The Year(s) of the Evangelical

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Okay. Hello, can everybody hear me? Yes. Okay. I'm Pat Costigan. I'm part of the adult ed. Like this. Like I'm about ready to gulp it. If it's an ice cream cone, I may take a licking. Anyway, here we are again. Okay. More of Heath Carter. What a blessing. What a blessing he is and his family right to take the time to help us find, make sense of the Christian reality. We are in external to Presbyterians, of course, and it's so great to hear 3.0. Hear about 3.0. Before we get started, just a little reminder at the back, we have some sign in sheets. Hannah Reichel, I think I'm pronouncing Reichel, her book for such a time as this. She's going to be presenting on December 14th, and we can sign up for reduced price on the copy of her book. And then Jackie Lewis and Shannon Daley Harris, their book. Sorry, I didn't write the name of that book down, but they present November 23rd. And please, if you're interested, you can sign up. Okay. At the back. So let's pray. Let's calm our hearts, remind ourselves we're asking ourselves the question, what kind of Christian, what kind of Christian are we? And we ask that to our dear Lord, Evangelicalism, Christian nationalism, faith and public life, these are tall things, complex things, overwhelming. And we ask you, Lord, to direct our hearts, calm our hearts, open our minds. We particularly pray for Heath as he presents. I pray that when he's finished that he will still have energy to do all of his duties and activities in his home life. We thank you for him and Thais and their lovely family. We pray for grace and strength to be on him, particularly now as he teaches us what he has learned and what he continues to learn about these complex times within the body of Christ. I pray this prayer in Christ's name. Amen. [00:03:00] Speaker B: Amen. Morning. Good to be back with you. We get to come for a historian perilously close to the present. This week we're going to sneak our way into the 21st century. In some of the circles that I run in these days, people wonder, I think, why would anyone want to be evangelical? Or why would anyone want to be associated with evangelicalism? You know, from last week when we talked about 2.0, that there's a way of thinking about Nassau Presbyterian as part of a kind of stream of evangelical faith, a kind of stream that has deeper roots in the 20th century and that arguably had its heyday in the post war, kind of the immediate post war decades. But what about 3.0. Why would anyone want to be a part of this thing? I want to talk today about a stream that emerges right around the time of the Second World War and it becomes a big deal and remains arguably a big deal in our time. Why would anyone want to be a part of this thing? Billy Graham may be part of? The answer ended last week by referencing Graham. Graham was, as much as anyone, a central figure in a very decentralized movement. His rallies were nothing if not memorable. Graham had a kind of sensational appeal in his day. And I was actually a few years ago I was down in Asheville, North Carolina, visiting a friend and there's a Billy Graham kind of home bases there and went over to the COVID and took a little tour and talked to some folks there and watched a very well produced evangelical. 3.0 would be very good at production values, well produced video about his life and his career. He had passed away. And at one point in the video you're watching Graham, who spoke, as I mentioned last week, all over the world, in all different kinds of contexts, often to crowds in the tens of thousands. And in the video, at one point it zooms in on Graham's face and he says, if you don't hear anything else, he's talking to a crowd of tens of thousands. He says, if you don't hear anything else today, hear this. God loves you. God loves you. God loves you. The power of that emphasis on God's love, which of course has deep roots in the Christian tradition, was part of the power of Graham's message. It was also the power of a new beginning. Many of you I know are aware of the Billy Graham revivals and what these were like, where people were invited to come down on, onto a field or to the front of an auditorium and as they came down to experience the power of new life and a new beginning. And that's something that, as it turns out, millions of people all over the world hunger for the power of a new beginning. It's that same power of the religion of the heart that we've been exploring together. A power that we saw in the 18th century. A power that we saw in the kind of worlds around this church and this denomination. In the early 20th century. Bob Dylan was impacted by the power of Billy Graham. He reflected in 2014. He was the greatest preacher and evangelist of my time. The guy could save souls and did. I went to two or three of his rallies in the 50s or 60s. This guy was like rock and roll personified. Volatile, explosive. He had the hair, the Tone the elocution. When he