University of Virginia Library

Ch 5: The Other Americans

Millions of Americans have for a long time felt put upon. Theirs is a powerful resentment against values that they believe have been imposed upon them, and an equally powerful sense of outrage at the suggestion that they are the ones who pose a threat to undemocratically imposing values upon others.

Richard John Nenhaus,
The Naked Public Square

A quarter-century ago, Michael Harrington shocked the conscience of the nation with the revelation of vast poverty in the midst of the highest standard of living the world has ever known. His book The Other America contrasted the familiar Americans of suburbia and Madison Avenue with those he said formed an invisible but nonetheless massive segment of our population. [1] The America familiar to most of us was largely middle class, comfortable, and optimistic. The other America, about which Harrington wrote, was poor and consisted of very large proportions of minorities, unskilled and migrant workers, and the aging.

Harrington's book dramatically raised our consciousness about people shut out of the American dream and the post-World War II economic miracle. Some of them were tucked away in America's rural hinterland. Most of them, by the tens of millions, were in our midst, but just far enough out of sight to be easily ignored. They were largely uneducated. In the cities, a large proportion of them were black. They were invisible because they had drifted into older, deteriorating neighborhoods left behind by Americans enjoying their rising affluence in

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the suburbs. Freeways, built over and around the deteriorating ghettoes, helped keep the Other Americans out of sight.

So moved were liberals, including Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, by the discovery of this other America that they declared a war on poverty. They quickly determined that the plight of these people was not of their own making. They were victims of generations of discrimination and impersonal economic forces. The nation passed laws to prohibit discrimination against the Other Americans, and created all kinds of agencies and bureaus to administer programs to help them.

Twenty-five years after Michael Harrington's epochal book, there is a gradual awakening to the inescapable reality of yet another America. This other America is not a place so much as it is a state of mind. The "new" Other Americans are right in our midst. But until recently, they have been too timid to reveal their identities.

Whereas the inhabitants of Harrington's other America were poor, the new Other Americans span the full economic spectrum. Nevertheless, they have much in common with Harrington's underclass. They, too, have been victimized for generations by being ignored and discriminated against. Their "peculiar" beliefs and lifestyles have made them objects of scorn and mockery. For most of this century they have experienced the gradual erosion of a way of life. Of late they have begun to protest their victimization, with the result that they are victimized all the more. They are being told that they are dangerous, that they are un-American when they try to create a social milieu in which they can practice their creeds.

Who are these Other Americans?

Thanks to the secular mass media and secular intellectuals, we know them only through distorted caricatures and stereotypes, according to which they are unsophisticated, reactionary, fatalistic, antimodern, inflexible, and doctrinaire; they are mostly small-town or rural, uneducated, and aging. In practically every respect imaginable, they are distinctly marginal to mainstream American culture.

Diverse though they may be, the modern secular world has lumped them all together and given them a highly derogatory label. In short, they are the fundamentalists.

According to the conventional wisdom of the mainstream of American culture, these Bible-thumping fundamentalist Christians retreated into the cultural hinterland after the Scopes "monkey" trial of

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1925 revealed the truth of their backward antievolutionist knownothingism. Presumably, the fundamentalist faith of this earlier generation of simple rural folk who could not adjust to a modern world lives on in the backwaters. Shamed and shunned, they are now a shrinking remnant of outcasts from American society.

Mass media usually portray the survivors of this pathetic and archaic belief system as defensive, rigid, and fanatic. They are depicted in a sour- grapes funk, proclaiming a pox simultaneously on modern industrial society, Christianity enlightened by biblical and historical scholarship, and all higher education.

Before there was any awareness that they might be interested in politics, their dogmatic militancy was a source of amusement and snide comment. Nostalgic, unreflective throwbacks, they were hardly to be taken seriously in our high-tech society. Said one commentator in The New Republic, "Many of the grassroots evangelical; come out of the tradition of 19th-century small-town Midwest Republicanism and Southern Democracy that has survived unexamined and unmodified into the late 20th century. [2]

The fundamentalists, say the media pundits, are now having delusions of grandeur and they are out of touch with reality. They have no long-range view of this country's needs or interests. They are still trying to reduce evolution from science to speculation, to have the Bible taught as science, and to reintroduce prayer in the schools. They have frighteningly dangerous beliefs about the military and world conflict. Their expectation of an imminent Armageddon freezes any hope of social reform beyond their narrow religious goals and even prompts them to anticipate a miraculous rescue from any future nuclear holocaust.

