This is really a thought provoking article. Worth reading for more than one reason.
Here is the beginning of the article, as a teaser:
* * *
From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism, by D. G. Hart, Eerdmans, 252 pages, $25
The title of historian D. G. Hart’s new book, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism, is somewhat misleading. Hart doesn’t actually think that evangelicals have betrayed conservatism but rather that they were never very conservative in the first place. The marriage was an uneasy match from the start, and the recent distancing of the younger generation from the religious right is precisely what history should lead us to expect.
As Hart explains, evangelicals began in the nineteenth century as zealous reformers and social gospellers, and today they are only reverting to type. They believe in conversion, unexpected revival, and the timeless truth of the Bible. And so, more often than not, they tend to sit crossways to traditions and established institutions, to get impatient with gradualism and compromise, and to trouble the status quo with sweeping, radical reforms drawn directly from the pages of Scripture.
While “high church” believers such as Catholics and ethnic Lutherans tended to focus their energies on building parishes, schools, and neighborhoods, “low church” evangelicals tended to look past the Church to America, their own “city on a hill,” inspiring countless moral crusades to create a righteous empire and a redeemer nation. National moral crusades seemed only natural to evangelicals influenced by the optimistic, revivalist perfectionism of Charles Finney and Henry Ward Beecher but were looked on with skepticism by those who followed the more somber Augustine, Luther, or Calvin.
In other words, evangelicals may well be better understood not as conservatives but as radical reformers. The era of Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson was the exception to the rule, a truth difficult to see in the Christian Coalition’s heyday but now becoming clear.
Recent Comments