In the 1920s the fundamentalists abandoned the culture to the modernists and humanist secularizers, and they also lost control of the large mainline churches in the 1930s. The mainline modernist Protestant establishment had won the war with the fundamentalists to be the church’s voice, but they were in the twilight years of their power to set the tone for American culture. The liberal churches’ triumph coincided with the advent of the Great Depression, and they assisted in setting the political course for the nation in those troubled times. In 1908, the highly humanistic and socialistic tenets of the liberal churches’ defunct social gospel movement had been codified in the Social Creed of the Churches by the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America.[1] Many of these recommendations were resurrected and implemented as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. However, the America over which the triumphant humanists, secularizers, and liberal churches presided remained in turmoil through 1945 and beyond.
As end of World War II approached, there were momentary feelings of euphoria, goodwill, and hope for a more cooperative world order among the soon to be victorious allied nations. But when the gates of the death camps swung open at the end of the war to reveal the horrors of Nazi atrocities, those illusions quickly melted away as the realities of war exposed the heart of mankind and his capacity for evil. J. N. Robert’s summarized the post-war search for answers as to the “why” of Nazi Germany.
In many ways, Germany had been one of the most progressive countries in Europe; the embodiment of much that was best in its civilization. That Germany should fall prey to collective derangement on this scale suggested that something had been wrong at the root of that civilization itself. The crimes of the Nazis had been carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific controlled, bureaucratic (though often inefficient) way, about which there was little that was irrational except the appalling end which it sought.[2] [emphasis added]
The post-war world remained puzzled at Germany’s “collective derangement” given its veneer of rationality and scientific and cultural progress. That “something” that had been wrong at the root of the civilization over which the Nazis presided was evil. But the evil found at the root of its civilization spread far beyond Germany’s borders. Much of the world also worshiped the same gods of rationalism, science, materialism, secularism, and progress. They had assumed the nature of man was basically good, but the realities of the war removed humanism’s mask of goodness to reveal the hideous face of evil. And the source of that collective evil resides in the heart of every person who ever lived.[3]
Following two world wars separated by the Great Depression, mankind was having second thoughts about managing its own affairs through reliance on the naïve claims of Enlightenment philosophies and their humanistic prescriptions. Therefore, following World War II, God was back “in style,” and America was seen as His most favored evangelist.
The end of World War II saw the reemergence of evangelical Protestantism as a substantial force in American life. Even Catholic writer Ross Douthat, a severe critic of much of Protestantism, called evangelical Protestantism a “…postwar revival of American Christianity, which ushered in a kind of Indian summer for orthodox belief.”[4] These were neo-evangelicals who still held to fundamentalist views of the Bible but sought to escape from their separatism and engage the culture with a “redemptive vision that would not only embrace individuals but also social structures and institutions.”[5] There were several key players that led the revival of American Christianity during this period, but first it is helpful in understanding the neo-evangelical era following World War II to briefly examine the demographics and social conditions that supported and encouraged this reemergence of evangelical Protestantism but also sowed the seeds that led to its decline beginning in the late 1960s.