They are allegedly naive in a political and organizational sense, having sat out involvement in "the real world" for generations while they clung to concerns about sin and salvation, concepts no longer relevant to a secular age. Those who have sought public office, whether as president or state representatives, in order to promote their points of view, are labeled "regressive," not progressive.

In late 1986, when Pat Robertson suggested that the U. S. Supreme Court had accumulated policymaking power that the Founding Fathers had never intended it to have, and when he said that the Court was not necessarily the final authority on law in the United States,

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the press as well as liberals reacted with a mixture of guffaws (at what they assumed was a colossal gaffe) and outrage. After all, the Supreme Court has been the fount of liberal social policy for the past thirty years. But Robertson turned liberal tradition on its head and spoke for many unhappy Other Americans when, in the tradition of Thoreau, he wrote on civil disobedience:

Politicians unfamiliar with people who take their religion seriously come away amazed from their encounters and fall back on stereotypes. When Kay Danks, secretary of the Texas Republican party, was defeated in her bid to become the party's vice chair in 1986, she pointed to her failure to sign a nine-point "covenant" drawn up by a conservative Christian group called the Crossroads Coalition. "They have unwavering ideas," she claimed. "They won't accept you if you have one little doubt about anything. [4]

Robertson and the Other Americans believe in a universe of absolute values, not relative principles bound by time and place. And while that may make them look fanatic or quixotic or narrow-minded in the contemporary political arena, it also makes them highly motivated, with a genuine sense of righteous indignation and purpose.

Their religious beliefs tell them that Divine Intervention is passandeacute; only if men and women choose it to be so. Otherwise, the supernatural and the miraculous are all around us, ready to be assimilated into all human affairs, including politics. To harness the power of miracles, as Robertson wrote in The Secret Kingdom, "You have to be involved in a personal relationship with Him-a relationship that arises from a firm commitment on your part." [5]

Many people assume that any voting clout conservative Christians may have demonstrated in recent elections was exaggerated and will be short-lived. As a political force to be reckoned with, they have had their day. They don't have what it takes to stick it out in the long run. Their presumed demographics-disproportionately Southern, blue

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collar, and lower middle class, lacking much formal schooling-have been devised to type them as unsophisticated hicks.

The stereotype may be comforting to uneasy liberals, but it is dead wrong. To lump together all sorts of conservative Christians and proceed without hesitation to paint them all with the same broad brush is to miss critically important differences.

But the sad truth is that most liberal commentators and lay persons cannot recognize the distinctions among fundamentalists, charismatics, Pentecostals, or evangelicals. Nor have they knowledge of premillennialism, postmillennialism, amillennialism, and the implications of all three for social action. Most cannot properly identify the theological orientations of the stars of the video vicarage. Yet these distinctions are crucial for understanding what the various groups believe about God and the world, as well as how they respond to other religious traditions.

In a word, if the new Other Americans are to be understood, they have to be understood on their own terms-what they believe and who they are in the vast and complex social and demographic structure of America.

To be sure, the different terms for these varieties of Christians can be bewildering. Thumb through the magazine rack in a Christian bookstore and you will come across at least the following designations: fundamentalist, evangelical, neo-evangelical, conservative, moderate, Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal, charismatic, and holiness groups. Some of these labels, like Pentecostal, refer to institutionalized traditions. Others, like fundamentalist, refer to a posture toward Scripture and the modern world. Still others, like born-again, are not categories used to identify a discrete biblical tradition as such.

Furthermore, almost all of the groups are very touchy about attempts to characterize or distinguish their group from others, particularly if the one doing the characterizing is an outsider. And to muddy the waters, some notable leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, may shift from one category to another, depending on who is doing the labeling. Falwell proudly calls himself a fundamentalist. Bob Jones, another fundamentalist, considers Falwell's doctrines and practices to be heretical to this tradition and has labeled him "a liberal" and "the most dangerous man in America." We ourselves would characterize Falwell

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as a "neo-fundamentalist," but that is a category that has not yet entered the already confusing array of labels used to differentiate among significant traditions.

For all the confusion, it is possible to map out some very rough guidelines. A full delineation of the complex and subtle differences in usage would require a lengthy essay. Some groups and individuals adamantly disagree with these distinctions, although they have become fairly conventional among scholars of American religion.

It is often assumed that fundamentalism is a very old biblical tradition. Actually, its roots were not clearly delineated until the second decade of this century. Fundamentalism originated as a separatist movement in rebellion against late-nineteenth- century liberalism (then called modernism), which was viewed as an encroachment upon and compromise of the biblical doctrine of inerrancy. In time, the fundamentalists would become what evangelical scholar Richard Quebedeaux refers to in The Worldly Evangelicals as "the evangelical far right. [6] But when the movement started, it counted among its membership some of the leading intellectual and academic theologians of the day. Only gradually did they gain notoriety as a noncompromising tradition of separatism from "worldly" society.

