American Evangelicalism: New Leaders, New Faces, New Issues

June 30, 2008

Leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2008 for the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite,¹ described how, in the three years of his extensive research, he made surprising discoveries about the true power brokers and centers of power in American evangelicalism. He also found that the deep divisions in this movement are not between the political left and right, nor between young and old, but between "cosmopolitan" and "populist" evangelicals. Lindsay discussed the implications for this election year as well as the future of the evangelical movement. David Kirkpatrick, Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, added some history about "old-school" evangelicalism and ways of categorizing the changes that are occurring within the American evangelical movement.

Speaker:
D. Michael Lindsay, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rice University

Respondent:
David Kirkpatrick, Washington Correspondent, The New York Times

Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

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In the following edited excerpt, ellipses have been eliminated to facilitate reading.

MICHAEL LINDSAY: I started thinking about evangelicals in the late '90s. I was working for the Gallup Organization as a consultant for religion and culture. In the run-up to the 2000 election, some folks in this room -- and some of your colleagues -- would call me and say, Michael, I need the data from Gallup on the percentage of evangelicals in America. George W. Bush was running in the race, and everybody was interested. The assumption was that there are a lot more evangelicals in America today than there were in '76 when Jimmy Carter ran for office. And then I'd have to go through a long spiel to explain that, depending on how you measure it, evangelicals constitute somewhere between 7% and 47% of the adult population. That's a pretty wide margin there, but most people who study it think it's probably around a quarter to a third of the adult population. And the intriguing thing is that the percentages have not really changed over the last 30 years.

Well, that gets us scratching our heads. There certainly seem to be a lot more evangelicals. They're certainly more public in lots of different areas. We hear about them in politics; we hear about them in Hollywood. What's bringing about the change? My hunch was that a group of leaders, people in national positions leading major social institutions in this country, were self-identifying as evangelical. Either they had become evangelical on the rise to the top, or they had been evangelical and somehow they had navigated their way into powerful positions. And so I set out to try and study them.

So I did 360 face-to-face interviews, spent three years doing the research, traveled to 72 different research sites, logged about 300,000 miles and collected about 5,000 pages worth of transcript data. For every one hour of interview I did, I did about eight hours of background research to try and learn the individual stories. What I'll share with you this morning are eight fallacies I had walking into the project that in the end proved to be completely wrong.

Elastic Orthodoxy

First, I assumed that evangelicals had succeeded in politics because they had been united, and that unity had been the way that evangelicals have become an important factor in the Republican Party. In reality, I found that evangelicals, not surprisingly, are divided across the political spectrum and that those divisions are quite significant. Jim Wallis,² the head of Sojourners, and James Dobson,³ the head of Focus on the Family, really see the world in very different ways. That left-right divide within American evangelicalism is a very significant fracture and oftentimes results in very tense relationships -- even among folks who go to the very same church. People who are in the same Bible study or fellowship group oftentimes cannot talk about elections because it's something that is quite divisive.

I knew that that existed, but I did not realize that within the same White House you could actually have significant division. For example, one of the persons I interviewed for the project was C. Everett Koop (surgeon general under President Reagan).⁴ He told me about how in 1986 he became increasingly convinced that AIDS ought to be treated as a public health crisis. Now, when Koop was nominated in 1981, many evangelicals were very excited about this. He was a symbolic appointment; and although he didn't have experience in public health, he was a world-class surgeon at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He eventually got confirmed, even though the public health community was not very excited. But evangelicals were thrilled, and for five years he had a very good relationship with the evangelical community.

Then in 1986 he began to say the White House ought to treat AIDS as a real public-health concern. But remember, in 1986, most evangelicals saw AIDS as God's punishment against a homosexual lifestyle. One who held that position was Gary Bauer;⁵ he was serving as President Reagan's domestic policy advisor. In a matter of a few months, Bauer and Koop began to lock horns. Koop would try and get a meeting with the president; Gary Bauer's staff would get the meeting removed. And in fact, when I did the interview with Dr. Koop -- he has an institute up at Dartmouth now -- he didn't have very nice things to say about Gary Bauer. There are these tensions -- and they last.

And so, unity is not what has given evangelicals success in politics. No, the reason why evangelicals have succeeded in politics is because they fundamentally believe something is wrong with the world and they can help set it aright. This gives a fire in their belly that motivates them not just to be active in politics but also to be involved in a whole range of activity. It sustains them through political defeats.