Douthat’s Indian summer of evangelical Protestantism closely overlays the birth and growing-up years of the Boomer generation which most historians mark as beginning at the close of 1945 and lasting through the end of 1964. During those years, six areas of significant shared events and formative experiences shaped the Boomer generation and what they became in the late 1960s and beyond: child rearing techniques influenced by Benjamin Spock instilled a spirit of permissiveness; a progressive, humanistic educational model based on John Dewey’s teachings; the advent of television and its attendant acculturation of children; the exceptionally large and dominating Boomer cohort; unparalleled prosperity; and a burst of technological advances. Each of these influences and their outworking can be seen in the Boomer personality that emerged by the middle to late 1960s.[6]
The large size of the Boomer cohort did not cause the reemergence of evangelical Protestantism, but it certainly fueled its growth. It is estimated that between seventy-six and eighty million Boomers were born between the end of 1945 the end of 1964. The birth rate per year during that nineteen year span averaged 24.3 live births per 1000 in population. This compares to 19.9 for the sixteen-year period 1930 through 1945 and only 15.8 for the thirty-six year period from 1965 through 2000.[7]
Just as remarkable as the rapid population growth was the rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in both numbers and stature in American culture. The number of Americans who were formally affiliated with a church or a denomination increased steadily: 43 percent in 1930, 49 percent in 1940, 55 percent in 1950, and 69 percent in 1960, perhaps the highest in all of American history.[8] Church construction increased from $26 million in 1945 to $409 million in 1950 and more than doubled again to $1 billion in 1960. When polled about who was doing the most good in the nation’s common life, 46 percent of Americans named the clergy whose favorable numbers far exceeded those of politicians, businessmen, and labor leaders.[9]
American evangelical Protestantism was vigorous and energized in tens of thousands of churches in thousands of cities and towns from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. This vitality was both denominationally and locally driven through revivals, Sunday schools, literature, conventions, and conferences. There were also voices rising on the national scene in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s that would use the new medium of television and other mass media to further the cause of evangelism both nationally and locally. The two most prominent revivalists in the 1950s were a Catholic Bishop and a Baptist preacher.
The Catholic Bishop
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) was an experienced radio broadcaster on the Catholic Hour during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1951, Sheen was an auxiliary bishop for New York when he was asked to fill a thirty-minute slot at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, typically considered a ratings graveyard. Within a few years Sheen became one of the first celebrities in the early days of television as his viewership eventually climbed to thirty million.[10] Sheen presented his message of apologetics mixed with moral advice to a vast audience comprised mostly of non-Catholics.
One of the failures of the today’s evangelical churches has been the abandonment of any hint of the clergy’s traditional authority as an accommodation to the egalitarian spirit of the age. When the lost in any culture seeks truth and answers to the daunting questions of life, they have little respect for or listen to a faith, Christian or otherwise, that by its appearance, actions, and preaching appears weak, insipid, and ineffectual. Bishop Sheen understood the need for an aura of clerical authority.
When the great apologist set out to bring the Catholic faith to a mass-market audience, he didn’t doff his collar and throw on blue jeans; instead, his prime-time performances drew much of their power from the way his costume and style hinted at an authority that transcended the spirit of the age.[11] [emphasis added]
This author was a young Protestant child of the 1950s who vividly remembers being spellbound by Bishop Sheen as he presented the powerful and timeless stories from the Bible and applied them in such a dramatic and sensible fashion to the problems of modern life, even those of an eight or nine year old boy. One writer described Sheen and the compelling nature of his program.
Sheen may have been the finest popular lecturer ever to appear on television…he was elegant, elevated, relaxed, often very funny…The show had a precise formula. Sheen, wearing his bishop’s cross, crimson cape, and skullcap, would stride into a parlor-like studio, pause, tell a humorous story, and then pose the problem for the evening…The problem analysis inevitably pointed in one direction—to humanity’s need for God, for Truth, for Divine Love.[12]
Although Sheen’s philosophy was very Catholic, he never mentioned the Catholic Church or its doctrine. He connected with his non-Catholic viewers because “…he somehow made a very particular form of Christian thought seem like the natural common ground for a pious but deeply pluralistic society.”[13]
The Baptist Preacher