spoke, he brought the storm down. Clouds parted, souls got saved, sometimes 30 or 40,000 of them. If you ever went to a Billy Graham rally back then, you were changed forever. Dylan wrote in 2014. I mentioned last week, oh, my screen's not working. I just noticed. Any idea why that might be? I mentioned Graham's 1949 campaign in Los Angeles, which really launched his public career, brought him into the public eye in a new way. So that's Dylan in 2014. Here's the Los Angeles Daily News in 1949. Billy Graham, whose evangelistic campaign in the big tent at Washington and Hill street starts its final week tomorrow, is one young preacher who believes that the old ideas are the best. I don't know of any new system for getting rid of sin, he says. The only cure for sin I know about is the blood of Christ. And the only hope for sinners is the grace of God. This is still the Los Angeles Daily News, emphasizing the old time religion. Billy Graham's meetings have resulted in hundreds of seekers following the sawdust trail. In one meeting this week, more than 1,000 of his congregation came forward seeking a deepening spiritual life. Thank you. The old Time religion. Part of what we've seen and been talking about these last few weeks is that the old time religion was often an entering wedge for things that were actually quite new. Talked about this with Whitfield and Edwards revivals of the 1700s. I want to talk about it today. You know, this Los Angeles Daily News article emphasized some of the new stuff. One of the features of the big tent, they don't mean the big theological tint, they just meant the big tent in which the revival was happening is the excellent sound system and seating arrangements which provides for easy sight and hearing from any part of the huge tent. But it wasn't just technology that was new. Like Jonathan Edwards and the facilitators of the Great Awakening, Graham understood himself probably as reviving an earlier, more beautiful, more righteous church and nation. But part of what I want to argue today is that the world that he became the face of was in fact less old timey then. It was something quite distinctly new, a disruptive, entrepreneurial form of Christian faith that unlike Evangelical 2.0, which we talked about last week, the worlds around this church, our kind of world. Evangelical 3.0 Rejected forms of churchly and bureaucratic authority. It preferred parachurch ministry, entrepreneurial ministry. You break out on your own, you found a new ministry, you do your own thing. This was evident even in the money that funded these different streams of evangelical faith. Evangelical 2.0 was really funded in no small part by big oil John Rockefeller, Standard Oil. This is Darren Dochuk's great book, Anointed with Oil Follows the money. Rockefeller and Standard Oil were interested in funding the kind of worlds of Evangelical 2.0 that offered these big structural solutions to big social problems. Evangelical 3.0 drew the interest and the philanthropic commitment of wildcat oilmen who had a very different attitude towards systems and structures. Rockefeller had benefited from his partnership with the federal government, was interested in partnerships with governments in Saudi Arabia, and so needed pluralism and whatnot to kind of make the way for the kind of big international business that he was building. Wildcat oilmen had a different culture and a different attitude, and they also had a lot of money. And Billy Graham was one of the many folks in this evangelical 3.0 world that would attract the attention of the wildcatters. This world that the wildcat oilman hoped to find was less open to theological difference. It was. One of the Characteristics of the 2.0 stream we talked about last week was its kind of unwieldy theological big tent. This was an interdenominational but fundamentally smaller tent. It was less interested in freewheeling debate about tough theological or political issues. It was less interested in making sure that every voice in every position got heard on every committee meeting about every tough issue. If Evangelical 2.0 was an unwieldy big tent in which, as we saw last week, minoritized voices could and sometimes did break through, evangelical 3.0 was overwhelmingly white. It often took the shape of a political movement, an exceedingly ambitious political movement that was opposed to the New deal, opposed to cultural liberalism, and understood itself, as the earlier versions had, as trying to sustain or revive a better version of the nation. 