Evangelicals embody what I call "elastic orthodoxy." For a movement to succeed, you have to have some measure of unity; that, for evangelicals, is a core set of shared beliefs that are religious. Most evangelicals believe the same things about God, the Bible, heaven and hell, and who gets there. That provides a sense of cohesion for the movement. The other thing, though, that makes evangelicals unique is that they have an elasticity to this orthodoxy so that they can build bridges in very interesting and creative ways, so they have been able to build alliances with a whole range of different religious groups and with secular groups as well.

The difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists is how they respond to secular society. A fundamentalist comes into contact with secular society and his or her natural inclination is to pull back, to withdraw, to maintain the integrity of his or her faith. Evangelicals, on the other hand, encounter secular society and their natural inclination is to engage it because they're wanting to win it over. Now, it doesn't mean that they're losing their faith. Books have been written about how evangelicals are becoming more secular; they're losing their distinctiveness. I think you can certainly say that [with regard to] commitment to organized religion or a couple of other things that we'll talk about; but in terms of core beliefs, evangelicals that I interview today look very, very similar to previous generations of evangelicals. The core beliefs have not changed.

The 1998 Apex

The second fallacy that I walked into the project with is that I assumed that 2004 was the apex, the pinnacle of evangelical influence in American politics. And I agree with Michael Gerson that it certainly did demonstrate how evangelicals were able to be a very significant force in a presidential election; but many people that I interviewed talked about how very often they voted their person into office and got nothing to show for it. And many evangelicals -- although they had very positive things to say about the president personally -- didn't feel like that he had delivered as much as they wanted.

When have been moments where evangelicals have succeeded on the policy front? I'd have to say 1998 is incredibly important. In 1998, evangelicals led a broad coalition of different religious groups to lead the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, a significant development because it said that religious freedom is a basic human right and that it ought to be a fundamental part of American foreign policy. It set up an independent commission that investigates concerns about religious liberty around the world and issues an annual report through the State Department. It established an ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, and is probably, in my opinion, the most significant piece of legislation that has been enacted that deals with religious issues over the last quarter century. And evangelicals were at the heart of a broad coalition that brought that about.

Big Personalities, Not King-Makers

The third fallacy I walked into the project with was that there was select group of evangelical movement leaders who functioned as king-makers within the Republican Party. Folks like James Dobson or Chuck Colson had enough clout because evangelicals are the largest, single element of the Republican constituency. What I learned is that evangelicalism is a movement dominated by big personalities, but based upon the interviews that I conducted with cabinet secretaries, senior White House officials, heads of federal bureaus and agencies, I can tell you that these evangelicals movement leaders are important constituents to keep in the fold, but they certainly do not have make-or-break status within the Republican Party -- not at all. In fact, many times there are very deep tensions.

One of the persons that I interviewed for the project was Dick Armey [who] served as majority leader of the House in the late '90s. He's no longer in politics, so Armey can say pretty much whatever he thinks, and he gives really great interviews. I had heard that after the Republican revolution in 1994, evangelical movement leaders would meet with Republican leadership in Washington five or six times a year. As the years went by, these meetings became increasingly acrimonious. In one particular meeting, things really hit a flashpoint. Majority Leader Armey was recounting the story and said, "I said to James Dobson," quote, 'You don't know how the legislative process works. All you want to do is come up here whining and complaining about the failures we've experienced when you really ought to mind your own business.'" Then Armey turns to me and says, "You know, there's a song by the Pointer Sisters, 'Mr. big shot, who do you think you are?'⁶ Also, there was this little wimpy guy that ran for president, Gary Bauer, and he's one of these arrogant guys that was telling me about how he made me the majority. Well, Shania Twain says, 'That Don't Impress Me Much.'" So, very deep tensions occur.

Now, what role do evangelicals have in setting up Republican power structures? Well, Republicans are keenly concerned not to have a repeat in 2008 of what they saw happen in 1996. In 1996, most evangelicals were not necessarily excited by the presidential candidacy of Bob Dole. Some movement leaders spoke out against him, saying that he wasn't conservative enough; he didn't hold to some of their core convictions. So in many ways, evangelicals were not a force to be reckoned with in the 1996 election. And Republicans are concerned about that with a moderate candidate like John McCain.

The big questions in 2008 -- there's two: Will there be a slim segment of the evangelical population that could, in fact, go for a Democratic candidate? Senators Obama and Clinton have certainly done more outreach and have been more outspoken about signaling their faith than any candidate since Jimmy Carter on the Democratic side. And so in tight races in Missouri and in Pennsylvania, it very well could be that they're able to shave off some of that support, and that could be quite significant. The other very significant question, though, is will evangelicals, by and large, stay home when John McCain is a candidate? Because if they're not mobilized behind him, it could indeed be a repeat of 1996.