For fundamentalists, "right doctrine" is everything. And emphasis on doctrine has led to an incredibly complex maze of variations on fundamentalism, with scores of sectarian movements. With the exception of the Southern Baptist Convention, fundamentalism is not organized along denominational lines. Rather, it consists of hundreds of independent churches, some of whom are loosely aligned with other independent fundamentalist churches. In its most extreme form of separatism, fundamentalists deny they are even evangelicals.

In the early twentieth century, almost all Protestants in America considered themselves to be evangelicals. They (1) believed in the inerrancy of Holy Scripture; (2) accepted a creationist (rather than evolutionary) explanation for the origins of the universe, earth, and mankind; (3) put their faith in Christ's crucifixion, atonement, and resurrection for salvation; and (4) believed they had a mandate-the so-called Great Commission-to take the redeeming message of Christ to all the peoples of the world.

In broad terms, this is still a fairly accurate definition of what an

evangelical is today. In this sense, evangelical is an umbrella term, and there are lots of groups that subscribe to these tenets. But there is serious disagreement about how wide the umbrella extends.

The self-designation of evangelical was claimed by a significant number of groups who, in the 1940s, sought to differentiate themselves from fundamentalists. Their quarrel with fundamentalism stemmed not so much from doctrinal disagreement as from a weariness with the highly combative and negative posture of most fundamentalists. The term neo-fundamentalist probably would have been a more accurate designation of their theology, but sensing the negative cultural image of fundamentalism, they chose to call themselves evangelicals. Even today, these groups do not accept the legitimacy of labeling fundamentalists as evangelicals. Nor are they happy when some liberal Protestant groups, drawing upon the historical differentiation, insist that they too are evangelical.

The holiness movement began around the turn of the century as an attempt to chart personal rectitude in the chaos and laissez-faire morality of the nation's burgeoning urban centers. Holiness groups emphasize strict personal ethics, piety, and "perfection" in the sense of an evolving personal relationship with God.

The Pentecostal movement also began in early twentieth century urban centers. Pentecostals stress experiential faith and "life in the spirit." What such faith jargon means is that these Christians try to relive in this era the original spiritual "gifts of the Holy Spirit" that the first-century Christians experienced on the Feast of Pentecost, as described in the Book of Acts. These gifts include speaking in tongues (glossolalia), healing, prophecy, and miracles.

Charismatics are Christians who also believe in these gifts. Until the 1960s, there was not much evidence of charismatic behavior outside of Pentecostal churches. But from the late 1960s forward, rapid growth in charismatic behavior has been witnessed in the so- called mainline denominations, such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians, as well as among Roman Catholics.

To complicate matters further, some charismatics refer to themselves as neo- Pentecostals. Generally, although not exclusively, these are people from older Pentecostal traditions-e.g., Church of God- that had gradually come to deemphasize the "gifts of the Holy Spirit."

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The designation neo is testimony to their recovery of the traditional gifts.

Neo-charismatic, on the other hand, is the designation chosen by some Christians in mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions. They are not Pentecostal, and their religious traditions have not previously accepted the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" as legitimate doctrine. While still not officially acknowledged in these traditions, it is no longer uncommon to hear glossolalia in an Episcopal or Catholic service, or to see a healing service announced in the church bulletin. According to current estimates, almost 8 million Roman Catholics and more than 6 million Protestants claim to be charismatics.

For the most part, the charismatic movement has not penetrated fundamentalism, but there are important exceptions that further muddy the conceptual waters and spur doctrinal disputes. Pat Robertson, who was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention, is now the most visible charismatic in America.

More recently, televangelist James Robison (the fiery Texas fundamentalist who was instrumental in organizing the National Affairs Briefing that brought candidate Ronald Reagan face-to-face with fundamentalists in Dallas) has received the "gifts of the Holy Spirit." This has not gone down well with his fellow Southern Baptist colleagues, but Robison's audience showed no decline when his program switched to a charismatic format. Either he attracted a whole new audience or he has brought his old audience along with him into this new spiritual venture.