3.0 became a major block within the larger, changing, rapidly fold of GOP Republican politics. We've seen various forms of Christian nationalism along the way these last few weeks, and this week we see another version of it. For folks in Evangelical 3.0, it often seemed like the nation was going off the rails, and it was up to them to stand in the gap during a season of truly momentous cultural change across the nation. They appealed less than sometimes, we think, to the kind of most reactionary elements of the nation. There was some of that, and we can talk about that. They appealed especially to the growing suburban population. They were in some ways less deep south than they were Sunbelt. Evangelical 3.0 would proclaim a faith that in some ways Dovetailed with the new message of a Republican party preaching the virtues of colorblind meritocracy. But before the 60s, before Graham's in LA, there's a group of mostly white ordained conservative fundamentalist pastors who got together in St. Louis to found the national association of Evangelicals. This is a critical moment in the ways that we've come to understand the term evangelical. We understand we actually these days when we use that term, we mean it to talk about the world. I'm talking about today. As we saw last week, people that had gone to this church would have understood themselves as evangelical. The founding of this organization, 1942 was a major shift, the beginning of a major shift in the usage of the term. Harold Auchingay, the pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, a very respectable, ambitious church in its own right, was one of the leaders of this meeting. He said the nation faced, quote, a tidal wave of drunkenness, immorality, corruption, dishonesty and utter atheism. It is up to us to make sure that the Christian church will return to a new leadership, producing new statesmen for government circles, influencing education and rebuilding the foundations of society. These folks did not feel represented. We talked about last week how the federal and the National Council of Churches had become really heavy hitters in American political life. The folks who gathered in St. Louis didn't see those folks as their friends. They didn't see those folks as representing their point of view. And they had their own cultural and political ambitions. And they wanted a lobbying association in D.C. and they got it. They built an interdenominational agency that was stretched across denominational lines but was smaller tint in terms of its theological and political outlook. It was heavily populated by northerners, again kind of bucking the idea that this is just purely a deep south kind of thing. In its early years the NAE was very interested. This is kind of an older thing that I'm not going to talk about a lot, but was a big deal in its moment in protecting evangelicals access to the airstreams. Federal Council Churches have been trying to kind of get these folks off the radio. And so the NAE was partly motivated by protecting evangelical access to the radio restrictions on liquor advertising limits. Interestingly, this is a big point of change over the course of the time. I'm gonna talk about today on Catholic political influence. They're very anti Catholic and worried about the rising power of the Catholic Church. It was also very opposed to organized labor. Worked with anti labor forces to crush Operation Dixie in the immediate post war south it took what was at the time a pretty mainstream stance against communism. And that was part of the entering wedge for this organization. But its mission would evolve. By the early 1960s, Supreme Court rulings against school prayer and Bible reading were elevating worries in these circles that it was really secular humanism that was the enemy, not Catholicism, which had long been the enemy of Protestants who were organizing in politics. Graham again, was the single most important individual in these circles. And if you listen carefully in Los Angeles, if you listen carefully in his own revivals, it wasn't just a message about the power of heart, faith in la. He told the crowds that gathered that Communism was, quote, a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the devil himself. And more than that, quote, communists are more rampant in Los Angeles than in any other city in America. This message earned him the admiration of William Randolph Hearst, who saw in Graham a potential ally in Hearst's own conservative cultural ambitions and schemes. Puff Graham, Hearst told reporters in his papers, and they did. This is part of the reason why the 1949 revival became such a big deal. Harold Aucingay at Park street took notice of Graham in the wake of the LA revival and invited him to hold his second major crusade on the Boston Commons, as George Whitfield had done. You'll recall from our talk a few weeks ago. Graham wasn't only concerned about communism, he was concerned, like J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, with threats to the home, which he considered, like Hoover, quote, the citadel of American life. If the home is lost, all is lost. Graham in his early years was politically ambitious. He sought and received an invitation to meet Harry Truman. Like most southern white Christians of the time, Graham was a Democrat. But he became frustrated with TRUMAN and in 1952 basically effectively campaigned for Eisenhower. He would be a regular visitor at the Eisenhower White House. He was becoming one of the