The Cosmopolitan/Populist Divide

Fourth, I assumed that centers of evangelical power, like Wheaton, Ill. and Colorado Springs, Colo. were the central places, the sites of evangelical power. When in fact, the evangelical power brokers are where the rest of the power brokers for American society are. They are in New York, in Washington, and in L.A.

There are very significant divisions within the evangelical movement. Most people who have studied evangelicalism recognize this. They say, well, it's divided between the political left and political right, or it's divided between the ages: you've got the older generation and the younger generation. But as I did the research, none of those really held up. You know, Jim Dobson and Jim Wallis used the exact same strategies to mobilize their base. They come to different outcomes but they look very, very similar. And I also learned that it wasn't a pure generational divide. What I encountered was that there were people in the study who tried to sort of distance themselves.

One of the questions that I asked the leaders was, "Tell me some of the books that you've read that have been really important in your life" -- a seemingly innocuous question. People would say, well, I've read C.S. Lewis, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer,⁷ or some other things. And then, after I'd done about a dozen interviews, one person, said, "But I'll tell you, I have never read one of those Left Behind⁸ books." And I thought, well, that's kind of interesting; I didn't ask you what you didn't read. And then I did another couple of interviews and somebody else said, "Now, that Tim LaHaye, that whole Left Behind, that's not for me; that's not my kind of reading." And then somebody said to me, "And you know, I not only don't read that Left Behind, but also I would never hang a Thomas Kinkade⁹ painting in my home."

And I began to realize that there is a whole segment of the evangelical movement --many of those folks who are in the elite -- who were trying to distinguish themselves from the rest of the evangelical subculture. And so I began to think more about this and pay more attention to it. And the real divide, in my opinion, in evangelicalism is not between the left and the right; it's not between the young and the old. It is between a group that I call the "cosmopolitan" evangelicals and "populist" evangelicals. And these are very, very significant divisions.

You see, populist evangelicals are what we oftentimes think about evangelicals. These are the folks who are culture warriors, who say that they want to take back the country for their faith. They see themselves as embattled against secular society. They are very much concerned that they are in a minority position, and they've got to somehow use very strong-arm tactics to win the day. That populist evangelicalism is alive and strong, especially in the evangelical subculture: the music, the publishing, the entertainment segment of the evangelical subculture. But there is a whole other segment.

[But] the people who I interviewed, by and large, fit more this cosmopolitan outlook. They are less interested in taking back the country for their faith. They really are more interested in their faith being seen as authentic, reasonable, and winsome. So they still have an evangelistic impulse, but their whole modus operandi looks quite different. Because of that they have different ultimate goals. They want to have a seat at the table, to be seen as legitimate. They are concerned about what The New York Times or Time magazine thinks about evangelicals because they [the cosmopolitan evangelicals] are concerned about cultural elites. Legitimacy is actually more important to them than necessarily taking back the country.

Within that cosmopolitan element a whole new set of faces have emerged within the evangelical movement. Let me just mention five or six interesting people to consider. Most of evangelicalism does tend to still embrace a traditionalist understanding about gender relations, but that's changing. Cherie Harder, for example, was recently named the president of the Trinity Forum, a group of folks who provide support and continuing education programs for many of the cosmopolitan evangelicals that I interviewed. Cherie is a very dynamic woman -- served most recently in the first lady's office. She has been in government for a long time, is Harvard educated, very bright and very sharp. She happens to be a cosmopolitan evangelical. Or Catherine Rohr, an investment banker who has founded an organization called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. It is designed to help folks transitioning out of prison learn entrepreneurial skills. She's one of the featured speakers this year at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, the largest leadership conference for evangelical pastors held every August.

Or think about Latinos: Luis Palau, Argentine-born evangelical based out of Portland, Oregon. You don't think of Portland as a hub of evangelical activity all that often, but there's Luis. And he sponsors citywide events called festivals that draw even more people than the Billy Graham Crusades do -- quite significant.

Or the rise of Asian-Americans. Here's an interesting tidbit: Twenty years ago, the Campus Crusade for Christ chapter at Yale University, one of the leading evangelical campus ministries, was 100% white. Today it's 90% Asian-American. This dramatic growth in the percentage of Asians at elite college campuses paralleled the rise of evangelical influence on these elite college campuses. Dan Cho is the executive director of something called the Veritas Forum; it sponsors conversations, debates, engagements on leading college campuses where the reasonableness of evangelical Christianity is discussed -- not in an angry, red-faced manner, but actually quite cosmopolitan in its outlook.

