Reflection on The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances Fitzgerald

               This is a book about white evangelical movements, mainly as a way to understand the modern Christian right wing of American politics. It was a really deep look into movements I had not yet understood and still need to learn more about. This post is a little disorganized but basically I tried to answer a few critical questions. There is A LOT to learn about Evangelicals but I think the best way to sum it up is that they are a critical part of the United States’ history and their teachings are always in a state of evolution. I gained a new appreciation and respect for Evangelical people and Evangelical thought.

Who were the early Protestants in the United States?

               The earliest Protestant evangelicals existed and spread their teachings well before the United States existed. They were Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, the most prominent of the first generation of preachers to cross colony lines and united the colonies on something larger, in this case, the evangelical denominations, meaning those who evangelize, seeking out new converts. They were the Baptists, the Methodists, and Presbyterians.

               Edwards began by telling people what they already believed, which was that they were sinners and needed to repent. However, he did so in a more dramatic and intense language that had ever been used before. In addition, he taught something new- that instead of “renewing covenant” and preaching obedience to ministers, Edwards taught that each person can have an individual relationship with God and that Christ would receive all who received his teachings and grace. This revival, where most had been short-lived, lasted for years and years all over New England, challenging the dominance of the older “Congregationalist” Puritan churches. It was also more emotional. Edwards write that true religion required “A sense of the heart.” With the arrival of Englishman George Whitefield in 1739, the revivals spread through all the other colonies too. Whitefield was an itinerant preacher, who went sailing all over the eastern seaboard, spreading similar messages to all the colonies.

               These early American Protestant denominations refused to pay taxes arguing liberty of conscience. They practiced civil disobedience and their struggle would form the basis of the religious exemption to income taxes in the United States as well as the separation of church and state. These upstart denominations spread easily in the New World because the Anglican Church AKA The Church of England sent few ordained priests to massive parishes and therefore did not meet the spiritual needs of the new Americans. By 1776, there were twice as many evangelicals in the South as there were Anglicans, a religious split occurring before the political split. The First Great Awakening continued until the American Revolution and penetrated all levels of society with new, individualistic Christianity that upset established churches.

               The Second Great Awakening had an even bigger impact and came out of western states like Kentucky and Tennessee at the turn of the century. This is when the Methodists had their biggest impact, building a hierarchy of church officials, but recruiting laymen with grade-school education to minister as well. The Baptists however, spent the Second Great Awakening building the opposite structure, a confederation of independent churches that would split and form together based on doctrinal differences or the need to create a larger, more powerful organization. The Presbyterians began to fracture on the frontier as they proselytized further. In 1831, the farmer William Miller predicted that the end of the world would come in 1844- when it didn’t, those who still had faith formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Upstate New York was a fertile religious breeding ground, the most famous of its productions being the Mormons who would move west to what is now Utah. By 1850, over 33% of religious adherents were Methodists, 20% were Baptists, and 12% were Presbyterians.  Evangelicals made up the majority of the country’s religious practitioners.

When did Northern and Southern churches split?

               The issue of slavery was the cause of the splits in different churches in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1844, the Methodist General Conference excommunicated a Southern Bishop who had slaves and the Baptist General Convention declared it would not instate any missionary not committed to emancipation. That same year, southern Methodists and Baptists broke off to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Southern Baptist Convention. This led to southern evangelicals advocating much more for slavery based on racial inequality and from cherry-picked bible quotes.

How did evangelicalism evolve in the 20^th century?

               It had seemed to many that fundamentalism was done for after the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 that fundamentalism was dead, but while educated people certainly thought so, fundamentalism grew through the radio and tent revivals all over the country, yet even at this time, literalism was derided as an exaggeration made by secular folks. It was considered perfectly acceptable in fundamentalist circles that the Bible be read metaphorically. After World War Two, Americans “poured into churches and synagogues” as they started families and chose to raise their children in religious teachings. This was when the fundamentalist Billy Graham began to resuscitate an old word, “evangelical,” to describe his movement. It defined itself as, to quote author Frances Fitzgerald, “a conservative Protestant who had been ‘born again.’” The fundamentalists would become a subset of Evangelicals and both would become a powerful socially conservative movement in the late 20^th century. 

               Early in the 20^th century, another movement formed out of the South and Southwest “among the poor, black and white,” called Pentecostalism. The author writes that “their distinctive belied was that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, like speaking in tongues, prophesying, and healing, were available to believers today as they were to the apostles at Pentecost.” The Pentecost, by the way, refers to the descent of the Holy Spirit to meet the apostles after Jesus’s “Ascension.” They became a very influential movement, spreading a far as Latin America. They would be included in the Evangelical “tent” by the end of the millennium.

