That Old Time Religion: The Evangelical Empire

“I went to a Bible study group with my wife. It was just a Bible study, but it angered me. I thought, ‘These people talk like they have God in their hip pocket.’ But I went eight Wednesdays in a row. The last Wednesday evening, while everyone was praying, I got down on my knees and gave my life to the Lord and I have never been the same since. It was an emotional experience, but it hasn ‘t passed. That was nine years ago.”

Once such words would have been identified, and uncharitably patronized, as the essence of Southern redneck religion. But they were uttered last week at a thoroughly Episcopal church in Darien, Conn.,.an almost stereotypically proper and affluent Northeastern suburb. The speaker, Lee Buck, 54, is a senior vice president of the New York Life Insurance Co. “Before, I wanted to be successful in the world,” says Buck. “Now I want to exalt the Lord. I want to stay a businessman, but I want people to know that God changes lives. You don’t drop out of the world because you become a Christian.” Buck now spends his free time preaching to far-flung church and business groups.

Nationally, the Episcopal Church has lost a member every 15 minutes over the past decade. At Darien’s St. Paul’s Episcopal, though, Sunday attendance has climbed from 200 to 1,200 in less than five years. Observes the Rev. Everett (“Terry”) Fullam, 47, a Harvard Ph.D. who is mainly responsible for infusing the local commuter set with Pentecostal fervor: “The church has functioned subnormally for so long that when it becomes normal, it seems abnormal.”

Not only in Darien but all across the country, and indeed the world, that old-time religion is being recycled with ever increasing zeal. Countless people like Lee Buck were brought up to think that revivalism is the province of faith healers, holy rollers and counterfeit preachers—a thing of bad taste, or bad theology, or both —and just possibly a sign of simple-mindedness or galloping hypocrisy as well. Yet there they are today, down on their knees at prayer meetings. They are pursuing the word day by day instead of settling for the sudden thrill of religion only on Sunday—or only at Christmas and Easter.

The Bible Belt is in fact bursting the bonds of geography and seems on the verge of becoming a national state of mind. Encouraged by the presence of a born-again Southern Baptist in the White House, stirred by the widespread fear that modern man will not be able to make it to the end of the century without some spiritual help, the far-flung residents of the new Bible Belt are loosely lumped together under the name Evangelicals. There are an estimated 45.5 million of them on the U.S. church rolls* after a generation of steady growth. They are outnumbered only by the Roman Catholics (49 million). Says Rice University Sociologist William Martin: “The Evangelicals have become the most active and vital aspect of American religion today.” He is almost certainly right.

It is easier to see signs of Evangelical life than to define exactly what an Evangelical is. The movement cuts across many denominational lines and includes a number of distinct subgroups. Among them: Fundamentalists, the militant right-wing churchmen who oppose all accommodation to contemporary culture, and Pentecostalists, who have experienced the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and practice such divine “gifts” as speaking in tongues and miraculous healing by prayer. The latter include everything from Episcopalians to nearly a million Roman Catholics, to oddball healers and assorted tent preachers. Most Evangelicals, though, are basically conventional Protestants who hold staunchly to the authority of the Bible in all matters and adhere to orthodox Christian doctrine. They believe in making a conscious personal commitment to Christ, a spiritual encounter, gradual or instantaneous, known as the born-again experience.

Almost by definition (the Greek word evangelion means gospel), Evangelicals also believe in bringing the word of God to their fellow man, and today they are bringing it more exuberantly than ever. The faithful throng to gaudy superchurches with 5.000 to 10,000 seats, green shag wall-to-wall carpeting, pit orchestras and Jesus rock bands. From such places the message rolls out, often multiplied many times over on TV programs or projected by satellite to impromptu global parishes of 20 million or more at a time. The message rings out, too, at the early morning pre-work prayer meetings held by businessmen and in the liniment-and-locker-room chapels that seem to have converted half of the players in the National Football League.