To outsiders, all of these distinctions may seem like so much nitpicking. And the shifting limits of the categories are somewhat bewildering. But to the believers of these distinctive traditions, the differences are critically important. Fundamentalists, for example, go beyond dismissing the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" as improper behavior for modern times; to them, speaking in tongues is positive evidence of delusions (or, worse, Satanic influence). But to the charismatic, failure to have received the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" (also referred to as "the baptism of the Holy Spirit") is evidence of inadequate spiritual nourishment.

Beyond these groups, there is a whole coterie of conservative Christians who emphasize the adult conversion experience of being "born

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again" but would prefer not to get bogged down in labels. That would include a lot of Southern Baptists.

Many people take the concept evangelical to include all conservative Christian traditions. Given the common origins just traced, this is technically correct, although it excludes the liberal Protestant tradition. In order to cut through some of the intramural quibbling, and out of respect for the parties in question, the authors have usually maintained the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists, referring to the broad spectrum of conservative Christianity as "fundamentalists and evangelicals." But because this is awkward, on occasion the authors use the word evangelical alone to refer to the wide spectrum of conservative Christianity. This should be evident in context. The solo use of fundamentalist, however, is employed only when the authors are referring to that rather more limited group.

If the stereotypes of evangelical theology are incredibly unsophisticated, the demographic stereotypes are sadly dated. Many conservative Christians-yes, even fundamentalists-have moved into the ranks of well-paid entertainers, athletes, beauty queens, and prominent national politicians. The whole movement has expanded far beyond the rural South and the lower economic levels of society.

Such an assertion can be supported by looking at the facts. For example, Stuart Rothenberg and Frank Newport, in a 1984 survey conducted for the Washington-based Institute for Government and Politics, found that under half (45 percent) of the evangelicals they sampled nationally lived in the South. Likewise, one-third of the evangelicals were working in white-collar/nonmanual occupations. [7] In another regional study of the burgeoning Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in the early 1980s, University of Texas sociologists Anson Shupe and William A. Stacey found that 60 percent of supporters of the Moral Majority, a group disproportionately evangelical/fundamentalist, worked in white-collar jobs. [8]

In the area of income, evangelicals fail to live up to their lowerclass stereotype. Rothenberg and Newport concluded: "There is no reason to believe that there is a major income disparity between evangelicals and the country as a whole." Only 37 percent of the evangelicals they studied had a total income under $20,000, and fully one-third had family incomes of at least $30,000 per year. In the

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Shupe-Stacey study, 60 percent of evangelical/fundamentalist respondents had incomes over $30,000 per year.

Perhaps some of the most dramatic evidence of the mainstreaming of evangelical Christians is the growing proportion who have achieved some level of higher education. For example, according to University of Massachusetts sociologist Wade Clark Roof, in 1960 only 7 percent of those from the various evangelical traditions had attended college, but by the mid-1970s the proportion grew to 23 percent. No other religious group approached this dramatic change in the level of higher education during this period. [9] Rothenberg and Newport found a slight majority (61 percent) in their sample who had at least some college or a college degree, while Shupe and Stacey in their Dallas-Fort Worth study discovered an even larger majority (79 percent) of evangelicals/fundamentalists with similar education levels.

As a result of this dramatic increase in educational achievement, as well as advances in occupational prestige levels, unprecedented numbers of fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants are entering the middle class. Says Wade Clark Roof:

. . . in large numbers they began to taste affluence, becoming middle class, Republican, suburban, and well connected in business, social, and political circles. Increasingly represented in the lower- middle echelons of American life, conservative Protestants gained entrance into the mainstream during this period and came to enjoy greater respectability, social and economic standing, and a new self-esteem. [10]

So much for being culturally marginal.

What about age? The stereotype of the group is that of embittered old conservatives out of step with the modern age. Out of step perhaps, but certainly not an aging remnant. Evangelicals and fundamentalists-not the liberal mainline groups-have the highest proportion of young adults. In mainline denominations, the percentages of total membership over age fifty-five run as high as 41 percent in the United Methodists and 43 percent in the United Church of Christ.

Various studies shatter the age myth. A national study conducted in 1978-79 by the Princeton Religious Research Center for Chris-

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tianity Today found more than half (54 percent) of the evangelicals queried were between the ages of eighteen and fifty. [11] Shupe and Stacey in Texas found 41 percent of their evangelical were under the age of fifty-five, while Rotllen'oerg and Newport reported that only 17 percent of their nationally sampled evangelicals were over sixty-five.

These young adults are having children-lots of them. The fertility rate among conservative Protestant women is higher than for women in liberal denominations-because they are younger and because they believe in large families.

