attend countless evangelical Bible study courses, watch evangelical ministers on television, and donate to foundations that worked to promote “Christian values” in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress.

Nearly everyone, regardless of their religion or politics, agreed that American families were straining to cope with recent changes. By all accounts, the waves of social liberalism and economic transformation that swept over the nation in the 1960s and 1970s had destabilized public and private life alike. But Americans did not agree about how to restabilize home life. Indeed, differing attitudes on that question would further divide the country in the coming decades, as the New Right would increasingly make “family values” a political issue.

Added to timeline:

Date: