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It was a cabal of evangelical historians who turned Lilly's interest toward evangelicalism itself. In the 1970s, the late Timothy Smith (professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a Nazarene pastor) introduced Lynn to a group of young evangelical historians of religion—George Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, Grant Wacker, Harry Stout, Joel Carpenter, and others. Lynn was impressed. Not only did he think they were "enormously able," but he especially appreciated the "intimate connections between their own faith and their scholarship." He was struck by "the way that religious awareness often illuminated their scholarship" on a much wider range of Christian faith traditions than he had expected.

In 1979 Lynn arranged a Lilly grant of $15,000 to Noll and Hatch for a conference on the Bible in American history at Wheaton College. The crisis point came early. Harold Lindsell, author of The Battle for the Bible and a Wheaton trustee, objected that some of the invited scholars weren't true evangelicals. The speaker he objected to most was Ernest Sandeen, a Wheaton alumnus and author of the first good history of fundamentalism. But Wheaton vice president Dave Johnston told Lindsell that scholarship did not demand ideological purity, and president Hudson Armerding backed Johnston. The conference went forward.

Lynn was pleased with the outcome and followed up with $200,000 that launched the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE). Noll and Hatch headed the board, and Carpenter became the director. Lynn's primary goal was to make sure this cohort of historians received the support for their work that they "deserved and needed." A secondary goal was to advance scholarly understanding of the evangelical past.

Since then, Lilly has spent over $2 million on the work of the ISAE. The endowment and its agencies have also made several direct grants to evangelical historians, sociologists, and political scientists. But before all this came to pass, Lynn did something else that would dramatically increase the level of foundation support for evangelical scholarship. He felt that the ISAE and the Pew Charitable Trusts were a match made in heaven, so he volunteered his services as matchmaker. He flew to Philadelphia with Wheaton College's vice president for development to recommend the ISAE to Martin Trimble, then a junior program associate working in religious grant-making at Pew.

The Pew trusts were founded between 1948 and 1979 by the wealthy children of J.N. Pew, who made his money in oil. The son who succeeded J.N. as head of Sun Oil Company was J. Howard Pew, a lifelong mainline Presbyterian. J. Howard's main philanthropic interests were supporting free enterprise against big government and supporting America's free-enterprise form of Christianity, evangelicalism. He gave a lot of money to parachurch groups like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, World Vision, and Young Life. He also helped launch a couple of evangelical intellectual enterprises—Christianity Today in 1956 and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1969.

There are two iron laws of foundation philanthropy. The first law is that while the donor is still living, a foundation's giving patterns will be idiosyncratic. At this stage, the philanthropic vision originates in the donor's personality, passions, and prejudices. This is why most Carnegie library buildings look alike, regardless of the architecture of the neighborhoods in which they were built. The second law is that once the donor and close friends die, the foundation's giving patterns start to resemble those of other foundations near it on the ideological spectrum. At this stage, the vision stems from a professional class of foundation managers who share ideas, personnel, and consultants with each other. Differences between foundations do, of course, persist—conservatives and liberals map out very different routes up the mountain of social progress. But over time these differences owe less to the concerns of their founders and more to the ideology of their staffs and to the need for a distinctive identity in the philanthropy marketplace.

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July 8 2002, Vol. 46, No. 8