What evangelicals looked like before they entered the political fray
Source: WaPo, by Gregory Alan Thornbury
President Jimmy Carter and Larry Norman stand together during a White House event celebrating gospel music in September 1979. (Don Riggott/Larry Norman Estate)
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Perhaps the high watermark of the Jesus Movement was “Explo ’72” in Dallas at the Cotton Bowl, where over 100,000 teenagers — dubbed “Jesus Freaks” by the media — crowded into the stadium to hear the evangelist Billy Graham preach and to listen to their favorite Christian musicians perform, chief among them being Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, the black gospel singer Andraé Crouch and Norman. Time magazine ran a cover story on the phenomenon as a leading national news item, calling Norman “the top solo artist in his field.” Life did the same and expressed fascination with this non-free-love, peace-loving and drug-free version of the hippies. Soon, Graham himself would feel burned by getting too close to Richard Nixon and naively defending the president before the truth about Watergate was known. From that point onward, the nation’s most famous preacher shied away from political jockeying, and generally stuck close to his core message, which was basically, “God loves you. Jesus died for you.”
Evangelicals had a social conscience too, though, in the 1970s, and, for a brief moment, showed promise as a group of people who now had positions of leadership in America. Newsweek dubbed 1976, “The Year of the Evangelical.” Jimmy Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, professed a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and was elected president. Graham broadcast his nationally televised “crusades,” held in packed-out stadiums, and was a guest on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Author Francis Schaeffer was so popular with college students that purportedly even rock stars like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were reading his books. By 1979, Bob Dylan made headlines by claiming he had become a “born again” follower of Jesus. The newly converted Dylan began attending church at the Vineyard fellowship, a Bible study that began, appropriately enough, in Norman’s living room.
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Carter and Norman called upon evangelical churches to do something about poverty and protested institutional racism — messages they carried nationally but also in white conservative churches in particular. But when Carter’s presidency faltered, Ronald Reagan found a different cadre of Christians with whom to share common cause and rock the vote. The relatively apolitical Graham was overshadowed by new voices in the “Moral Majority.” Television evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gained ascendance. Fundamentalist preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart and James Robison then began to have the ear of the White House, and both reviled Christian rock music in public — with Swaggart famously calling Norman’s music “spiritual fornication.”
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Within Christian circles, Hollywood, rock and roll and anything that sounded “liberal” were now the enemy in the minds of the televangelists and their legions of followers. The culture wars proceeded apace, and they kept the faithful mobilized. Subsequent evangelicals didn’t get contracts with secular record labels, as Norman once did. And if they did manage to do so, they stayed silent about their religious views. So increasingly evangelicals doubled down on building their own record companies, publishing houses, and increasingly, their own subculture. And the only time they poked their heads above their own wall was to hand out a voter’s guide or endorse a political candidate. By the time University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter coined the term “culture wars” in 1991, the die had been cast. No longer could evangelicals be a part of the cultural mainstream, and eventually they would come to be known in the mind’s eye of the public as little more than the Republican Party, now Donald Trump’s party, for the foreseeable future.
Read it all at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/20/what-evangelicals-looked-like-before-they-entered-the-political-fray/
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