An Evangelical Identity Crisis

Others who say they're disillusioned that the power they entrusted to the religious right has produced so few results prefer a break from politics--as former Bush aide David Kuo puts it, "a fast." "You can't find a values leader out there that is not disappointed, discouraged," says Richard Viguerie, who was one of the architects of the Moral Majority, a forerunner of the religious right.

In his Encyclopedia of Evangelical-ism, Randall Balmer defines evangelicals, broadly, as Protestants who emphasize conversion and who are characterized by "a suspicion of wealth, worldliness and ecclesiastical pretension." By that definition, Jonathan Edwards and the other characters in the First--and Second--Great Awakenings were evangelicals, as were many of the great political activists of the 19th century: the abolitionists, the suffragists, the advocates for prison reform.

In the early part of the 20th century, a movement called "fundamentalism" grew out of a series of pamphlets published by conservative Protestants to counter what they saw as creeping modern secularism. These pamphlets, called The Fundamentals, emphasized Biblical truth--what we call "literalism." The Virgin Birth was authentically true, they said, as were the Resurrection, the accounts of Jesus' miracles and the Creation story in Genesis.

Not every believer took the same literalist line. In 1922, a sermon by an urbane Baptist preacher in New York City named Harry Emerson Fosdick separated the world into fundamentalists and other Protestants. Fundamentalists were opposed to change, history and progress, he said; the challenge for everyone else was to embrace it.

Three years later, in faraway Dayton, Tenn., the fundamentalist prop-osition was put to a very pub-lic test when the American Civil Liberties Union hired an unremarkable science teacher named John Scopes to teach the theory of evolution in a public school. Scopes was arrested, and the ACLU hired Clarence Darrow to defend him. The fundamentalists hired none other than the great populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Darrow routed Bryan; beaten, the fundamentalists went back to their homes and their Bibles.

The defeat raised an important issue: who is an insider, who is an outsider? After Scopes, evangelicals felt a chill from America's elites--and the culture warmed only slowly, over the middle decades of the century, as Billy Graham rose to prominence. He understood the seductiveness of a simple, populist message. Confess your sins, come to Jesus and be saved. By definition, politics divides; let others worry about campaigns and legislation and petitions.