Rigidness and narrow- mindedness? Another myth. Says sociologist Roof: "Contrary to popular understanding, fundamentalist belief systems are flexible and lend themselves to rich and varied interpretations, depending on the cultural context.'' [12] Indeed, both fundamentalists and evangelicals have been busy doing all sorts of things they were not "supposed" to do.

For instance, Reverend Jerry Falwell, an independent Baptist, has courted Mormon groups in Utah to block undesirable legislation and squelch issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment. [13]

Mormons and Baptists? Baptists believe that Mormons are a heretical faith. For years they have been antagonists-like snake and mongoose. Writes master cult-watcher Walter Martin, ". . . Joseph Smith's religion is a polytheistic nightmare of garbled doctrines draped with the garment of Christian terminology. [14] Yet, here at the fundamentalists' initiative, they are building coalitions.

Or consider Falwell's own flexibility. During the 1960s he preached against social activism for ministers, particularly in the civil rights movement. In the late 1970s he, along with millions of fellow conservatives, reassessed the situation. Even liberals are beginning to recognize Falwell's capacity to moderate his stances and accept compromise as he has turned to a "reformist" rather than a confrontational style. The world cannot be made over in a week, and he realizes it.

Sociologist James Hunter has suggested other ways in which fundamentalists and evangelicals have adapted to modern America. is For one thing, most of them have toned down their traditionally harsh condemnations of Christians who are unlike themselves. They have also grown comfortable with twentieth-century materialism. Following the initiative of televangelists such as Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller,

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Pat Robertson, Kenneth Copeland, and a host of clones who preach a "Gospel of Prosperity," they believe that God wants Christians to enjoy the fruits of this life, both spiritual and physical. They have allowed their t:aitll to be "codified" into step-by- step procedures and principles packaged in classic American marketing terms. Billy Graham promoted a self-help manual on How to Be Born Again, Bill Bright promotes "the four spiritual laws," Oral Roberts has A Daily Guide to Miracles, Robert Schuller can teach you to Discover Your Possibilities, Kenneth Copeland can clue you in on The Laws of Prosperity, and Pat Robertsoll's eight "Laws of the Kingdom" are designed to accumulate wealth and happiness in this life as well as in the next.

Underneath it all, there may be old-time religion, but, like capitalism's finest products, faith has been updated, refined, and repackaged to give consumers the very best product that money can buy.

One might question the theological appropriateness of these developments. Certainly a number of fundamentalist- evangelical communities have done so. The liberals are angry, too. One reason is that the conservative Christians have stolen much of their stuff, and not just from Norman Vincent Peale. And when they see evangelicals translating the Gospel of Prosperity into their language, it seems trite and superficial.

On the whole, the evangelical is much more appropriately characterized by a willingness to explore, enthusiasm for learning, and openness to change than the traditional stereotype of a closed-minded ideologue. This trend has given rise to an enormous growth industry of Christian sex manuals, Christian financial guides, Christian soap operas, and Christian bumper stickers; a gigantic market for popular Christian music; and even a Christian amusement park at PTL's Heritage Village, USA. Inflexible dogmatism is fading from the scene, and evangelicals and fundamentalists are increasingly open to new ideas.

Labels of antimodern and unsophisticated also fail to pass muster. One of the foremost qualities of the new fundamentalists and evangelicals is their astute mastery of electronic communications, the latest in organizational and political strategies (including lobbying, political action committees, and think tanks), and the psychology of fund-raising and mobilization of followers. Their leaders, in three-piece suits and elaborate coiffures, are as comfortable before the television cameras

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as in air-conditioned churches with stereophonic sound systems. The electric church itself is testimony to the fact that fundamentalists and evangelicals are creatures of this era.

Nor are they nearly as extremist as portrayed. Various national and regional polls conducted during the early 1980s consistently found that only small percentages of the public had heard of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority organization and supported it. Yet the statistics also showed that the majority of noncommitted or neutral respondents were in agreement on issues such as prayer in schools, pornography, drugs, homosexuality, and declining academic performance. When it comes down to the controversial issues, many Americans have more in common with Jerry Falwell than with Norman Lear and his People for the American Way. We'll see the evidence of this later.

Finally, the reality of the fundamentalists' and evangelicals' numerical strength and significance in modern American culture makes short work of the myth that they are a tiny but vocal remnant of a rear- guard movement eventually destined to wither away. This underestimation is perhaps the greatest mistake of liberal commentators.