“Trying to live as a Christian when I was in high school in the late ’40s, I was regarded as some kind of speckled bird,” says David McKenna, 48, the Evangelical president of Seattle Pacific University. “Now when Seattle Seahawks Tackle Norm Evans states his faith in Jesus at a school assembly, he is greeted by shouts of’Right on!’ ”

In terms of sheer hoopla, 1978 promises to be one of the biggest years in recent history for the Evangelicals. Items:

> Gerald and Betty Ford, whose oldest son, Michael, is a Pittsburgh-based Evangelical who gives religious guidance to college students, have joined U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, Football Coach Tom Landry and other notables in convoking 800 “national leaders” to a glittering “Congress of the Laity” in Los Angeles next February. The vague forum, devised by wealthy Lay Evangelist Howard Butt Jr., is intended to gather in one place the broadest possible collection of influential people who are at least “open to the leadership of Jesus Christ.”

> Global Soul Seeker Bill Bright, 56, director of the successful Campus Crusade for Christ, plans to raise $100 million next year—and a cool $1 billion by 1982—for another project. Its aim is to saturate the earth with Gospel preachers and placards. Bright, who is based in Arrowhead Springs, Calif., describes the effort as “the most extensive Christian social and evangelization mission in recorded history.” A number of the richest businessmen in America are backing his campaign.

> Some 2,000 broadcast preachers, those who have taken their Gospel from tent to tube and also reach 114 million radio listeners, will hold their annual convention in Washington, B.C., next month. Among the speakers will be Anita Bryant, just named “Most Admired Woman” by 22% of 11,530 voters in the annual Good Housekeeping poll, and Marabel (Total Woman) Morgan. As if to emphasize the extraordinary range of personalities the movement embraces, that elegant and curmudgeonly Convert Malcolm Muggeridge will be on hand to share the lectern with the two women.

> Billy Graham, who has preached in person to 80 million souls so far, will invade the very citadel of sin, Las Vegas, the first week in February. At age 59, the grand old man of Evangelicalism is as popular and active as ever. Last week he brought the Gospel to 75,000 people at Nehru Stadium in Madras, India. About 1,500 accepted his invitation to “come forward saying ‘Yes’ to Jesus Christ.” Graham’s Minneapolis office now receives $28.7 million a year from the 8 million apostles on its mailing list.

> Graham Contemporary Oral Roberts will begin construction of an enormous, $100 million medical center in Tulsa. Target date for completion: 1981. The site is across the street from Oral Roberts University, a $150 million palace of New Pentecostalism, complete with a 10,575-seat sports arena and a spiky, spectacular 200-ft. Prayer Tower. Opened in 1965, the campus cost $150 million and is all but paid for. “I had to have a university to show that it was not a fly-by-night thing,” Roberts says. Though he folded “the world’s biggest revival tent” in 1967, the former faith healer now preaches via TV; an estimated 60 million people watched his latest variety special.

> A newer TV face, Pat Robertson,46, founding father of the Virginia, based Christian Broadcasting Net; work, will open the first component of a proposed $50 million combined communications school and university next fall. The Yale Law graduate, son of Virginia’s late U.S. Senator Willis A. Robertson, recently inaugurated a new satellite transmitter—the first one to be owned by an independent TV producer —to feed various Gospel programs simultaneously to the four CBN-owned channels and 130 other stations at an annual cost of $20 million. Pentecostalist Robertson also acts as host on the 700 Club, seen daily by millions.

> Two surefire confessional books are about to appear. In Soul on Fire (Word), out in February, ex-Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver testifies that after years spent as a prisoner of Marxism and hate, he finally found peace when he saw the face of Jesus in the full moon over Cannes. Cleaver was later converted by a prison “God squad.” In Will You Die for Me? (Revell), due in April, Charles (“Tex”) Watson, leader of the vicious Tate-LaBianca murders, tells how he supplanted Charles Manson with Jesus Christ. Watson, a mandatory lifer, now preaches three times a month and teaches a weekly class for newly converted convicts.