most famous people in the country. By 1958, he pulled fourth in a national pool to determine America's most admired man. Graham was a moderate on one of the key issues of the day, which was civil rights. He was very much of a piece in some ways with Eisenhower himself. He had insisted on integrated seating at his revivals starting in 1953, including revivals in the still Jim Crow south at that point. He said in 1956, the Bible speaks strongly against race discrimination and went on to invite MLK to pray at his New York crusade the following year. He talked about his admiration for King's moral leadership in those early years of the civil rights movement. But he wasn't keen on where that movement went. He wasn't keen on the tactics of civil rights activists. He wrote to Eisenhower as his Graham in 1956 if the Supreme Court will go slowly and the extremists on both sides will quiet down, we can have a peaceful social readjustment over the next 10 year period. He opposed civil disobedience, declaring in 1960 we have the responsibility to obey the law, no matter what the law may be. Graham would always see to the end of his life, I think, individual conversion, not social or political activism as the key to social change. Those views dovetailed with many other white northern evangelicals and their cultural institutions, beacons, journals like Christianity Today, which again usually didn't embrace the massive resistance that was becoming quite common in the south, but regularly took opportunities to criticize King and other leaders of the civil rights movement on the basis of the, the methodologies that they were using. Moderate in the sense. Graham's civil rights politics were moderate in the sense that for folks like Jerry Falwell, he was a bridge too far. In 1958, Falwell, the 25 year old pastor of a fundamentalist Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia, which refused to associate with the then pretty moderate Southern Baptist Convention, Falwell preached in 1958, quote, the true Negro does not want integration. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race. Who then is propagating this terrible thing? We see the hand of Moscow in the background. Integration was for Falwell the product of, quote, the devil himself. Falwell and Bob Jones, who was then president of a college founded by his father in the south, had broken with Graham because Graham in his own way had some bigger tint sensibilities. He was willing to work with folks, for example, who didn't affirm scriptural inerrancy. In 1965, Bob Jones accused Graham of quote, disobeying the word of God by quote, building the church of the Antichrist and aiding and abetting apostasy. So at that moment there are real divisions on the Christian right in these sort of burgeoning evangelical 3.0 worlds. They hit the 1960s, this period of obvious social turmoil and cultural change. If you were standing in 1963 or four, it might have seemed like the New Deal was here to stay. Certainly Republican presidents, Eisenhower, even early Nixon presumed that the New Deal was here to stay. It could look like the Republican party was sort of had been vanquished or at least been relegated to the status of a minority party in the mid-1960s. But that coalition, the Democratic coalition that had powered the New Deal and that was powering the Great Society that was moving behind slowly but steadily behind. The civil rights movement proved more and more fragile, especially as folks in these evangelical 3.0 worlds were mobilizing. Changes in sexual mores alarmed these folks. So did the rise of a younger New Left and an increasingly assertive civil rights movement. Fundamentalists helped to power massive resistance to school integration in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision and other civil rights measures. In some cases, they bolted existing denominations on the basis of their racial liberalism. In 1973, 84 out of 150 Southern Presbyterian congregations in the state of Mississippi left the Presbyterian Church US to join the newly founded Presbyterian Church in America. The reunification of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian churches 10 years later in 1983, resulted in yet another mass exodus to the PCA. These departures were usually justified in terms of theological purity, that the Southern Presbyterian and then the Unified Church had gone astray in terms of its devotion to historic Christianity. But there was no question that many of the drivers of the newly founded PCA were known segregationists who had castigated the Presbyterian Church US for its racial comparative racial openness and cast the denomination's racial views as evidence of its compromised Christian faith. Graham and the moderates took a somewhat different tack. They were worried. They talked about in the 60s about the demise of law and order. Many evangelicals like Graham and company didn't go the George Wallace route. George Wallace was the governor who had famously proclaimed segregation