Inventing the Old-Time Religion

This chapter examines the founding and rise to prominence of Christianity Today, the most important religious magazine of the 1960s and 1970s. It details the magazine’s founding by the revivalist Billy Graham and his father-in-law L. Nelson Bell, both of whom envisioned a periodical that would target ministers with a mix of theological content and conservative political commentary. With financial backing from J. Howard Pew and long list of conservative businessmen, the magazine soon outpaced its liberal rivals; and under the editorial guidance of Carl Henry, a noted theologian, it developed a novel critique of mainline religious authority that may well have exacerbated the divide between mainline elites and average churchgoers. Yet Henry’s insistence that evangelicals were obligated take notice of social problems such as racial discrimination ultimately created an inbridgable rift between the magazine’s editor and its financial backers, and in 1967 Henry was forced to relinquish his post.

Revolt in the Suburbs

This chapter examines some of the forces that led to the decline of mainline Protestant religious authority in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, it argues that the waning of religious authority during these decades liberated upwardly mobile white Americans to follow their own inclinations and interests, not only in their personal lives but also in their thinking about politics and society. And it was at precisely this point that many of them developed a sudden affinity for the extreme libertarian view that the use of state power to correct systemic injustice or redirect resources to the less fortunate was fundamentally illegitimate. The chapter concludes with an account of mainline Protestant leaders’ failed campaign to defeat Proposition 14, a 1964 ballot measure that repealed California’s fair housing law.

Assaulting the Citadel

This chapter tells the story of how J. Howard Pew and a band of conservative activists attempted to infiltrate the National Council of Churches with the aim of undermining religious support for the welfare state. As with many odd pairings, financial considerations helped bring the parties together. The courtship began when the NCC’s architects hatched the idea of a National Lay Committee—a body of prominent laymen and women that would help the Council keep its finger on the pulse of lay opinion while also boosting the Council’s budget. From Pew’s perspective, the Lay Committee offered a potential backdoor into the citadel of the Social Gospel. The NCC needed money, and he was willing and able to supply it. In return, he asked only that the Council cease issuing pronouncements in favor of government aid to the less fortunate and instead transform itself into a champion of the free-enterprise system. The plan sounded simple enough on paper, yet it ultimately failed to accomplish its principal objective of prompting the NCC to abandon its commitment to a robust social welfare state. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was a group of prominent business leaders, not the alleged communists in the ranks of the clergy, who led the opposition to Pew’s short-lived Lay Committee.

The Battle for the Clergy

Covering the period from 1945 to 1960, this chapter examines a series of clergy education initiatives that attempted to build support for libertarian economic ideas. Launched by conservative activists and organizations, these programs sought to undermine clerical support for the New Deal–era welfare state, but they mostly ended in failure. With financial support from the wealthy oil executive J. Howard Pew, organizations like Spiritual Mobilization and the Christian Freedom Foundation spread the gospel of free enterprise using newsletters, radio broadcasts, and sermon contests. But polls funded by Pew himself found they had little impact on the political or economic views of rank-and-file ministers. The National Association of Manufacturers’ (NAM) clergy-industry program was marginally more successful, though its organizers were similarly disappointed at their inability to stoke clerical opposition to the New Deal/Fair Deal agenda. The chapter concludes with a series of observations on why Christian Libertarianism gained little traction with either ministers or lay people during the 1950s.

The Brief Reign of Whirl

This chapter examines how Protestant elites responded to the political and cultural turmoil of the 1920s. It argues that while the failure of prohibition and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan shattered Protestantism’s sense of unity, the mainline churches nonetheless emerged from the decade with their core ideals and institutions intact. The 1920s also witnessed the birth of several new ecumenical initiatives, including an extensive network of state and local church councils, that worked to direct believers’ energies toward urgent social problems. The church councils, in particular, would later play an important role in building support for New Deal-era economic programs and postwar civil rights reforms.

Introduction

This introduction develops a theoretical framework capable of explaining both the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth. The theory proceeds from the premise that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically—for example, by championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society—it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so. For much of American history, the socioeconomic significance of church membership, coupled with a robust network of ecumenical institutions, endowed mainline Protestant leaders with considerable authority over the beliefs and actions of their congregations. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, the collapse of mainline Protestant authority fueled the rise of an evangelical movement whose leaders were incentivized to echo the increasingly conservative political convictions of the broader white electorate.

Conclusion

Many present-day Protestant congregations are deeply involved in humanitarian projects—from feeding the homeless to promoting interracial and interfaith understanding. Yet when it comes to political behavior, white evangelicals remain overwhelmingly opposed to programs that benefit the less fortunate, or that run counter to the free market ethos of the modern Republican party. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a trio of failed reform campaigns by evangliecal elites—targeting climate change, foreign aid, and immigration, respectively—underscored the fragile nature of evangelical religious authority. In contrast to their postwar predecessors in the Protestant mainline, evangelical elites possess neither the intrinsic religious authority nor the institutional resources necessary to shape the political convictions of their followers. Instead, they serve at the pleasure of the rank and file.

Why the Prophetic Torch Wasn’t Passed

This chapter examines the fate of liberal and moderate evangelicals from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. It argues that moderate evangelicals—an ascendant force in the 1970s—were marginalized less by the rise of so-called “values” issues than by economic anxieties and a broader white reaction against federal civil rights initiatives. That white evangelicals drifted to the political Right for essentially secular reasons—and often in the face of counterpressures from prominent evangelical leaders and institutions—provides further confirmation of religion’s limited ability to shape political behavior in an age of religious autonomy. In short, it is the weakness of evangelical institutions, not their strength, that best explains why the term “conservative evangelical” has come to seem redundant.

The Twilight of the Protestant Establishment

This chapter further documents the decline of mainline Protestant influence over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows how the rise of the antiwar and black power movements, together with the emergence of a new generation of free market-minded corporate leaders, exacerbated the demographic and social trends that had been undermining Protestant moral authority since the mid-1960s. A particularly vexing problem, from the perspective of mainline leaders, was the exodus of young professionals from the church. As a result of this trend, the nation’s churches were increasingly dominated by politically conservative older churchgoers. As they worked simultaneously to address the concerns of young activists and assuage the fears of an aging churchgoing population, mainline elites found themselves caught in an insoluble demographic bind.

The Last Hurrah

This chapter examines the role of mainline Protestant religious leaders in building support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Using both archival evidence and public opinion data, it argues that church-based educational campaigns played an important role in the law’s passage. Although the general arc of the story will be familiar from prior histories of the Civil Rights Act, the focus here is on religious authority and its role in shaping the views and actions of average believers. With that in mind, the chapter concludes with a section in which data from the 1964 American National Election Study (ANES) is used to test whether church involvement affected white Protestants’ views concerning the Civil Rights Act. The public opinion data confirm the picture that emerges from the archival record—namely, that the churches’ educational efforts were, in fact, a critical factor in building northern white support for a meaningful civil rights bill.