This year stores in the Christian Booksellers Association had revenues of $600 million, thanks to pop devotionals and testimony books from Christianized Governors (Julian Carroll of Kentucky), athletes (Heisman Trophy Winner Archie Griffin, Tennis Star Stan Smith), businessmen (Walter Hoving of Tiffany) and entertainers (Pat Boone).

> Born Again, a film adapted from Nixonian Hatchet Man Charles Colson’s testimonial book of the same title, is to be released in June. Production began in Washington last week. Actor Dean Jones (The Love Bug), also a born-again Christian, plays the celebrated convert.

> On the global scale, an international committee of Evangelical leaders headed by Graham’s colleague, Presbyterian Evangelist Leigh ton Ford, will meet in Bermuda in mid-January to set the time and place for a 1980 strategy conference to follow up the 1974 Evangelical congress in Lausanne, Switzerland.

These are only the flashiest, most visible signs of the Evangelicals’ rising prosperity. The real progress of the faith is less visible. It goes on at the grass-roots level from one convert to another in thousands of local congregations, some of them quite small and isolated. It is a highly personal brotherhood. And for most Evangelicals the experience of receiving Christ is the principal event of any Christian life.

Accounts of such conversions vary sharply. Some saved souls have been dramatic sinners, as were Cleaver and Watson, for example. But the vast majority of born-again religious experiences seem to come quite simply and quietly, at least as they are recollected later. In March 1976, when President Carter decided to tell a press conference how he had “formed a very close, intimate, personal relationship with God through Christ,” he added: ”It wasn’t mysterious. It might have been the same kind of experience as millions of people have who become Christians in a deeply personal way.” Says Marabel Morgan of her own experience, which took place when she was working as a beautician and rinsing a client’s newly washed hair: “There with the water running I was born again. There was no bolt of lightning, only peace. I was tickled to death.”

Non-Evangelical Christians can understand the stark conversion of scapegraces and rapscallions, since the history of Christianity is full of agonizing personal reform (St. Paul. St. Augustine). Recalling the anguish of saints and mystics in their lifelong search for a flash from heaven or a sudden touch of grace, some Christians find it difficult to accept the validity of easy Evangelical contacts with God. Still, grace has always been amazing, and that judgment may be too harsh. Whether they wrestled mightily in their souls for a private sense of the divine presence or slipped salvation on as easily as a glove, a certain radiance, kindness and integrity do seem to flow from many born-again Christians.

The big question, which may determine whether or not the new Evangelicals eventually change the balance of power in U.S. Protestantism, is what they will do collectively with this passionate sense of God’s presence in everyday life. Mainstream Protestantism, though dutifully devoted to social reform, often seems drained of vitality. For years it undervalued a notable Evangelical asset, the kind of religious zeal that causes embarrassment but might work miracles. One critic of the Evangelicals. Activist Preacher William Sloane Coffin Jr., of New York City’s Riverside Church, ruefully tells the story of the Evangelical who said. “You could ice skate down the center aisle of any New England church on Sunday morning.” Concedes Coffin: “The warmth of the Evangelicals is all to the good.”

Perhaps partly owing to a shortage of warmth, and even more to a loss of religious authority, the four churches that are the epitome of the cultured Protestant Establishment—United Methodist, United Presbyterian. Episcopal and United Church of Christ (Congregational) —have suffered a net loss of 2.7 million members over the past decade. Conversely, Jimmy Carter’s conservative Southern Baptist Convention has alone gained nearly 2 million and is now the nation’s largest Protestant body (12.9 million).

Many mainstream Christians—particularly those most critical of the values of commercial American society and suspicious about serving God and Mammon together—are troubled by the way in which celebrated Evangelicals blend show biz and salvation. They deplore the star system they tend to foster and the amounts of cash required to maintain what has been referred to as the “country-and-westernization of religion.”

Evangelicalism’s practitioners are quick to defend themselves. Says Jim Bakker, high-pressure preacher of TV’s P.T.L. (for People That Love) Club: “If Johnson Wax didn’t have an identifiable name, how would one know to buy it?” An even bigger star, Billy Graham, mildly invokes the great Evangelicals of the past to defend the jet-setting and electronic gimmickry that have become a part of his calling. “John Wesley had to go on horseback. George Whitefield had to spend all that time crossing the Atlantic 13 times. They used to have to shout at the top of their lungs. I can use a microphone.”

