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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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Page 35
complicated relations with Pentecostals or theological liberals. Reducing theological conservatives to crude sociological categories, Bell, Lipset, and Glazer also ignored the impact of ideas. Apparently, dispensational premillennialism did not even qualify as ideology. This pluralist scholarship reflected the assumptions of the 1950s as well as the legacies of the 1930s. Sharing the prevailing belief that society was growing increasingly secular, Bell, Lipset, and Glazer naturally regarded unfamiliar, fervent religiosity as a sign of reaction.
Curiously, the pluralist view of fundamentalism as a vestigial element in the body politic won wide acceptance among cosmopolitan intellectuals, this during a decade marked by an extraordinary religious revival in which theological conservatives played a prominent part. Instead of fading away, fundamentalism was largely transformed into "evangelicalism," a transformation best symbolized by Billy Graham, still our foremost evangelical. Graham's fundamentalist origins are unmistakable. He had been converted as a youth by Mordecai Ham, attended Bob Jones University and Wheaton College, and was chosen by the aging William Bell Riley to head his Minneapolis religious empire. As late as 1955, Graham criticized
Life
magazine for accepting Darwinism. By the late 1950s, however, the changes looked more significant than the continuities. Graham was not only more polished than Riley or Winrod but also less strident. Though convinced of Jesus' ultimateperhaps imminentreturn, he named no candidates for Antichrist from the list of European statesmen. Minimizing theological differences, Graham shunned anti-Semitism, reached out to Pentecostal preacher Oral Roberts, and never compared the papacy to the biblical whore of Babylon. Wary of a Roman Catholic president, he nonetheless behaved better than theological liberals Norman Vincent Peale and Daniel Poling when John F. Kennedy sought the office in 1960.
In 1957 Graham brought his crusade to New York City, saying that he was prepared to be "crucified" in this capital of cosmopolitanism. The closest thing to a driven nail came from Union Theological Seminary. To neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Graham's pietism, lacking even the minimal realism of the social gospel, offered a "blandness which befits the Eisenhower era." On the other hand, Niebuhr's colleague Henry P. Van Dusen supported Graham's
 
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popularization of the gospel. So did the New York Protestant Council of Churches, which officially sponsored Graham's effort. Indeed, far from being crucified, Graham was lionized by New Yorkers as diverse as Ogden Reid, Henry Luce, Ed Sullivan, and Walter Winchell. The crusade lasted ninety-seven days.
If Professors Bell, Lipset, and Glazer had taken account of Graham's popularity, they might have concurred in Niebuhr's critique but drawn a different moral. Perhaps they would have discerned that bravura radicalism had become a hollow shell even among most Protestant theological conservatives who, along with their worldly counterparts, were dealing with technical problemsorganizing revivals, for exampleinstead of dreaming chiliastic dreams. In short, they probably would have concluded that fervent fundamentalism also could be absorbed into the American religious and political consensus.
They would have been partly and temporarily correct. As Professor William G. McLoughlin wrote, Graham's New York campaign was a broad "pep rally" for Americanism. Yet Graham, Carl Henry of
Christianity Today,
and their fellow moderating evangelicals did not constitute all of the theological right. As Graham attracted national attention while moving toward the religious center, Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist separate Baptist, began to build the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Nor need we look below the Mason-Dixon line for embryonic signs of the second fundamentalist controversy that would erupt in the 1970s. While Graham filled Yankee Stadium, Pat Robertson sat under a Modigliani print in his living room on Staten Island, sipping Courvoisier with his Catholic wife, and searching for the meaning of life he would ultimately find in a politically conservative Pentecostal ministry.
This point deserves emphasis since in some respects the religious and political situations in the late 1980s resembled those of the late 1950s. Once again, Protestant theological conservatives, recently regarded by cosmopolitans as a serious threat to the American way. are losing influence on the national scene. Major spokesmen for the theological and political right have been indicted (Jim Bakker), disgraced (Jimmy Swaggart), defeated (Pat Robertson), or worn down (Jerry Falwell) In this environment, cosmopolitan commentators
 
Page 37
again presume that current social stability will persist indefinitely and predict that noisy fundamentalists are finally fading away. Yet disappearance from the front page of the
New York Times
does not necessarily mean disappearance from American life. And the present embattlement of a grassroots movement does not necessarily preclude future resurgence. Despite many prior obituaries, the culture of theological conservatism has not only survived but has also intermittently thrived by adapting to social circumstances, recruiting fresh adherents, and producing powerful new leaders.
And it may someday thrive again.
 
