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In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, theWashington Postpredicted that the new evangelical left could \"shake both political and religious life in America.\" The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong-evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? InMoral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way-organizationally and through political activism-to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.

In the last half of the twentieth century, neo-evangelicalism moved from an anticommunist nationalist consensus to a new internationalism characterized by concern for human rights, justice, and economic development. Case studies of World Vision, a global relief and development organization, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a campus ministry, demonstrate that this trajectory was due in part to a growing global reflex in which many missionaries and third-world evangelicals “spoke back” to American evangelicalism. Interpreting the Bible for themselves—and increasingly for American evangelicals—substantial numbers of non-Western converts and missionaries offered sharp criticisms of American politics, culture, and capitalism. These critiques, sacralized by their origins on the mission field, helped turn some young evangelicals toward Vietnam protests, poverty relief, civil rights, and a tempered nationalism. By the 1970s, these progressive elements—and a more resolute global concern generally—had become important markers of the evangelical left.

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality.

Essay in a symposium on \"The Future of Social Conservatism.\". Adapted from the source document.

In the early 1970s, a group of progressive evangelicals challenged the mid-century cultural conservatism of their tradition. Activists associated with Reformed, Anabaptist, and neo-evangelical institutions denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon's \"lust for and abuse of power.\" When this coalition met in 1973 to issue the Chicago Declaration, delegates effused a profound sense of optimism. The evangelical left held very real potential for political impact. Within a decade, however, the movement seemed to be in disarray. This article suggests the centrality of identity politics to evangelicalism in the 1970s and outlines the fragmentation of the progressive evangelical coalition along gender, racial, and theological lines. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, the growing stridency of the National Black Evangelical Association, and the divergence of Anabaptist-oriented Evangelicals for Social Action and the Reformed-oriented Association for Public Justice sapped the evangelical left of needed resources and contributed to its impotence into the 1980s. The forces of identity politics, which also plagued the broader political left, were powerful enough to sabotage even a group of evangelicals with remarkably similar theological convictions, religious cultures, and critiques of conservative politics. The story of the fragmenting evangelical left, however, reflects more than broader culture's preoccupation with identity. It points to often-overlooked religious elements of the broader left. And alongside the New Left and the New Right, the evangelical left's debates over racial, sexual, and theological difference added to the disruptions of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s.

Swartz examines the often overlooked juncture between radical Leftist ideology and evangelical Christianity which arose in the 1960's and early '70's. Despite a substantial undercurrent of concern for nonviolence and the law, evangelical radicals underwent an important transformation in the early 1970s. Increasingly dismissing decorous evangelicalism as passe, even immoral, in the face of social injustice, they began to portray Jesus as a revolutionary figure, added a harder edge to protests, and displayed more creativity and exuberance as they took their faith and politics to the streets.

As the Thanksgiving Workshop of 1973 approached, the progressive evangelical coalition consisted primarily of Americans with roots in Billy Grahamstyle revivalism. Sharon Gallagher’s communitarianism, Mark Hatfield’s electoral savvy, Jim Wallis’s antiwar activism, John Alexander’s civil rights advocacy, and Carl Henry’s social engagement formed the basic architecture of an emerging evangelical left. But it took the contributions of people from non-American contexts previously on the margins of neo-evangelicalism to launch the movement. Non-Anglo ethnic groups—including Dutch Reformed, Swiss-German Anabaptists, Latin American Christians, and other third-world evangelicals—added trenchant critiques of social passivity and shaped the course of evangelical politicization. These

By the early 1970s political activists, evangelical and secular alike, despaired over the futility of their protests. Racial conflagration persisted, despite the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Other Side’s John Alexander. Big business remained big, despite New Left critiques by Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society and Jim Wallis of the Post-Americans. The war continued, and Richard Nixon coasted to an easy second victory, despite Senator Mark Hatfield’s efforts. As America’s cultural and political elites reigned unimpeded, activists felt as if they had exhausted established methods for political change. In 1972 Tom Skinner, the fiery

In 1983 conservative activists repeatedly disrupted a conference on peace-making at Fuller Theological Seminary. During a workshop on Central America, one protester shouted his objection to evangelical accommodation with communist totalitarianism until he was ushered out of the room. Another protester berated the 1,700 delegates from a balcony during a plenary session. When the disturbance brought the proceedings to a halt, the audience sang the hymn “Amazing Grace” to drown him out. A display table manned by the Institute for Religion and Democracy urged delegates to sign a “research report” accusing Senator Mark Hatfield and Sojourners’ Jim Wallis of advocating