There is a graver criticism of Evangelicals: in concentrating on personal salvation, the convert tends to grow safe in his inner consolation, lapsing into passive acceptance of the evils of the outside world. Critics like Coffin tend to see the resurgence of Evangelicalism as one more sign of a self-preoccupied and self-serving national swing toward conservatism in general. The argument is that the outward-looking reformist ’60s have regressed into the selfish ’70s. The charge has some merit. But there is also much to the Evangelical theory that a man must dramatically change his life and values before he can begin to affect things around him. “We want to change the world,” says Manhattan Evangelist Bill Bray, “but we want to change ourselves first.”

Pursuing that goal. Evangelicals have thriving student groups on many college campuses. Former Democratic Senator Harold Hughes is quietly working with prominent men in Washington, D.C.. while other specialists are spreading the Gospel among scantily clad chorines, prep school students and young intellectuals. During the past decade, while the four mainline Protestant denominations were cutting their foreign missionary staffs by more than half, many Evangelical agencies were expanding. This year 2,200 college students sent cards to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship pledging their lives to overseas work.

Even while they avoided complex social problems. Evangelical missionaries have always cured bodies as well as saved souls. There is a new emphasis, however, on help as a good thing in itself—rather than just as bait to attract converts. The number and variety of Evangelical projects at home are broadening dramatically as ministries bring care as well as conversion to the despairing and needy of America.

“I crawl over broken lives,” says Michael Haynes. describing the walk from his small apartment in the black ghetto of Roxbury. Mass., to the Twelfth Baptist Church, where he has been pastor for 13 years. Haynes was a broken 15-year-old himself when a Roxbury social worker “lassoed my life.” coaxed him back to Christianity and into seminary, and “never let me go until he was sure I could stand on my feet.” Still a tireless community apostle at 50, Haynes returns the favor to as many young people as he can. He also makes certain that his elderly members are picked up and brought to the church three times a week. A black, Haynes served three terms in the Massachusetts house of representatives and is now on the state parole board. Like most black Evangelicals, he has no patience whatever with his white brothers who pay no attention to social justice. Yet he insists on the necessity of personal commitment. During a sermon at a Brockton church last week, Haynes preached: “I don’t know what they mean when they say, ‘Chile, I’ve been goin’ to church since I was a baby.’ You may have a religious style, but it doesn’t make you a Christian.” That, in effect, is what 18th century Revival Preacher Jonathan Edwards used to tell the white folk of Massachusetts.

“My aim,” says the Rev. Paul Moore, 35, minister of midtown Manhattan’s Church of the Nazarene, “is to get the suburban church off its butt to save the cities. The government can’t do it. Only the Gospel can.” His aide, Bill Bray, gives short shrift to the “humanistic programs” run by traditional churches in the slums. As he sees it, they leave out the experience of God: “If I was like that I’d work for the government.”

Moore’s church has bought the once fashionable Lamb’s Club in Manhattan’s theater district and turned it into a multifaceted Gospel center. It houses a residence for young actors and artists, and a restaurant that doubles as a Christian supper club on weekends. (December attractions: a professional puppet show on the Nativity, and converted Folk Singer Noel Paul Stookey, formerly the middleman of Peter, Paul and Mary.) Moore is also trying to establish a helpful beachhead in an asphalt jungle of derelicts, runaways, lost teen-agers and prostitutes, sex parlors and porn shops. Says he: “God isn’t into skywriting. He’s into people coming to the end of themselves and admitting they’re a mess and need help.”

