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Theological conservatives had lost control of the historic Northern denominations that once played such a large role as arbiters of the nation's public life. Strong evangelical outposts did remain in several ecclesiastical traditions. These included mainline churches; fundamentalist associations and individual congregations; burgeoning Pentecostal networks; ethnic Mennonites, Lutherans, and Christian Reformed; a variety of African American church families; even a few Hispanic American and Asian American bodies. But the outposts were largely unconnected. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, evangelicals in rich variety dominated the landscape, but the region's institutionalized racism undermined its religious influence nationally.

While large numbers of evangelicals could still be found, their general impact was considerably less than the sum of the parts. Politics offers a good example. Apart from nearly universal support for the nation's stand against Communism, a burst of interest in the new state of Israel (driven more by apocalyptic speculation than on-site analysis), and simmering agitation against the liquor trade, evangelicals—in sharp contrast to their predecessors of earlier eras—were politically inert.

Sadly, evangelical political passivity extended to the nation's greatest enduring moral problem—race. In 1956, far more than half of the nation's African Americans were still prevented by law or custom from voting, and the nation's armed forces had been recently integrated only because Russian propagandists made capital out of the plight of segregated blacks in the supposed "land of the free." Congress was again considering civil rights legislation in 1956, as it had annually since the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954, Brown v. Board of Education. But as if to underscore how difficult it would be to alter the racial habits of three centuries, in mid-year, 96 white congressmen from the 11 states of the former Confederacy issued a widely noticed manifesto that defended segregation, criticized non-Southerners for their own racial hypocrisy, and defied federal efforts at altering Southern race traditions.

Individual white evangelicals could be found working to pass a civil rights bill and contributing to the Southern manifesto. But without an evangelical consensus, there was no national mobilization. Nor was there even much awareness that coercive discrimination against African Americans contradicted evangelical moral norms as much as it did American ideals.

Evangelicalism was by no means dead. But its capacity to shape national mores or to influence national agendas in politics, the media, and intellectual life seemed spent. One could not wonder if perceptive observers at the time predicted increasing irrelevance for America's evangelicals. Some might have anticipated selected outposts of evangelical strength fueled (especially in the race-divided South) by resistance to the secularizing trends of national life. Few, however, could have predicted the resurgence that actually occurred.

Why did this resurgence happen? It is possible to sketch some of the important forces at work, even if assessments of cause and effect and judgments about theological merit remain hotly debated, especially among evangelicals themselves. Here I briefly highlight two specific developments and three diffuse movements. I then consider one overarching characteristic of recent evangelical history that may explain a great deal about these unexpected happenings.

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October 2006, Vol. 50, No. 10