Never mind that in 1976, when James Earl Carter, a born-again Christian, became president of the United States, both Time and Newsweek declared it the Year of the Evangelical;

Or that religious autobiographies, such as Charles Colson's Born Again, were best-sellers in the secular trade market;

Or that in 1980 Billy Graham s newspaper, Decision, topped 24 million in circulation;

Or that there are more than 1,370 religious radio stations; 221 religious television stations; three major religious television networks broadcasting seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day; and perhaps a dozen other television networks struggling to get a foothold in the marketplace;

Or that every month 16 million people watch Pat Robertson's "700 Club" and more than 35 million see one or more of the top ten syndicated religious programs;

Or that evangelical Christianity Today's subscribers outnumber liberal Christian Century's subscribers five to one;

Or that according to the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association the 37 million buyers of Christian books made up a huge, billion

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dollar consumer group--more than 20 percent of the entire book buying public in one year;

Or that Hal Lindsey's 1970 prophecy book, The Late Great Planet Earth, selling over 30,000 copies a month for years, may be the nonfiction best-seller of all time-next to the Bible;

Or that the number of Americans who considered themselves bornagain evangelicals exploded from 30 million in 1980 to 35 million in 1986, according to a Gallup poll that year;

Or that 16,000 private Christian academies, opening at a rate of one per day, have developed into a $2 billion-per-year industry in this country. [15]

Or that . . . the list goes on and on. The point is simple: The media took bemused note that populist President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, called himself an evangelical, but they treated it as an inconsequential fact.

The time for such misinterpretation is long past. The Other Americans know who they are, even if others do not. They rankle at distortions of their intentions and qualifications, but they are not put off. They have tasted organizational and even political success and they believe they can achieve more.

This is the crucial difference between these Other Americans and the deprived multitude about which Michael Harrington wrote. The banners for the War on Poverty during the 1960s were flown by liberals on behalf of the poor. The victims were not expected to fight the battles. And the critics may well be right that one reason the massive amounts of money poured into social programs did so little good was that it had to trickle down through such an immense bureaucracy that proportionately little of it reached the poor directly.

The "new" Other Americans, on the other hand, are ready to do their own fighting. This war is theirs, not one conceived for them by well-meaning third parties, its active support coming from bottom up, not top down. Unlike the War on Poverty, which was couched mainly in secular moral language, this new war, or cultural revolution, is understood in sacred terms. It is not distributive justice that is at stake but Divine Providence.

Part of this new Christian activism has been achieved by adopting a fresh interpretation of Scripture. For instance, Pat Robertson tells

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readers of Answers to 200 of Life s Most Probing Questions that "Caesar" means something different in American democracy than it did during the days of the Roman Empire:

In our society, Caesar is all the people. When we are told to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, that means we ourselves should be responsible for government. Therefore, we owe the obligation of serving in public office, of being informed citizens, of voting, and of being active in politics at all levels. That is part of the duty we render to Caesar. [16]

This activism is more than standard good citizenship; it is a moral imperative. Robertson goes on:

. . . in a country such as America, where there is waste of mammoth proportions, and when money is being used for programs that are abhorrent to Christians, the Christian should do everything he can to bring about change and reform. He must help to curtail the excessive spending of government, the growth of government, the profligate nature of government; and he must protest the improper use of his money. [17]

In 1975 renowned sociologist Robert Bellah published a book called The Broken Covenant, written especially to coincide with America's bicentennial. It was not the kind of book expected to capture the imagination of American sociologists, preoccupied as they are with empirical measurement. It was an ethical-moral treatise on American history, and, from the outset, highly controversial among sociologists, who questioned that the book had anything at all to do with sociology. Many were thus surprised when The Broken Covenant won the Sorokin Award, the highest honor bestowed by the American Sociological Association for scholarly achievement.

Bellah argued that America's concept of itself in relation to Divine Providence has always been a core cultural ingredient, observing that "Biblical imagery provided the basic framework for imaginative thought in America up until recent time and, unconsciously, its control is still formidable." [18] Americans, according to a "civil religion" shared by all citizens in addition to their individual denominational loyalties, are a

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chosen people, holding a special covenant with God. The terms of the covenant are simple but demanding: righteousness and faithfulness in return for God's blessing.

This sense of covenant and special mission began in North America before there was even a United States. It is commonly recognized by historians that the American Revolution, with its radical assumption that "all men are created equal" and "endowed . . . with certain unalienable rights," was a secular expression of religious values drawn from the early religious eighteenth- century transformation called the Great Awakening. Later, the struggle over the slavery question and the religious zeal both North and South brought to their causes had to be worked out on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. Both ordeals demonstrated that the idea of covenant entailed periodic rebirth, a painful process resolved only by major conflagration and conflict.