Who is the most celebrated evangelical today? Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is an outspoken theistic evolutionist. And that's significant because the close identification of evangelicals with either traditional creationism or intelligent design is actually going to be giving way, I think, to a whole new generation of theistic evolutionists. Who are some of the new political figures? Well, I really do think that the whole Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson generation is being replaced by a whole new face. And who best personifies that than Mike Huckabee? Huckabee is more telegenic than Falwell; he's more measured than Robertson; he's more winsome than Dobson. And he has the ability to appeal to both the populist and the cosmopolitan evangelical crowds.

A whole range of other scholars have found that actually, in the United States, cultural capital is revealed by having an omnivorous approach to cultural artifacts. You not only have to like the opera and the symphony; you also have to like jazz and hip hop. That's exactly the case for political figures. You have to be able to have a very interesting conversation with nuclear physicists at 12 o'clock and at 2 o'clock be bowling with the folks down the street. You have to be able to walk in these two arenas, and Huckabee actually can do that.

Still Faithful Republicans

Fifth, I assumed that the new issues, the new political issues that were developing across the evangelical political landscape necessarily signaled a party realignment [with] especially younger generations moving more and more into the Democratic Party. The data actually just does not support that. Evangelicals still are center right, and they are among the most loyal of Republicans. In 1992, for President George H.W. Bush, at the very end of his campaign, most Republicans were leaving him left and right -- but not the evangelicals. They were among his most loyal constituency until the very end. And he wasn't even necessarily one who they identified with, but they were incredibly loyal.

Also, I think we have to recognize that there are very interesting ways in which parties can change. Think about the issue of AIDS. In 1983, most evangelicals thought of AIDS as God's punishment for a homosexual lifestyle. Fast-forward 20 years. By using a whole variety of modes of reasoning (some of which included religious reasoning), Michael Gerson and others are able to persuade the president to allocate $15 billion for AIDS relief in Africa. Now, the fact that the evangelical community not only thought that that was legitimate but actually embraced the idea -- and have seen now AIDS is one of their celebrated causes -- shows just how fast a movement can change its political direction without changing its party affiliation.

It's true that the Democrats today -- Senators Obama and Clinton -- are more open and than ever toward evangelicals. But remember this: the Focus on the Family mailing list is 10 times the size of the Sojourners' mailing list. It's still a difference of size and scope. I do think that some issues are emerging. I think that the faith-based environmentalism called Creation Care¹⁰ is going to be increasingly important. I also see issues like abortion not going away at all. Is it possible for Obama or Clinton to say things that could somehow win over some evangelicals? It comes down to: are they willing to say that abortion is not just a tragic choice but one that we want to try and reduce the incidence of -- and propose some policies that might do that?

I think there are some issues that people assume will be huge elements that I think are going to go away: same-sex unions, for example. I don't think evangelicals 20 years from now will be raising concerns about it. This is one of the issues where you do see very significant generational divides. Older evangelicals are very opposed to it; younger evangelicals are not. And in this way, it mirrors the rest of the country.

Focus on Foreign Policy

The sixth fallacy I had is that if we have to look at how religion fits into politics, it is most centrally about domestic issues, when in fact the real interesting story, is foreign affairs. Fifty years ago, evangelicals were vehemently opposed to foreign aid, to interventionism. In fact, some of the strongest opposition that President Woodrow Wilson received for some of his policies when he was in office was from fellow conservative Christians. The major turnaround that evangelicals have made on issues about foreign aid and foreign investment is quite significant.

Today, for example, evangelicals are very high on USAID and the State Department. Why is this? Well, over the last 20 years, we have witnessed a de-professionalization of foreign missions. Fifty years ago, evangelicals were sending missionaries by the droves to China, to India, to all over. Now you don't necessarily send somebody for the rest of his or her life to go and do foreign missions; now you send a lot more people for shorter-term ventures. People go for two weeks, for a month, for a summer, for a year, for two years, and this has changed the dynamic. What it's done is exposed a lot more average evangelicals to a global culture. So you've got 7,000 members of Saddleback Church¹¹ who have now traveled to Rwanda to go and do development and aid in very interesting ways.

What has happened is that evangelicals are far friendlier to issues about foreign affairs than they ever were, and they have built very major institutions around the idea. World Vision,¹² one of the very largest foreign relief and development agencies based here in the U.S., is a $2.6 billion enterprise. They distribute most of the food for the hungry that's given by the United States. And it's headed by Rich Stearns, who used to be the CEO of Lenox china, and before that, Parker Brothers games. In fact, one of the interesting developments is that there is a trend within evangelical parachurch ministries: they are no longer headed by people who are pastors and preachers, who have divinity degrees. They are now headed by business executives.