               These varying denominations began, by the end of the 1970’s, to form confederations of interests that combined to push social issues in Congress. They were helped by Billy Graham, who was uniting the northern and southern conservative Protestants and Oral Roberts, who was spreading Pentecostalism. Pentecostal thought spread to Latin America rapidly and by the 1980s there were more Pentecostals in Latin America than the United States. By 1979 19% of all American adults identified themselves as Pentecostals or charismatics, “though only 4 percent spoke in tongues.” Charismatics are known for having an ecstatic religious experience, speaking in tongues, and healing.

               The evangelicals did not oppose abortion laws in principle, and during the 1960s the Southern Baptists supported the liberalization of state laws against it. In 1968, a symposium of prominent evangelical physicians and theologians wrote that personhood began at birth. However, in the 1970s, Christian conservatives organized and were energized like never before. Jerry Falwell’s wife, Beverly, founded the Concerned Women for America, an antifeminist organization organized in prayer circles of seven and prayer chains of fifty that asked its members to send a small number of letters, a small amount of money, and a small amount of phone calls every year. It was an excellent grassroots organization.

               Thanks to this level of organization, Christian conservatives gained a huge level of influence in the Republican party, but were disappointed when their influence failed to transform into meaningful policy (with the exception of the Defense of Marriage Act). At some point in the 2000 election, leaders abandoned the fight for a constitutional amendment against abortion and struggled to fight against gay marriage, which would become legal in 2013. The movement foundered in George Bush’s second term and it became Bush, rather than any pastor, who was the leader of the movement. In the 21^st century the Democratic Party sought to increase the relevance of the Christian left, holding several “faith panels” and “faith caucuses” at the 2008 convention. They made little headway with white Christian conservatives but showed a new willingness to attract religious voters.

Who are today’s major evangelical players?

               The author writes that Billy Graham was “the first truly national revivalist since George Whitefield,” who was active 200 years earlier. He helped to forge a religious alliance against Communism and his greatest achievement was the founding of the “evangelical” ideology, combining conservative white Protestants from the North and the South for the first time since the split in 1844. Graham talked about nations as instruments of God and Satan, introducing the idea that Communism was a tool of Satan. He would often make conditional statements about the end of the world but never committed fully to them. He influenced Eisenhower, as the president added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and adopted the slogan “In God We Trust.” He earned few converts but united and consolidated conservative white Protestants in a way never done before. Graham struggled with segregation, sometimes integrating his sermons and sometimes not, but generally following the prevailing laws of wherever he preached, and never allowing segregation again at his events after  Brown v. Board.

               Oral Roberts was a major Pentecostalist preacher who became very popular in the 1950’s, using radio and TV stations he owned to spread his sermons. He realized that the most reliable funds came from direct mail solicitations and from the mid-1950s onward he emphasized prosperity teaching and evangelism, rather than healing people and laying hands on them to cure sicknesses and disabilities. Instead he would send “deliverance cloths” with a suggested donation, and promised “spiritual, physical, and financial” rewards to his flock.

               Jerry Falwell began the Old Time Gospel Hour at 22 years old in 1956 and would eventually build his church of just 35 members into a mega-church. He would also found Liberty University in 1971 as a place of higher learning for conservative Christians. However, he is probably most famous for founding the “Moral Majority,” an influential lobbying group, in the late 1970s, that was the first major effort of evangelicals to be recognized as a political force. Falwell was able to galvanize the Christian right against Jimmy Carter’s attempt to deny Christian schools tax-exempt status due to their segregationist practices.

               Pat Robertson was a Southern Baptist and a charismatic and characterized a new generation of religious leaders who defied the old boundaries and preached an inerrant bible. They generally came from the South and Southwest. Where Falwell had just made a TV show, Robertson created the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), reaching thirty million households via satellite by 1985.

               Rick Warren gained renown as the answer to the Christian right as a left-wing evangelical, giving the invocation at Obama’s inauguration and supporting the fight against climate change as an issue of biblical proportions. He also spoke out against poverty as a Christian issue, claiming that conservative opposition to welfare programs was wrong.

Conclusion

               The Evangelicals became a powerful conservative force in the late 20^th century and maintain that power today. Their roots are truly at the heart of America and the movement, despite being conservative, is constantly changing. Today, as a result of their close alliance with the Republican Party, it seems that they’ve lost influence, their alliance backfiring to turn them into solely a faction of the Republicans. The Republicans have absorbed them to the point where the biggest Christian leaders are Republican office holders.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Horace Bushnell- Argued that “words are not thoughts.” He was against literalism and felt that the words that represent love, sin, salvation, and justice are extremely fluid and that changing times change definitions.
• For most of American history through the nineteenth century, the clergy had headed universities. However, in the 1890’s, religion was relegated to “Divinity Schools,” and thanks to standards of objectivity, universities were secularized.