forever. Graham and company would worry about the kind of rising disorder in American cities. They embrace the colorblind conservatism of what Richard Nixon would call the silent majority, folks who embrace the colorblind view of the nation. Nixon himself in 1967 wrote in Reader's Digest, Does America have the national character and moral stamina to see us through this long and difficult struggle? We must face up to an unpleasant truth. A nation weakened by racial conflict and lawlessness at home cannot meet the challenges of leadership abroad. This was a message that resonated in some ways with Graham's own and with evangelicals, not only across much of the more moderate south, but across the entirety of the Sun Belt, all the way west through Arizona into Southern California, both of them becoming in many ways hubs of Evangelical 3.0 faith. Not content because of the kind of extent of cultural turmoil, to stay on the sidelines in the 1968 election, he would later. Graham would later openly regret his deeply partisan engagements. Early in his career, he declared in 68 I feel that the very survival of the country this is with Nixon up for election, may be at stake in this year's election. His wife, Ruth Belgram, far more conservative than Billy, put it more pointedly, quote, if God does not punish America for its sins, he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. Ruth Belgram said in 1968 she was hardly unique. Conservative women helped to power the rise of evangelical 3.0 and a resurgent GOP. Conservative women who opposed the feminist movement, who were in many ways, in many cases activated by the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, which stated that, quote, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. This was an amendment that was passed in Congress. It was supported by the Republican Party. But Some conservative evangelical 3.0 women feared it would lead to women being drafted. They feared that it would degrade the separate spheres gender ideology that prevailed in their circumstances circles. Many of them rallied to the side of a conservative Catholic. This is an important moment as well because again, there had long, long been a historic divide going back to the Reformation between Protestants and Catholics who would have been really leery of working together. But Phyllis Schlafly was a conservative Catholic who graduated from Radcliffe College and immediately kind of dove into Republican politics. She campaigned against the ERA and for the, quote, right to be treated as a woman. She was joined by many evangelical women who argued that men and women were not only biologically different, but had different roles to play in family and society. Beverly LaHaye, who some of you read for small groups, wrote in her 1976 book the Spirit Controlled Woman, quote, the woman who is truly spirit filled will want to be totally submissive to her husband. Schlafly wasn't just conservative, she was an organizing genius. This is another theme of the 3.0 world. These folks knew how to organize. Her newsletter grew from 3,500 subscribers in 1972 to 50,000 by the end of the 1970s. She helped turn evangelical women into Republican Party activists. Abortion played a role in this story too. It kind of came out of nowhere. As late as 1968, evangelical leaders like Harold Aucingay, the pastor of conservative Park Street Church, and Harold Linzel, the editor of C, were arguing that quote unquote, abortion on demand might have been wrong, but that quote unquote, therapeutic abortion might be acceptable in 1971. The moderate. Sometimes we think about the SBC as just perennially in this era. In the mid 20th century, the SBC pretty moderate passed a resolution saying that while it affirmed, quote, a high view of human life, including fetal life, the convention urged, quote, Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental or physical health of the mother. That's the Southern Baptist convention. In 1971, Roe changed these politics. Christianity Today and the national association of Evangelicals condemned Roe, promoting a historic convergence with Catholics which cannot be underestimated in terms of the power of a resurgence. This is one of the Characteristics of Evangelical 3.0 was its openness to a pragmatic coalition with conservative Catholics who shared cultural and political values. That had not been enough in generations past to get these folks to work together, but their ability and investment in a shared partnership would change the nation's politics in the late 20th century. It wasn't just women who were powering this movement. Evangelical college students were also part of the story. Bill Bright founded Campus Crusade in the early 1950s. By 1976, it was personally presenting what Bright considered the four spiritual laws, his kind of rendition of Evangelical 3.0 faith to nearly 2 million non Christians every year. Bright's organization would sort of get involved through various outlets with Republican party politics. Though Campus Crusade itself remained apolitical for many folks who participated, it cultivated a faith that dovetailed in ways that I've already discussed with a certain kind of emerging GOP politics. Though it could go in different ways too. In 1976, the year of the evangelical, the nation saw two born again Christians running for president. