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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.

\"Proposes to solve the question of how contemporary American literature has registered--or has failed to register--what is one of the most important cultural paradigm shifts of the postwar period, the astonishing expansion and empowerment of fundamentalist and conservative evangelical and Christianity in the United States\"-- Author's university Web page.

Since World War II, historians have analyzed a phenomenon of \"white flight\" plaguing the urban areas of the northern United States. One of the most interesting cases of \"white flight\" occurred in the Chicago neighborhoods of Englewood and Roseland, where seven entire church congregations from one denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, left the city in the 1960s and 1970s and relocated their churches to nearby suburbs. InShades of White Flight, sociologist Mark T. Mulder investigates the migration of these Chicago church members, revealing how these churches not only failed to inhibit white flight, but actually facilitated the congregations' departure. Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion-often used to foster community and social connectedness-can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school-instead of the local park or square or market-as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy-when black families moved into the neighborhood-to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves. Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity-congregationalism-functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight,Shades of White Flightlends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.

Evangelical Christian Women draws on two years of ethnographic research nationwide to shed new light on the gender conflict faced by women in evangelical Christianity. Julie Ingersoll goes beyond previous attempts to find avenues of empowerment for fundamentalist women to offer a more nuanced look at the challenges they face when they occupy positions of leadership which violate traditional gender norms. She looks where other studies do not—at women who, while remaining entrenched in and committed to evangelical Christianity, are also resisting accepted gender roles. Evangelical Christian Women offers a look at conservative women who challenge gender norms within their religious traditions, the fallout they experience as part of the ensuing conflict, and the significance of the conflict over gender for the development and character of culture. In the face of a growing number of scholarly studies of conservative religious women that argue that submission is somehow “really” empowerment, this book seeks to get at the other side of the story; to document and explore the experiences of the women caught in the middle of the conservative Christian culture war over gender.

How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government funding? InPiety and Public Fundinghistorian Axel R. Schäfer offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in the first half century since World War II, conservative evangelical groups became increasingly adept at accommodating their hostility to the state with federal support. Though holding to the ideals of church-state separation, evangelicals gradually took advantage of expanded public funding opportunities for religious foreign aid, health care, education, and social welfare. This was especially the case during the Cold War, when groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals were at the forefront of battling communism at home and abroad. It was evident, too, in the Sunbelt, where the military-industrial complex grew exponentially after World War II and where the postwar right would achieve its earliest success. Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public policies were a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions and values. The welfare state, forged during the New Deal and renewed by the Great Society, hastened-not hindered-the ascendancy of a conservative political movement that would, in turn, use its resurgence as leverage against the very system that helped create it. By showing that the liberal state's dependence on private and nonprofit social services made it vulnerable to assaults from the right,Piety and Public Fundingbrings a much needed historical perspective to a hotly debated contemporary issue: the efforts of both Republican and Democratic administrations to channel federal money to \"faith-based\" organizations. It suggests a major reevaluation of the religious right, which grew to dominate evangelicalism by exploiting institutional ties to the state while simultaneously brandishing a message of free enterprise and moral awakening.

Prologue. 1. California Kickback. 2. Dallas Orthodoxy. 3. On Location. 4. Phoenix Prophet. 5. Adirondack Fundamentalism. 6. Georgia Charismatics. 7. Bible School. 8. Campaign Journal. 9. Mississippi Missions. 10. Bible Bazaar. 11. Episcopal Indians. 12. Camp Meeting. 13. City Crusade. 14. Oregon Jeremiad. Epilogue. Index.

The U.S. military has historically believed itself to be the institution best suited to develop the character, spiritual values, and patriotism of American youth. InStrategy for Survival,Lori Bogle investigates how the armed forces assigned itself the role of guardian and interpreter of national values and why it sought to create \"ideologically sound Americans capable of defeating communism and assuring the victory of democracy at home and abroad.\" Bogle shows that a tendency by some in the armed forces to diffuse their view of America's civil religion among the general population predated tension with the Soviet Union. Bogle traces this trend from the Progressive Era though the early Cold War, when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations took seriously the battle of ideologies of that era and formulated plans that promised not only to meet the armed forces' manpower needs but also to prepare the American public morally and spiritually for confrontation with the evils of communism. Both Truman's plan for Universal Military Training and Eisenhower's psychological warfare programs promoted an evangelical democracy and sought to inculcate a secular civil-military religion in the general public. During the early 1960s, joint military-civilian anticommunist conferences, organized by the authority of the Department of Defense, were exploited by ultra-conservative civilians advancing their own political and religious agendas. Bogle's analysis suggests that cooperation among evangelicals, the military, and government was considered both necessary and normal. The Boy Scouts pushed a narrow vision of American democracy, and Joe McCarthy's chauvinism was less an aberration than a particularly noxious manifestation of a widespread attitude. To combat communism, American society and its armed forces embraced brainwashing-narrow moral education that attacked everyone and everything not consonant with their view of the world and how it ought to be ordered. Exposure of this alliance ultimately dissolved it. However, the cult of toughness and the blinkered view of reality that characterized the armed forces and American society during the Cold War are still valued by many, and are thus still worthy of consideration.

In the late 1970s, the New Christian Right emerged as a formidable political force, boldly announcing itself as a unified movement representing the views of a \"moral majority.\" But that movement did not spring fully formed from its predecessors. American Evangelicals and the 1960s refutes the thesis that evangelical politics were a purely inflammatory backlash against the cultural and political upheaval of the decade. Bringing together fresh research and innovative interpretations, this book demonstrates that evangelicals actually participated in broader American developments during \"the long 1960s,\" that the evangelical constituency was more diverse than often noted, and that the notion of right-wing evangelical politics as a backlash was a later creation serving the interests of both Republican-conservative alliances and their critics. Evangelicalism's involvement with —rather than its reaction against —the main social movements, public policy initiatives, and cultural transformations of the 1960s proved significant in its 1970s political ascendance. Twelve essays that range thematically from the oil industry to prison ministry and from American counterculture to the Second Vatican Council depict modern evangelicalism both as a religious movement with its own internal dynamics and as one fully integrated into general American history.

While the inspiration of the Bible is central to Christian faith, there is no general agreement about its nature. Reviewing seven major evangelical theories of biblical inspiration, Kern Robert Trembath proposes a new definition--that inspiration is \"a mediated enhancement of human experience by God, through the Bible\"--and argues that this new understanding is most compatible with a Thomistic doctrine of God.