People are also paramount at Pastor Jimmy Allen’s First Baptist Church in fading downtown San Antonio. In the past decade, it has grown from 7,000 to 9,000 members, 1,000 of them Chicanos. Allen, currently the honorific president of the Southern Baptists, combines Bible preaching with 20 ministries to meet every imaginable need. At the Fourth Street Inn restaurant, 55 volunteers offer low-pressure “witnessing” to paying customers and use the profits to offer lunch to anyone who is hungry, no questions asked. Upstairs, counselors are ready to chat. There is also a hostel for the homeless and a street ministry that trains young men to talk with troubled teenagers.

Help for federal convicts is the aim of ex-Lawyer Charles Colson, who served seven months in prison at Maxwell Air Force Base for obstructing justice in connection with the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon-papers case. While he was behind bars, Colson bent rules to help fellow inmates; outside, he has dedicated himself to bringing them the hope of salvation. Brown leather Bible in hand, Colson, 46, now speaks in prisons and organizes week-long inmate seminars. His most dramatic program has brought 107 convicts to Washington for two weeks of Bible study, after which they return to proselytize fellow cons from the inside. In the Memphis penitentiary, two members of Colson’s Prison Fellowship in nine months have persuaded a third of the inmates to begin studying the Bible. “There will always be skepticism about the ‘new’ Charles Colson,” he admits ruefully, “but the Apostle Paul said that one should only care about what God thinks.”

In California, the Berkeley Christian Coalition evolved from a wing of the Jesus Movement revival that dealt with the street people, university students, hitchhikers, political radicals and occultists found nowadays in large college communities. It runs a free university, a youth ranch, a drop-in hostel, a street drama troupe, the sprightly Radix newspaper, and the unique Spiritual Counterfeits Project, which acts as a watchdog on Oriental and occult movements in the U.S. “Our objective,” says S.C.P. Director Brooks Alexander, 41, “is to expose and counter the broad patterns of spiritual deception within our culture.”

Bearded, blue-jeaned and barrel-chested, Alexander pursues his work with a zeal worthy of the Grand Inquisitor. Like his two assistants, he was involved in the hippie movement, then found Jesus and set up a mission in the Haight-Ashbury wilderness. “We told the protesters that they were fundamentally right in their critique of society but that their answers were inadequate.” He was accused of being a fascist, or a pawn of the FBI.

Like Evangelicals generally, Alexander believes in the Second Coming and the end of the world, and he regards humanist faith in progress as naive. Says he: “The most elaborate programs are useless when compared to the simple training of the heart.” He is little impressed by the spectacle of what he calls the “Christ circuses” put on by some other Evangelicals. “This is a grass-roots movement of Christian faith which is riding a reaction to dead churches.”

One of the most spectacular and prosperous of the new centers, however, also grew out of the Jesus Movement: Chuck Smith’s Calvary Church downstate in Costa Mesa, Calif. A liberal writer in Christian Century snaps that the church “churns out ignorance and hysteria,” but in the pulpit Smith is actually a balding Everyman, leading hymns with only modest gestures and offering unvarnished Bible lectures accompanied by a disarmingly broad smile. “People come here because God is explained to them in a way they can understand,” says Smith. They can also understand Christianity in action. Calvary sponsors homes for separated wives and for children having trouble with parents, counseling for parents and vocational training. Smith points to an 85% recovery rate for youths with drug problems “once they find the Lord.” Confirming the claim. Franklin Jones, a psychiatrist who heads the methadone program at nearby Brea Hospital says: “My own program is a failure. I came here because they’re taking kids off heroin cold turkey. What’s more, they stay off.”

In the size and speed of its growth, in the range of needs to which it caters, in the promises and visions it offers, Pastor Smith’s Calvary conglomerate illustrates both the dangers and the opportunities implicit in the success of the Evangelical movement. Smith started Calvary eleven years ago in a tiny chapel in Costa Mesa, with a congregation of 25. Today, transferred to a new 21-acre site, it is a still-growing $1.25 million complex, visited by more than 25,000 worshipers each Sunday. Besides the church, it includes a shopping center, complete with a butcher shop and a jewelry shop, clusters of conference rooms and nurseries. Even so, it is not big enough for the weekly needs of those who want to attend. Twenty-five satellite churches have been set up near by, and Calvary has established outreach ministries in juvenile halls, prisons and foster homes all over Orange County.