Bellah's thesis was that Americans' sense of covenant had again been called into question, our lack of moorings in civil religion leaving the nation confused and disheartened. The broken covenant would have to be reworked carefully to avoid the civil strife that characterized the first two revisions.

Bellah's picture of American society was grim. "Today," he wrote, "the American civil religion is an empty and broken shell." Society has drifted dangerously toward the "edge of the abyss.... We certainly need a new 'Great Awakening.' " Wrote Bellah:

The inward reform of conversion, the renewal of an inward covenant among the remnant that remains faithful to the hope for rebirth, is more necessary than it has ever been in America. The great experiment may fail utterly, and such failure will have dark consequences not only for Americans but for all the world. [19]

Harvard-educated Bellah sensed that America was passing from the hands of the liberal establishment, and he feared chaos was the alternative. His solution was for liberals not to abandon their critical humanist tradition but, rather, to recover it with a sense of renewed idealism:

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No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism, as even those who call themselves materialists have discovered. Culture is the key to revolution; religion is the key to culture. [20]

Bellah became an enormously popular speaker among liberal Protestants, who found his vision of recovering our religious heritage and forging new concepts of liberty and freedom quite compatible.

Yet, writing from the vantage point of disillusioned academic liberalism in the mid-1970s (post-Vietnam, post-War on Poverty, postWatergate), Bellah did not see the profound cultural transformation stirring among the religious "outs" of his day, i. e., the fundamentalists, the charismatics, the Pentecostals, and the evangelicals who composed the Other Americans. He ignored the rich religious ferment that had gone on elsewhere for the previous fifty years.

Bellah lamented the collapse of the liberal version of covenant, mistaking it for the version held by all Americans. Contrast Bellah's sense of a "broken covenant" with the ebullient, optimistic rhetoric of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Bill Bright. Whose sense of covenant is an "empty shell"? Not theirs!

In fact, for many Americans, God's covenant with the nation was (and is) not only alive and well but strengthened during the two Reagan administrations and the ascendancy of the New Christian Right. True, it is a reworked understanding of covenant. Modern interpreters have had to adjust it in order to address ssues such as abortion, which never existed for the first generation of Americans. But the covenant is resilient. It lives!

Just how aware Bellah may have been of the emergence of a New Christian Right while he was writing The Broken Covenant is not clear. He did warn "critical Americans" not to leave idealism in the hands of the chauvinists, but one must resort to conjecture as to what he meant.

A decade later, Bellah published another major work, entitled Habits of the Heart [21] , which he considers his most important to date. In collaboration with four junior colleagues, Bellah searches for a core of commitment to community and finds only "cancerous" individualism. America has lost her way, Bellah concludes. Her people still believe in God, but their liberal faith impels no public duty.

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Bellah's analysis of the origins of the nation's covenant may be right on target. But he seems to miss what was already beginning to unfold in earnest by the bicentennial.

A new covenant was being forged, but liberals were not the architects of the new vision.

In the fall of 1986, shortly after Pat Robertson announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for the presidency if he received the signatures of 3 million people pledging their support for his candidacy, the Thomas Nelson publishing company released a new book by Robertson entitled America's Dates With Destiny.

In important ways, America's Dates With Destiny can be viewed as a conservative answer to Bellah's Broken Covenant. Robertson takes his reader on a journey through American history, focusing on critical dates and incidents that served first to solidify and then to break the covenant with God.

Like Bellah, Robertson sees a nation in conflict and poses tough questions regarding our ability to endure the troubled times ahead. "America stands at the crossroads," he writes:

But in Robertson's vision, America is beginning to find her way again. America's Dates With Destiny is upbeat and optimistic. A postscript is addressed to his fellow evangelical Christians:

Robertson and others seem to perceive an emerging unity among conservative Christians. Assuming, for the moment, that this is so,

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what explains the "new ecumenism" among conservative Christians? What lowered the onetime barriers among them that caused infighting more venomous than any railings directed against non-Christians? What has united them as allies?

Some argue that just as evangelicals and other conservatives have recently rediscovered the sense of social and political responsibility that was part of their religious heritage, so have they rediscovered their cooperative ecumenical spirit of 150 years ago. During the first half of the nineteenth century, enthusiasm over evangelism and social reform produced a variety of interdenominational missionary and Bible tract societies. The different churches were perceived as separate variations on a basic agreed-upon core of biblical beliefs. Evangelical Christians saw (or thought they saw) a religious canopy above them that transcended sectarian differences.