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Newsweek declared it the year the Evangelical. A question on the table was who would evangelicals support again? Many white evangelicals had long been Democrats. That was their historic party loyalty. But at east since the 1960s, there had been a new strain of Evangelical 3.0 that affirmed or seemed to affirm liberal politics. I think this was a very small strain, but it tried to do a thing. In this period, evangelicals at evangelical colleges founded an organization. Evangelicals from and governed. Tom Skinner, black evangelical, gave a stirring address at 1970 Urbana Conference on Racism and World Evangelism. Jim Wallace and other friends of his, in response to the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, took up radical evangelical common sense readings. We talked about this a couple weeks ago too. How common sense readings of the Bible could power radical political points of view. Wallace took those up. Troy Perry founded the first, and to this point, I Think only still exclusively affirming LGBTQ denomination, the Metropolitan Community Church. Ralph Blair, another evangelical, founded an organization called Evangelicals Concerned, which also promoted the holiness of homosexuality in evangelical circles. In this moment of cultural turmoil in 1974, an interesting moment on the world evangelical stage, where the movement that had developed around Billy Graham, which really had big international ambitions too, some of which related to Cold War politics, but some of which really did open out trying to bring together evangelicals around the world who shared the values and commitments of those that had gathered around Graham in the US in 1974, in Lausanne, Switzerland, evangelicals from around the world embraced the Lausanne Covenant, which was a document that focused on the evangelization of the world, a kind of quintessential 3.0 concern. But that didn't jive with the fundamentalist politics of some in the U.S. black and Latin American evangelicals who showed up in Switzerland led the way in pushing for stronger language around social justice. And if you look at the Luzanne Covenant, I'm not going to read this because I'm running out of time already, but there's a lot of good language in there about evangelical pursuit of social justice. The document ended that the salvation we claim should be transforming us in the totality of our personal and social responsibilities. Faith without works is dead. Could this kind of perspective get the loyalties and the affections of Evangelical 3.0 in the U.S. no. In 1976. In the 1976 election, Carter won some evangelical votes, but proved unacceptable because of his liberal political and theological views. His decision to consent to an interview with Playboy in September of 1976 was the straw that broke the camel's back. And in the wake of that election, there would be a tidal wave of evangelical 3.0 investment in conservative Republican politics in June 1979. So that late is when the conservative takeover of the SBC began. This was really a takeover that was engineered and strategic because the SBC had been a moderate denomination. It's not hard in some ways to understand how someone like Jimmy Carter came out of the denomination, because it had long propelled kind of in the mid 20th century. It was accepting of Brown v. Board. It was accepting of moderate abortion politics as we've already described. There was a concerted, decades later conservative takeover. These folks knew how to strategize and organize, and they did it. They brought one candidate to the convention every year for 10 years. And if you do that, you get to replace all of the board members of all of the SBC seminaries. And they knew what was required in order to take power back from the moderates. And they did it. And already in 1980, fresh with the glow of having taken over the convention, the SBC issued statements opposing the Carter White House. Down the line, fellow conservative evangelical Tim LaHaye, Beverly's spouse, wrote, is Jimmy Carter a Christian who is naive about humanism and respects humanists more fully than he does Christians? Or is he a humanist who masqueraded as a Christian to get elected and then showed his contempt for the 60 million born agains by excluding them from his government? Part of the story we're going to move fast here is not just a political tidal wave, but a cultural one. Part of the story of Evangelical 3.0 is the production of all kinds of cultural products. Books like the late Great Planet Earth was the best selling book of the 1970s. James Dobson's Dare to Discipline, A Kind of Particular Take, Patriarchal Take on