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Postwar evangelical leaders who sought to reform fundamentalism and bring evangelical Christianity back into the American mainstream were participating in a religious and political coalition rallying around the Eisenhower administration. Billy Graham was a personal friend of both Eisenhower and of his heir apparent, Richard Nixon. By late 1973, when the Chicago Declaration was framed, the evangelical establishment's trust in the Nixon Administration lay in shambles. The upheavals of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal had dashed the idea that evangelicals could focus on personal salvation and character formation and leave the right ordering of society to a trustworthy, pro-Christian government.

At the same time, evangelicals were achieving more salience in American society than they had for a century. Billy Graham was a household name, and he routinely mobilized vast urban campaigns. Evangelical parachurch ministries were gaining attention as well, most notably Campus Crusade for Christ, which teamed up with the Graham Association in 1972 and 1973 to promote revivals across the nation. Even in the midst of the Watergate Scandal, one of the White House conspirators, Charles Colson, announced his conversion to evangelical Christianity. Born-again Christianity's new visibility came with a growing sense of social responsibility. World-fleeing views of ministry, which seemed realistic when the movement was marginal, now seemed irresponsible when evangelicals were entering the mainstream of public life.

With new social responsibility being thrust upon them, evangelicals drew from the resources at hand to develop it: their Bibles, their historical memory of the days when revivalism and social reform went hand in hand, and the witness of groups that, because of racist oppression or immigrant heritage, had stood apart from the great American evangelical divorce between evangelism and social action. Black evangelicals, peace-church Mennonites and Brethren, and Dutch-American Calvinists led the way in reasserting a whole-gospel witness. Representatives of these three groups were prominent in the Chicago Declaration meeting, in the early ESA, and in the ensuing movement.

The great surprise in this story came from two groups not known for their social action—fundamentalists and Pentecostals/charismatics. They too began to feel the pangs of social responsibility that came with growth, but the motif they chose to govern their return to the public arena was warfare against secularism, a renewal of sorts of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. First mobilized by the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell, and then by the Christian Coalition founded by Pat Robertson, religious conservatives have become an important power base within the Republican Party.

But overall, the heirs of the Chicago Declaration have been those who want to say that evangelical does not equal conservative. As the evangelical movement has become larger, it also has become more diverse in its social, economic, and political views. In a Princeton University survey conducted three years ago, 45 percent of evangelicals said they were political moderates, and 19 percent self-identified as liberals.

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December 2003, Vol. 47, No. 12