Historians tell us that this notion was necessary to prevent quarreling sectarian groups from fracturing the young American Republic. Some understood it in Calvinist, others in dispensationalist, terms; but all had to accept plurality in order to preserve the fragile union of states.

As Protestantism in the early twentieth century splintered into various groups, liberal denominations were left at the helm of America's cultural mainstream. In 1908, liberal Protestants established the Federal Council of Churches. While the fundamentalists sought to stake out a rear-guard position and then proceeded to quibble over just who was doctrinally fit to be included in the fold, liberals relaxed their boundaries and proceeded with such crusades as the reform-centered Social Gospel and accommodation to modern society.

In most cases, however, the ecumenism of liberals in the twentieth century was due to a de-emphasis on theological dogma. Specifically traditional beliefs, in other words-whether the literal virginity of Jesus's mother, Mary, or the historical reality of Christ's miracles- no longer seemed worth a quarrel.

At the same time, evangelical Protestants were moving toward their own brand of ecumenism. While they also had to accept a certain relaxation of doctrinaire dogma, they never approached the theological laissez-faire of liberals.

These two "ecumenisms"- liberal and evangelical-can best be

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understood as having quite different aims. Sociologist James Hunter has astutely observed that the ecumenism of liberal mainline denominations has sought church unity-that is, actual merger of separate organizations into conglomerates such as the United Methodist Church in 1968, the United Church of Christ in 1961, and fusions of Presbyterian and Lutheran bodies. Alternatively, evangelical ecumenism does not pursue any unity of organizations or bureaucracies. Instead, their ecumenism is project-oriented. [24]

Hunter also notes that it is not technically a "new" movement. The "projects" of evangelicals are vast and span many decades: publishing, missionary activities, broadcasting, charities, education at every level (primary, secondary, and higher education), and campus ministries, to name just a few.

In recent years they have come together to form special-interest groups primarily aimed at redressing what they perceive as declining morals in America. It is this development that has led them to agree, at least for the time being, to ignore their doctrinal differences and unite as allies seeking a common purpose: the realignment of the moral character of American public policy as well as the piety of individuals.

Their truce may be temporary, allowing them, in Jerry Falwell's words, to work together now so that they can fight among themselves later. But there has been a growing realization among most conservative Christians that if they do not close ranks and pull together to resist the encroachment of secular humanism, they will as individuals and as a sector of society be overrun and rendered powerless.

Theirs is a struggle for the survival of an endangered way of life even as it is a search for a new vision, a new way of coming to grips with problems that confront all of America.

Why has this consciousness of common interests arisen only in the past few decades? Why did it not develop sixty years ago when the threat of modernism, with all the secular and irreligious implications of that term, confronted them?

One answer is that the evangelical ecumenical movement did begin earlier. Youth for Christ, for example, was founded in the 1940s. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the founding and expansion of evangelical colleges, and the National Association of Evangelicals-all

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are important manifestations of ecumenical cooperation dating back nearly a half- century.

But the other answer, the answer that accounts for the tremendous surge of evangelical consciousness into the public arena of modern American culture, is to be found in the power of televangelism and the electric parachurches. All of the broadcasters have developed projects and made public appearances that have brought together peoples previously separated by sectarian differences and have contributed to the perception that those differences are not as important as many once believed. Religious broadcasting has served as the crucible in which grievances and common causes have crystallized.

Perhaps even more important, the National Religious Broadcasters organization has provided a forum for dialogue and cooperation among the broadcasters. They understand that NRB was instrumental in their struggle against the liberal denominations for access to the airwaves. They know that together presidents and senators and congressmen and Federal Communications commissioners will come and talk with them, while as individuals they would be lost in the crowd of lobbyists in Washington.

Pat Robertson appreciates the wide range of differences among evangelicals and fundamentalists, yet he also knows they can be mobilized effectively so that their actions have a combined impact. In the postscript to America's Dates With Destiny, Robertson describes them:

Their biblical translations vary. They celebrate the Lord's Supper in dozens of different ways. They are scattered across the nation in great cities and tiny villages. They represent an amazing cross section of the total American culture and experience. And although these evangelicals love each other as their Lord commanded, they remain independent from each other in a thousand different ways. Evangelicals are not one uniform, homogenized group as their critics fear.... But in recent months evangelicals are finding themselves more and more united in their concern for the nation's spiritual and political renewal.... They have rediscovered the central significance and ultimate necessity of spiritual renewal to this nation's strength, and they are committed to a speedy and wholehearted return by America to her JudeoChristian heritage. [25]

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And in a section addressed especially to evangelicals, Robertson added:

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Notes