A Contest Between Different Kinds of Christians

The Civil Rights Movement and the Moral Majority, bookends of a turning point in American and American church history, was a contest between two kinds of Christians. African American liberal/progressive social justice Christians vs. white conservative revival-based Christians. I lived through both of these, and I believe the Reagan era led evangelicalism off the rails. We are looking at the final two chps of Elesha Coffman, Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith. Buy the book and create some adult classes on it.

Segregation was deep and wide in Birmingham. A bomb in 1963 in a Birmingham church. Volunteers helping people to vote were kidnapped and killed; Malcolm X was assassinated in NYC; protesters were teargassed and beaten. Watts riots in LA. Martin Luther assassinated in 1968. Black activism for justice and equality was met by white “activism” against Blacks registering to vote and finding equality, justice, and freedom. Both claimed Christianity.

Coffman looks at the issues through the stories of the tenacious Fred Shuttlesworth. Whites argued for civility, but as Coffman notes, “The word ‘civil’ in civil rights meant legal, government-granted, but civility also encompasses notions of deference, decorousness, and propriety.”  In that era we stare America’s original sin in the face. African Americans were forming coalitions, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Ella Baker was behind it organizing it; she thought it was “stodgy and sexist.” Contrasting visions for justice formed. Freedom rides and marches. Many from across the States joined in.

George Wallace, governor of Alabama: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Bob Jones Sr joined that side. As Carolyn Renée Dupont concluded, it was about white power and white supremacy, and integration was heinous. ML King Jr (MLK) started Project C, for Confrontation in order to “prick the conscience” of America – Birmingham would be overloaded with protesters against segregation and racism. Boycotts, sit-ins, footdraggings … whatever it took. White moderates stood by, pleading for and acting with civility.

The march on Washington DC. The back and forths, the bomb in Birmingham, more back and forths. JFK worked on the Civil Rights Act, LBJ was in when it passed in 1964, and in 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed.

The turning point of the Birmingham bombing created a fork in the road: it bent civil rights toward justice but also influenced the two-party system in the USA. Churches and Christians took sides: for or against social justice for American’s African Americans. Civility held hand with law-and-order (Aaron Griffith), and moderates stayed out of the fray. Evangelicalism would never be the same because, as the Reagan era would show, it became politicized.

Hope for a greater common good was generated by Jimmy Carter and the Year of the Evangelicals. Gerald Ford laid claim to some evangelical credentials too, and was endorsed by W.A. Criswell in Dallas’s megachurch. Evangelicals became not only a defined category but they became influential.

Through James Kennedy, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson. Gallup defined them all, and “born again” was the marker, along with Bible reading and witnessing to others. Carter won, evangelicals were wary, and when he ran again in 1980 he faced Reagan, to whom evangelicals were attracted. Southern Democrats flocked to Reagan; so did Catholics (who have a robust social justice theology). Coffman, who knows the mainlines very well (see her book The Christian Century), probes various explanations of why the Religious Right and the Moral Majority formed, and why conservatives have become so aligned with the Republican Party. Those three names above matter, but so does Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry, who were at the helm of Christianity Today. Reagan fed the hopes of a return to a bygone “Christian America.”

Tie in dispensationalism’s apocalyptic eschatology along with its ties to white, conservative politics and links to the State of Israel … and Reagan is smiling at you. Coffman opens the door to our seeing Pat and Shirley Boone and Roy Rogers.

The nation was splitting apart, and Christian views were energetic on both sides.

Southern Baptists played a role and increasingly identified themselves with evangelicalism (and not just being Southern Baptists) and that brought in another wave of conservative politics. Evangelicalism became Republican. ERA and Title IX gave power to feminism, and that concerned Adrian Rogers, president of the SBC. O my, this will lead to Beth Barr’s important book and the one she’s writing now, and to Isaac Sharp’s too. Wayne Grudem was a significant voice in all this, and my recollection is that anti ERA energized him.

Roman Catholics were part of this resurgence, but their own Phyllis Schlafly helped the ERA from becoming law. Feminists, she said, were plotting against the nation.

Abortion entered the scene as well, and it became a symbolic totem for declaring where one stood in the religio-political spectrum.

She’s right: Christian Smith’s title of his 1998 book, Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving describes evangelicalism since the 1980s. She’s also right that evangelicalism’s claims to be persecuted are offset because there is plenty of offense played by the movement. Thriving has its critics too, including Mark Noll, Ron Sider, and Michael Emerson. Ryan Burge has recently concluded that evangelicalism is more shaped by its politics than its faith, and Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead. Oy. Add the sexual abuse cases, and megachurch pastor fails, and the rise of the “Nones”… and thriving sounds more than hollow.

What is very noticeable to me is how few African Americans show up in the discussion of America’s evangelicals since Reagan.

Turning point, indeed.