The precise contours of what happened to evangelicals during the Carter administration are still hotly debated by historians. The agenda of the Republican evangelical insiders was born. Asking pastors to hold voter registration drives, Falwell told them that they needed to get people “saved, baptized, and registered” to vote. He told Christians that it was sinful not to vote. Instead, he sought to mobilize fundamentalists and evangelicals to change the occupants of political offices. Unlike Graham, Falwell did not begin by seeking access to the top levels of power. As Kidd explains:įorming the Moral Majority freed from tax regulations against direct political advocacy by churches. And that inaugurated the affiliation of white American evangelicals with the Republican Party that has lasted to this day. For in the 1980 election the newly confident evangelical movement, in its self-understanding as the Moral Majority, supported not its co-religionist Jimmy Carter but the divorced former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. It’s instructive to contrast Mencken’s obituary of Bryan with his obituary of Machen.) This general dismissal by journalists and intellectuals lasted until the rise of the self-declared evangelical Jimmy Carter, which led to Time magazine declaring 1976 The Year of the Evangelical.īut this is where the strangest, and perhaps the most consequential, chapter in the history of American evangelicalism began. (That Mencken had great respect for more thoughtful evangelicals, including the conservative Presbyterian J. Mencken’s outraged mockery of William Jennings Bryan’s insistence that Darwinian theory and Christianity are incompatible-established evangelicals in the American public mind as ignorant yahoos who could safely be ignored. The Scopes trial-especially as reported by H. Kidd begins his book with a concise but assured history of the evangelical movement, from its origins in 18th-century England through the 20th century. Peter Wehner: The deepening crisis in evangelical Christianity And Kidd believes, as do I, that the language of “crisis” is appropriate: As he comments late in his book, “The 2016 presidential election would become the most shattering experience for evangelicals since the Scopes Trial.” ![]() Thus the full title of Kidd’s book: Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis. That said, the state of evangelicalism in America today is such that a single sentence can’t capture much of the complexity. So if you need something a little pithier, here’s the definition that Kidd offers in his new book: “Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.” It would be difficult to do much better in a single sentence. Its focus is on preaching the euangelion, a New Testament Greek word meaning “good news” or “good message.” The specific contours of that message are often debated: While most scholars of the movement hold to the Bebbington quadrilateral, some think a more complete picture is given by the Larsen pentagon. It is, rather, a complex and fluid movement dedicated to the renewal of Christianity, largely among Protestants, though its efforts have occasionally reached into Catholicism. Lewis).Īnd that’s one of the most important points to grasp about evangelicalism: It’s not a denomination. There aren’t very many evangelicals in the Episcopal Church anymore-there aren’t many Episcopalians anymore-but most of the founders of modern evangelicalism, in the 18th century, were priests of the Church of England, and some of the more recent figures who are dearest to today’s evangelicals are also Anglican (most famously, C. ![]() The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is generally, if not universally, evangelical: Just look at the uses of the term evangelical on the denomination’s website. And yet both of our traditions are closely connected, if in different ways, to evangelicalism. ![]() Where Tommy’s Church has a praise band, mine has organ music the central event on Sunday morning at his church is the sermon, while at mine it’s the Eucharist. Very different things, one might think, and in some ways one would be right. ![]() Tommy is a Southern Baptist I’m an Episcopalian, in the Anglican tradition descending from the Church of England. Because the future of that movement, which is our movement, matters to us-and, we think, matters to America. And more often than not, we end up talking about our complicated relationship with American evangelical Christianity. Over the carnitas and barbacoa and guacamole we catch up on how our writing projects are going, and perhaps gossip a bit about what’s happening at Baylor University, where we both work. Once a month or so Tommy Kidd and I get together for lunch at our favorite taco joint.
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