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Turner nicely captures the animosity of mainline Protestant campus ministries, which were not above lobbying universities to block Crusade's access to students. Thanks to Bright's persistence in identifying evangelicals with the simple act of witnessing, liberal Protestants reacted by increasingly defining themselves as Christians who never have to ask anyone if they know Jesus. Turner also shows how Bright negotiated complicated relationships with evangelical competitors (like InterVarsity Campus Fellowship) and early fundamentalist supporters like Bob Jones University. Fundamentalists wanted Bright to be clearer about what he rejected, while Bright wanted to keep the focus on what he thought everyone minimally needs to affirm.
Bright's theological minimalism is best exemplified by the "Four Spiritual Laws," which he formulated in 1959 and turned into a pamphlet in 1965. (Though CCC has a history of exaggerating its successes, it is no stretch to call this pamphlet the most widely distributed religious booklet in history.) Fundamentalists and liberals alike criticized the "Four Spiritual Laws" as a thin theological foundation, but Bright was not all that interested in systematic theology. Turner tells the story of Bright expounding the four laws to a group of Berkeley faculty in 1967. When a professor asked him how he would change his presentation for an intellectual audience, Bright replied, "I would probably read it more slowly."
Turner also does a nice job of showing how much CCC learned from campus radicals. Crusade speakers like Josh McDowell borrowed their tactics and sometimes even seized their platforms. Ironically, New Left groups created a culture of dissent that made the Sixties and Seventies the golden age of evangelical campus ministry. Crusade leaders were as idealistic and alarmist as radicals but often better organized and more effective in communicating their message, even if they did not look the part. (Turner quotes a Los Angeles Times reporter's comment that Bright looked "less like a revolutionary than anyone since Mahatma Gandhi.") While mainline Protestant ministries tried to accommodate or even endorse student radicals, Bright ran a tight ship, forbidding his male staff to grow long hair, though many did grow out their sideburns and crew cuts as they worked to counter the counterculture. The media began to take notice. In 1970, Esquire magazine placed CCC at the top of a list of ten movements to avoid in college—ahead of the Weathermen and the Communist Party, USA.
The campus radicals failed in their bid to take over the universities, but they went on to dominate them as professors. They also went on to dominate our collective understanding of the Sixties, but their scholarship systematically overlooks student movements that do not fit their narrow understanding of social activism. Liberal professors have exhaustively examined Woodstock as much as they have studiously neglected "Explo '72" (short for "spiritual explosion"), but the 85,000 college and high school students who gathered in Dallas to listen to Christian rock and learn how to witness to their faith went on to impact their universities as much or more than the crowds who partied on Max Yasgur's farm. Likewise, precious few university history courses would ever acknowledge that the "Four Spiritual Laws" have had a cultural impact completely disproportionate to the much acclaimed 1962 Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society.
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