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3
Revelations: The Future of the New Christian Right
Steve Bruce
This chapter will consider the significance of the new Christian right, summarize its strengths and weaknesses, and speculate on the future of the sort of conservative Protestant politics it represents. One way of framing a picture of the NCR is to consider two words that often appear in explanations of it: revival and reaction (Peele 1984).
Revival or reawakening can be taken in two senses: as referring either to the Christian Church as a whole and thus to an addition of numbers to the body of the saved; or as referring only to the "faithful," thus implying a new sense of vitality. Evangelicals, and people writing about evangelicals, usually use the term to suggest a period of widespread conversion, during which new members are being added to the churches. When used in discussions of the new Christian right, it suggests that the explanation for the movement lies in the increasing popularity of evangelical Protestantism. Many discussions of the NCR begin by placing the movement within the context of the decline of the mainstream Protestant churches and an increase (relative or absolute, depending on the author) in the numbers belonging to evangelical, pentecostal, and fundamentalist churches.
Although there is something in the observation that the rise of the NCR follows the decline in the size and confidence of the main-
 
Page 39
stream churchesand hence is related to the increase in confidence of conservative Protestantsit would be misleading to imply that the politicization of some conservative Protestants was a
natural
consequence of an increase in their numbers. Insofar as any connection can be discerned, it is almost the opposite; the expansion of the milieu has been accompanied by the reduction of its distinctiveness and hence of its grounds for a distinctive politics. As the claim to be "born again" has become more popular and respectable, the amount of behavioral change, of asceticism, associated with that state has been reduced. As Quebedeux signaled in the title of his book,
The Worldly Evangelicals
(1978), the gradual reduction of the amount of world-rejection involved in "getting saved"which John Wesley observed in his upwardly mobile followersis being repeated among American evangelicals. Hunter's 1987 study of young evangelicals shows a small but crucial change in attitudes; a relaxation in their own standards has been accompanied by an increasing unwillingness to condemn out of hand those who differ from them: Some of the certainty has gone and in its place there is an element of recognition of sociomoral pluralism. Although young evangelicals still have a strong sense of what is right for them, they no longer seem so sure that what is right for them is also right for everyone else.
There is a slight problem in interpreting these data. It might be that the expansion of conservative Protestantism has produced some relaxation at the peripheries because people who have always been conservative Protestants are less willing to forgo the pleasures their increasing prosperity is now making available to them.
1
Alternatively, it could be that the expansion has meant the incorporation of newcomers who wish some of the rewards of being born again without making what were previously mandatory sacrifices. Either way, the increasing self-confidence of conservative Protestantism has been accompanied by a relaxation of standards. This incipient pluralism and moderation offsets much of the advantage of self-confidence. Conservative Protestants may have had their morale boosted by having Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist lay preacher, as president, but he acted like a liberal.
The point will be pursued shortly but here it is enough to say that the simple connection of conservative Protestant revival and in-
 
Page 40
creased politicization assumes too monolithic a view of conservative Protestantism. A good part of conservative Protestant growth is associated with decline in the conservative elements.
The term ''reaction" is often used for two distinct purposes. Sometimes it identifies a general shift to the right in American politics; sometimes it identifies the NCR as a reaction on the part of a particular section of the American people. Taking the first possibility, the political mobilization of some conservative Protestants is seen as simply one element of a general shift to the right in American politics and culture. In this scenario, Nixon's rout of McGovern, and Reagan's victories in 1980 and 1984 are evidence of a general move away from the liberalism of the Kennedy era and Johnson's Great Society; and the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 is the exception explained by Nixon's Watergate disgrace. The idea that America has shifted to the right is one that has widespread currency, even among liberals. Especially since 1980, a significant number of younger Democratic politicians have seen it as their task to reconstruct the party to accommodate this new conservative mood.
There is actually little clear evidence for a general and significant shift to the right. In a lengthy analysis, Ferguson and Rogers (1986) persuasively argue that opinion poll data from the 1960s to the present show little evidence for a rightward shift in public thinking. For example, on attitudes toward business, support for government regulation of company profits actually
increased
between 1969 and 1979. The percentage of people thinking that business as a whole was making "too much profit" rose from 38 percent to 51 percent.
Over the period 1971 to 1979 the percentage thinking that "government should put a limit on the profits companies can make" nearly doubled, rising from 33 to 60 percent. . . . As the rollback in regulation and cutbacks in domestic spending became evident during Reagan's first term, the public increased its support for regulatory and social programs. (Ferguson and Rogers 1986:4445)
Nor is there any great evidence of a move to the right on sociomoral issues. An ABC poll found that support for abortion on demand, no matter what the reason, had increased from 40 percent in 1981 to 51 percent in 1985, while the percentage opposed to abortion on demand had gone down from 59 percent to 46 percent. On the issue of affirma-
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