Few Theologians

Seventh, I assumed that church life and theology really drove evangelicals' political activism. In fact, church involvement is actually quite low among the cosmopolitan evangelicals I've studied. Sixty percent of them have low denominational loyalty or low church affiliation. Some are members of their church but only show up on Sunday morning; they're not very engaged. Others are members in name only. Others are not members of any congregation whatsoever, and yet they are on the board of some of evangelicalism's most important organizations. They just happen to be in the parachurch sector. You see, the parachurch is the real driver of how evangelicals have become so significant in a short span of time. These include operations like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, World Vision, as I've mentioned, as well as a whole range of educational institutions.

There are some theologically literate cosmopolitan evangelicals, people who are able to articulate how their faith matters and drives them to particular positions. But on the whole, most of the evangelical leaders that I interviewed are like most of their fellow churchgoers: they don't know what they believe or why. They cannot articulate basic theological ideas. There have been a number of folks who have written books about how America is becoming a theocracy. One of the interesting notes they talk about is how evangelical ideas about the apocalypse or eschatology are driving American foreign policy. You know, that would be interesting, except most of the people I interviewed do not know the difference between premillenialist and postmillennialist13 theology. So the idea that they're driven by this concern that the rest of the country or the world is getting worse and worse and eventually there's going to be this kind of cataclysmic result, I don't find that to be the case at all.

Eighth and finally, I assumed that politics had been the main thing for most evangelicals. The way that evangelicals had succeeded in public life was because politics was a central driving force. In fact, most of the people I interviewed articulated a basic idea that they see politics as simply downstream from culture. Now, part of this is a disillusionment with the fact that they have invested a lot of energy and resources in politics, and it hasn't resulted in long-term cultural change. But also there has been just this recognition that there are other institutions that are very, very significant.

And so you have, for example, a new document being released at the National Press Club. It's called, The Evangelical Manifesto.¹⁴ It's signed by, I don't know, a hundred evangelical leaders and many mega-church pastors. It is a very significant development. It is drafted by Os Guiness and edited by David Neff, managing editor of Christianity Today. One of the things that's written in there is that they very much endorse the idea that the first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing. Well, what is the first thing? In terms of cultural life and desire to be involved, I found a lot more energy, enthusiasm, excitement for being engaged in things like Hollywood or on elite college campuses than in Washington. In fact, many times, people that I interviewed said that they were far more mobilized about some of the changes that they had seen going on in Hollywood over the last 5, 10 years than anything they'd seen in Washington over the last 30 years. So if you assume that politics is the principal development, I'd have to say that that didn't wind up how I found it.

So, there's eight things that I encountered while doing the research. I encountered some new leaders, new faces, new issues; and hopefully that sparks some good conversation.

Read the full transcript including remarks by David Kirkpatrick, Washington Correspondent, The New York Times and others at the conference at pewforum.org.

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Notes

¹ Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, Oxford University Press, 2007. The book was named one of the best books of 2007 by Publishers Weekly, received a Christianity Today's 2008 book award, and was Oxford University Press's nominee for the 2008 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize.

² Jim Wallis is president and executive director, Sojourners. His latest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (HarperOne, 2008).

³ James C. Dobson is founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, a non-profit organization that produces his internationally syndicated radio programs.

⁴ C. Everett Koop is now senior scholar at the ">C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth.

⁵ Gary L. Bauer, president of American Values, served in President Ronald Reagan's administration for eight years, as Under Secretary of Education and as President Reagan's Chief Domestic Policy Advisor. While serving at the Education Department, Bauer was named Chairman of President Reagan's Special Working Group on the Family.

⁶ The actual lyrics to the Pointer Sisters' song are: "Mr. big stuff, who do you think you are?"

⁷ Read more about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

⁸ The Left Behind series of novels by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye envisions events surrounding the Rapture, battle of Armageddon and second coming of Christ.

⁹ See Thomas Kinkade paintings at his website.

¹⁰ Creation Care magazine provides more information about the Creation Care movement.

¹¹ Saddleback Church operates four campuses in California.

¹² Read more about World Vision.

¹³ Beliefnet provides a summary of the differences between pre- and post-millennialism and other aspects of eschatological thinking.

¹⁴ Read more about "An Envangelical Manifesto," at pewforum.org.