Family Life and child Discipline, sold 2 million copies. In 1977, Dobson launched a national radio program, Focus on the family, which by 1995 was the third most popular popular radio broadcast in the US behind only Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey. Dobson's mailing list featured 3.5 million names. Part of what was starting to happen by the 80s and 90s was evangelical 3.0 was becoming a cultural juggernaut, complete with music, film, and increasingly ubiquitous bookstores and suburban strip malls where folks could not only buy books, but also cassette tapes with their favorite artists, T shirts and more. By the mid-1990s, there were thousands of these stores all over the country. You could flip on the radio and just happen upon a station that would be playing evangelical music. The Christian music industry was raking in billions of dollars a year by the 1990s, representing about a tenth of all music industry dollars. Carmen's the Champion, one of the songs. I gave the small group folks a creative, campy retelling of the resurrection that also captured the power of of this upstart Evangelical 3.0 movement. It was the ubiquitousness of it. It was everywhere. It was in the strip malls. It was on your radio. It wasn't just a kind of particular political movement. Mega churches were becoming increasingly popular. By the mid-1990s, there were more than 400 churches around the country with more than 2,000 members. And if you were on the inside of this cultural world, it could seem that this was the way to be Christian, and it was kind of the only way to be Christian. Catholics were maybe good partners on cultural and political issues, but not trustworthy when it came to the fundamental doctrines of the faith. People in the mainline world were way too far gone. There was a kind of cohesiveness to the evangelical 3.0 world that can be easy to underestimate. It was not just a political movement. It also had profound cultural power. We're going to fly. Reagan is a turning point. In 1979, you know, Falwell founded a moral majority. He was moving from his kind of earlier fundamentalist, arch segregationist kind of mindset to try to become more mainstream, but didn't really take off. He was never able to fully effectively kind of do the bigger tent coalition building that would have required for him to take off in national politics. But by the 1980 election, the Republican party had identified conservative Christians as a needed demographic in their reconfigured coalition. In August of 1980, Reagan went to Dallas and addressed the religious roundtable where Falwell and others were declaring. I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing. In that same speech, he declared, quote, over the last two or three decades, the federal government seems to have forgotten both that old time religion and, and that old time constitution. Such statements helped evangelicals to overlook Reagan's past support for therapeutic abortion, his opposition to an anti gay rights remnant in California, his own sporadic church attendance and his divorce. He made promises on abortion, the appointment of judges. He revoked the GOP's long standing support for the equal rights amendment, and he promised to protect private Christian academies. He took the oath of office where the King James Bible opened up to 2 Chronicles 7:14 in which God tells the people that if they pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I forgive their sin and heal their land. In his inaugural address, Reagan declared, we are a nation under God. In 1983, he went on to address the national association of Evangelicals, representing a new moment in that organization's cultural and political cachet. But part of the story, and maybe I'm just gonna rush through and just say, is that Reagan and other GOP presidents would prove unsteady allies to the cultural ambitions, the political ambitions of evangelical 3.0 activists. When a Supreme Court vacancy arose in his first year in office, some evangelicals suggested that Phyllis Schlafly should get the spot. Reagan instead appointed Sandra Day o', Connor, a known supporter of abortion rights. But evangelicals continued to Support him. In 1984. I'm going to be out of time here. But the basic deal here in these 80s, 90s the turn of the century there's kind of different poles within Evangelical 3.0 when it comes to politics. Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988 because they were really frustrated with the Reagan administration. They didn't trust HW catered to evangelicals as long as Robertson was in the race. But then after he dropped out and throughout his administration kind of pulled a Reagan sending certain kinds of signals that would keep folks in the loop but not delivering on some of their greatest hopes. Same would be true for George W. Bush. Meanwhile, there's lots of grassroots politicking happening at the local level in the sort of under the auspices of organizations like the Christian Coalition, who was turning out voters in local and state races. Again, these folks knew how to organize. When Barack Obama won the presidency, some predicted that the religious rite was done. This is Christian Coalition. The rise of new Millennial bloggers like Rachel Held Evans, who had very different ways of thinking about what it meant to be evangelical, suggested that perhaps there were new roads ahead, ones less defined by culture war and the like. At the same time, some evangelicals in the broader 3.0 circles, disturbed by the nation's suddenly changing moors and laws around sexuality and gender, sought to draw hard theological lines in the sand. In 2017, conservatives gathered in Nashville to double down on opposition to gay marriage, transgender identity and more. In 2016, Evangelical 3.0 seemed to be hurtling toward a quandary with no obvious champion in the general election, which pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. This is critical and part of where I want to pick up next week. The leaders of Evangelical 3.0 signature institutions, the national association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, Fuller Seminary and the like, almost to a person, were leery of Trump. Conservative Southern Baptists such as Russell Moore denounced Trump in no uncertain terms in the run up to election Day. But on that day, to the surprise of many, some 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, which brings a question that we can return to next week. Is this a new era, one in which the institutions of Evangelical 3.0 have been passed by and something new Evangelical 4.0 may be taking shape. A few brief things to conclude with this period that I've just kind of whirlwind toured through here is a period that was marked by major restructuring of US Politics, with the political parties becoming much more ideological and much less coalitional in their own approach to politics. Alongside that, it was a period marked by the restructuring of American religion, really down political lines. I've talked about this in this room here before. We See it in the convergence of conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals in this 3.0 movement. It was a period marked by massive cultural change across the Nation in the 60s and onward. Evangelical 3.0 positioned itself as the defenders of older cultural and theological orthodoxies, though again, it favored parachurch and entrepreneurial forms of organization that were disruptive and market driven. The religion of the heart in this case, didn't energize large church bureaucracies like it happened in 2.0, but rather centrifugal, capitalistic enterprises. Conservatives were not only happy, though, to let the market dictate reality. They organized to champion their values, as the examples of Phyllis Schlafly and the SBC takeover underscore. We saw last week that the Christian nationalism of Evangelical 2.0 had been more inclusive. It was real. I think. I think it's fair to call 2.0 Christian nationalist in its own way, but that Christian nationalism had often been more inclusive, more pluralistic, opening outward toward others who didn't share their outlook. Evangelical 3.0 embraced forms of Christian nationalism that were nostalgic for a bygone glory day and which favored the elevation of white Christian ideals and values over the embrace of pluralism. I'm gonna stop there. We got a few minutes. [00:42:31] Speaker A: Wow. This was a wonderful, wonderful sweep of a very complex history, and we have a lot of content to think about and limited time to ask questions at the moment, but maybe one or two. I don't know. Where's Lynn? What do you think, Lynn? Two questions. Okay. Lynn's my boss. Okay. Heath, if you weren't already planning to do so next week, could you please discuss the role of the lust for power and money in all of this? [00:43:21] Speaker B: That wasn't a question. We get three. [00:43:22] Speaker A: She says an observation. Anyone else? [00:43:25] Speaker B: One more question, Maybe briefly, just I can say there. I mean, I think one thing that is a shared thing across 2.0 and 3.0 is both are interested in power, but they have different ideas about how the power should be used. And in some ways, the project of the Federal Council, the National Council of Churches, was a project about putting power behind a certain kind of Christian vision of the world. It's one that resonates, I think, with congregations like this one far more than the 3.0 world does. But I've tried to say that there are ways in which we can see major differences in the values that these different streams are propounding. But in some ways, the interest in power may be something that is a through line in the evangelical faith. Through the centuries. We can talk more about that next week for sure. [00:44:18] Speaker A: Anyone else going once, twice, thrice. Thank you so much. [00:44:25] Speaker B: I'm happy to stick around and talk too, of course. Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. Let me turn this thing off. Hey.