For thousands of parishioners — rich, poor and middle class — churchgoing has expanded from a Sunday exercise to a daily involvement. That is true for both pastor and laity, with the traditional gap between the two virtually abolished. Churches like Smith’s serve for more than worship. They are swiftly evolving into a sort of all-purpose substitute for the extended family, for the kind of togetherness aimed at by country communes. They function as an ethical center where lonely and troubled suburban folk seek consolation and guidance about divorce and drugs, crime and the rise in VD incidence — the bitter fruit of certain kinds of American wealth and freedom gone wrong.

Smith is a Bible teacher, not an old-style hellfire and brimstone evangelist or a psychoanalyst. But he knows the traumas and failures of fragmenting society and family life, and the apocalyptic feeling that today assails many Americans. “There is a sense of impending doom in the world. Ecologists tell us this. So does the military. One sees it every day. The current philosophy in our educational system is despair. It has been concluded that there is no universal base for good. Removing all absolute values has left people floating, pessimistic, helpless. Jesus Christ not only established a code of ethics but he gave us the power to live by it. We are giving people back their sense of direction.”

As they have in the past, twin passions lend Evangelicalism both its force and its Amoral ambiguity: apocalyptic fear and the upbeat conviction that society can be rebuilt if men not only know Jesus but act like him in their everyday lives.

Apocalyptic fear tends to lead to a rescue-before-it’s-too-late religion. Identifying with Jesus in everyday life has long been regarded as behavior possible only to saints or crackpots. Yet the notion that religion may help to instill better values in the U.S., after the disappointment bred by the failure of secularism and situation ethics, is not confined to clergymen. Illinois Representative John Anderson, chairman of the House Republican Conference and an Evangelical layman, goes so far as to say that American democracy could collapse without a rebirth of the Founding Fathers’ belief in the “self-evident moral order in the universe.” The accompanying conviction is that the ultimate mission of government is to serve that moral order. Anderson concedes that the “prevailing intellectual climate” is still hostile to the idea of such absolute values.

Yet dissatisfaction with American life and a general decline of faith in science and rationality may be making a religious conception of the world more acceptable than it has been for more than a generation. In the 1940s, recalls Billy Graham, it was “embarrassing to talk about Jesus Christ because science had pretty well told us that it was impossible to believe in God and the Bible.” An increasing number of scientists would now appear to agree with the almost Pascalian argument of Astronomer Robert Jastrow, founder and director of NASA’S Goddard Institute. Since it is impossible to prove whether life on earth was created by the will of some supreme £ creative being, or evolved spontaneously, says Jastrow, the choice either way is “an act of faith.” Even among highly secular folk there is a general disposition to assume, as never before, that if God does not exist it may be necessary for man to reinvent him.

As a potential force for helping regenerate old-fashioned values in America, the Evangelical movement stands in an equivocal position. It is large but not organized, and often fragmented by arguments over matters like the “inerrancy” of the Bible. But the movement is now richer and more powerful than it has been in half a century. Men like Billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, Presbyterian son of H.L. Hunt, are prepared to help it. Hunt is head of Bill Bright’s international executive committee, and considers the stupendous goal of raising $1 billion “absolutely realistic.” Bright’s overall chairman, Baptist Wallace Johnson (the “praying millionaire” of Holiday Inns), travels 20,000 miles a month lining up contributors.

Besides businessmen, the movement has other converts and friends in high places. The most notable: Jimmy Carter, of course, and Oregon’s Senator Mark Hatfield, one of the first Northern politicians to espouse Evangelical values at a time when religion, and that kind of religion particularly, was a distinct political liability except in the South.

Politics and wealth create problems of their own. Respectability and riches do not often lead to serious efforts at social reform. Money also creates image problems for revivalists like Oral Roberts, who thinks his finances are nobody’s business, and Graham, who only this year for the first time decided to file open financial statements for his national program.

