That Old-Time Religion in Modern America by D.G. Hart Ivan R. Dee, 246 pages, $24.95 TO LISTEN to the more lurid claims of the ACLU, you’d think that evangelical Protestants were dominating American culture as never before. But this is not quite so. Yes, evangelicalism is still a presence in American life, and an important one, but it reached the height of its influence roughly a century ago. In “That Old-Time Religion,” D.G. Hart explores the change in the fortunes of evangelicals, taking up in particular their engagement with an increasingly secular society.
Hart is a noted church historian. Indeed, he once served as director of the Institute for the Study of Evangelicals at Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater. Surprisingly, he professes to feeling “ambivalent” about evangelicalism, contending that its adherents “misunderstand the nature of secular society and their role in it.” His arguments, if not always persuasive, are worth taking seriously.
As Hart reminds us, evangelicalism emerged during the First Great Awakening, in the 18th century, “as virtually a new form of Protestantism.” It was “centered in the experience and affairs of the individual believer” and not, as was true of Protestantism in Europe and early America, in “the teaching and worship of the church.”
Evangelicalism not only stressed conversion and holy living but also encouraged believers “to put their energies into the creation of a society that reflected Christian mores.” Thus did 19th-century evangelicals oppose slavery and alcohol and help the poor. By the last decade of the century, most American Protestants were evangelicals. In 1892, when the Supreme Court described the U.S. as “a Christian nation,” it might as well have said an “evangelical nation.”
Not until the 1920s did American Protestantism lose some of its unified force, having split into a traditionalist faction committed to the authority of the Bible and a liberalized Protestantism eager to shed historic doctrine and accommodate the challenges posed by science. The liberals captured the mainline churches, and evangelicals found themselves in a position entirely new for them–at the margins of American Protestantism. They responded, as Hart relates, by creating their own institutions.
Dallas Theological Seminary, for instance, was founded in 1924. It is still the leading seminary for teaching dispensationalism, an approach to interpreting the Bible that offers a vivid chronology of the End Times, including the “pretribulation rapture” and Christ’s return and reign over a millennial kingdom. (Many of the Bible schools established between 1918 and 1945–some 70 in all–teach dispensational theology.) By the 1950s, evangelicals had created many organizations, some targeting young people, such as Youth for Christ and Young Life.
In Hart’s narrative, the decades between 1920 and 1960 were, for evangelicals, a time of retrenchment during which they gained–as the mainline churches went their liberal way–a distinct religious identity. Many evangelicals still shared the belief of their 19th-century forebears that, as Hart puts it, “the saving of souls inevitably resulted in the salvation of societies.” As Billy Graham began his remarkable ministry in the 1950s, he propounded the power of the gospel to prevent juvenile crime and defeat communism.
Not until the 1960s, however, did evangelicals start to engage the culture. They did so, Hart explains, in response to well-known secularizing trends. Evangelicals made protecting the family and opposing secular humanism high priorities. Starting in 1980, they pushed for the election of conservatives (meaning Republicans) and the adoption of conservative social policies. They penetrated the popular culture as well: Among other examples, Hart cites evangelical fiction (the “Left Behind” series) and contemporary Christian music (Amy Grant).
At times Hart paints with too broad a brush–some who accept the appellation “evangelical” will not recognize themselves here–but he is right to see a “movement” character in much evangelicalism today. He argues that it is a form of “pietism,” which demands “evidence of genuine religion in affairs not typically considered sacred or religious.” Like pietism, evangelicalism makes that demand because it refuses to draw distinctions between religion and other spheres of life, for fear that to do so would deny the importance of religion in all of life.
This confusion of realms is a mistake, in Hart’s view: By failing to distinguish between the religious and the nonreligious (the sacred and the secular, the temporal and eternal), evangelicals put too much of their energy into trying to make America into the Kingdom of God and too little into the church.
Hart isn’t confident that evangelicals will soon change their ways. Yet he is aware that their engagement with society is proving to be a form of instruction. “Evangelicals are learning,” he writes, “that the politics and culture of the United States today are not so readily turned to Christian ends.” Whether they take the next step and make the church the locus of their energies is the question raised by this well-informed, tightly written and provocative book.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