Laments Carl F.H. Henry, a distinguished theologian: “Another year has passed in which the movement has registered no notable influence on the formative ideas and ideals of American culture.” There is little Evangelical leverage in the great universities or communications outlets. “How often do you see a born-again Christian portrayed on TV except as some hick?” asks Philip Yancey of Youth for Christ.

Will Evangelicalism simply go on consoling people in the face of alienation and apocalyptic fear, a not inconsiderable mission? Or will it move toward a “Third Great Awakening” that might help to regenerate American life? That is a matter for history to decide. In the history of Evangelicalism itself, there are precedents for both directions.

Evangelicalism is traceable to 17th century Germany and the work of Philipp Jacob Spener, whose “Pietists” rebelled against the formalism and worldliness of the German Lutherans. Like today’s Evangelicalism, the movement initially emphasized personal commitment to Christ and devotional life. But when the “Evangelical Awakening” reached Britain, Methodist John Wesley and his successors virtually revolutionized society. Among the results: orphanages, early child labor laws and the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.

In the New World, a personal, biblical faith was an American characteristic from the start. The early settlers’ fervor was reactivated in the 18th century by Jonathan Edwards and Anglican George Whitefield, America’s first mass revivalist. When Whitefield hit Philadelphia in 1739, Freethinker Ben Franklin figured his open-air congregation at 30,000 and marveled: “It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. It seemed as if all the world were growing religious.” But the social consequences of religious zeal were more dramatic during the “Second Awakening,” which took place more than half a century later. The network of organizations then created became known as the “Evangelical Empire.” Passionate and practical reformist crusading by Lawyer-Preacher Charles G. Finney and his allies helped produce the early feminist movement, the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

After the Civil War, Southern Evangelicalism was battered by defeat and a sense of hopelessness. Much of the Northern wing turned to premillennialism, the belief that Christ’s return was imminent and that society would inevitably get worse before it occurred. By the late 1800s, the great evangelist Dwight L. Moody literally preached a lifeboat ethic: “I look on the world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said, ‘Save all you can.’ ” Biblical conservatives withdrew from activism. Evangelical Historian Timothy Smith describes this as the “Great Reversal,” which persists to the present day. White Evangelical leaders, for example, did little to support civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Senator Hatfield, who was gradually born again in the 1950s while he was teaching at Willamette University, notes that “for years the Evangelical was withdrawn. He looked upon politics as being ‘worldly’ and something to be avoided. Only within the last few years has the Evangelical become politically aware.”

Perhaps as it rejoins the respectable mainstream of Protestantism, success will spoil Evangelicalism. University of Chicago Theologian Martin Marty is put off by the self-indulgent Good Life of the reborn. “You may have to give up some drinking if you are born again, but you will eat well to make up for it. American businessmen are offered justification for their successful lives. Even religious TV comes over like a nightclub, with women in long dresses with decollete.”

Sojourners of Washington, D.C., a radical Evangelical magazine that jousts with the conservative Establishment voice, Christianity Today, extends the worry. “The Evangelical movement,” complains its editor, Jim Wallis, “is presented in terms of what Jesus can do for me. It calls many to believe and few to obedience.” Yet along with the hot-selling books that deal with psychological fulfillment or sexual liberation (within marriage), the movement is producing such challenging studies as Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by another New Evangelical, Ronald Sider of Eastern Baptist Seminary. Sider makes a strong biblical case for a life of self-denial and offers concrete examples of Christians who are trying to live it.

William Sloane Coffin acknowledges: “If you get an Evangelical with a social conscience you’ve got one of God’s true saints.” Saints work miracles and are very rare indeed. Evangelicals make swarms of converts, a good many of whom, as in all religions, do not remain strong in their conviction. Even so, the burgeoning new empire of Evangelicalism has already challenged the more staid religious establishment and set off hopeful echoes in the national spirit.

* Evangelicals form a conservative minority of about one-third of the 36 million Protestants in “mainline” churches belonging to the National Council of Churches. In addition, 33.5 million are distributed among scores of orthodox Protestant groups outside the N.C.C.

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