In 1946, the dean of the Harvard Divinity School stated that the tradition of revivals had been entirely discredited by the hacks and hucksters of fundamentalism. However, just three years later a thirty-one year old Baptist preacher proved the dean and his liberal colleagues greatly mistaken. Billy Graham was born in 1918 and raised in rural North Carolina during the Depression. His father was a dairy farmer who had only three years of formal schooling. Once Presbyterians, they joined a dispensationalist church whose roots were unquestionably fundamentalist—both literalist in reading the scripture and apocalyptic regarding the end of the age. After attending several Bible colleges during the 1930s, Graham was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1939. He received his degree and met his future wife at Illinois’s Wheaton College in the early 1940s. Graham had a talent for preaching and traveled the revival circuit to hone his skills.[14]
In 1949, Graham’s eight-week tent meeting revival in Los Angeles attracted 350,000 and marked the beginning of his meteoric rise in the nation’s consciousness that has lasted into the second decade of the twenty-first century.[15] In 1957, Graham had been the most celebrated evangelist for almost a decade when he and his organization staged the famous 1957 Manhattan crusade which featured a 4000 member choir, 3000 ushers, and thousands of counselors for those who had made a decision for Christ. For sixteen weeks Graham preached to twenty thousand per night at Madison Square Gardens. On one mid-summer day the crusade was taken to Yankee Stadium and broke all attendance records when 100,000 attended. The crusade ended on Labor Day weekend with an open-air meeting surrounded by skyscrapers at 42nd and Broadway’s Times Square which attracted a crowd comparable in size to the one at Yankee Stadium.[16]
Recall that in the preceding chapter it was noted that during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial the New York Times had described the defenders of fundamentalist doctrines as freaks, queer fish, half-baked creatures, and having unregulated or ill-balanced minds.[17] Thirty-two years later, Graham was so popular and well-respected that the Times began printing the texts of Graham’s Manhattan crusade sermons. Other media took notice such as ABC who broadcasted hour-long segments of the revival.[18] Billy Graham had accomplished something remarkable in American Christianity. He had taken revivalism and its evangelical adherents from the wilderness and scorn to Main Street and respectability. Douthat described the magnitude of Graham’s accomplishment in the remarkable change of America’s attitude toward evangelicals.
…his style was something else—ecumenical, openhanded, confident, American. The revivalists of fundamentalism’s wilderness years were figures of fun for nonbelievers…and by the early 1940s revivalism itself seemed to be on the verge of dying out…But Graham almost singlehandedly revitalized the form, using it to carry an Evangelical message from the backwoods tent meetings to the nation’s biggest cities and arenas—and then overseas as well, to Europe and the Third World and even behind the Iron Curtain…Billy Graham had done the near-impossible; he had carried Evangelical Christianity from the margins to the mainstream, making Evangelical faith seem respectable as well as fervent, not only relevant but modern.[19]
The difference between Graham and the fundamentalists of an earlier generation was that he did not abandon but engaged the culture. What is all the more remarkable is that the source and substance of Graham’s message never changed to fit the mood of the times. Some may challenge this last statement by pointing to Graham’s big city crusades in which he cooperated not only with evangelicals but embraced mainline Protestants and Catholic leaders and referring those responding to the altar call to their churches where appropriate. But here Graham did not compromise his beliefs but seems to have followed the example of C. S. Lewis who also engaged the culture of the unchurched world through his World War II radio broadcasts later published as Mere Christianity.
The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’…I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted (in writing Mere Christianity). But it is in the room, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in…
You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’[20]
Like Lewis, Graham was engaging the culture and bringing them into the hall. He was speaking to the spiritually lost in his big city crusades and television appearances, whether they were the unchurched or church members in name only. His mission was to win the hearts of his audience to Christ and deliver them to the door of a local church.
In their quest for relevance and dialogue, many modern evangelical churches have confused the hall as being the rooms. For them, the hall has become the final destination from which one never progresses theologically. Douthat pinpoints the source of this modern evangelical confusion, “In their attempts to woo the biggest possible audience, megachurch pastors have watered down Evangelical theology and ignored much of their own Reformation heritage.” [21] Sadly, a great number of America’s evangelical churches are living in the same hall as the megachurch experts who supposedly have figured out a better way to do church. However, their congregations long for the meat of the Word and the intimacy of fellowship with God to be found only in the warm and welcoming rooms of their particular faith.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 376.
[2] Ibid., p. 964.
[3] Larry G. Johnson, “This was done by ordinary people – Part I,” CultureWarrior.net, May 30, 2014. https://www.culturewarrior.net/2014/05/30/this-was-done-by-ordinary-people-part-i/ (accessed September 21, 2015).
[4] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 21.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 18.
[6] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 37.
[7] Ibid., p. 31.
[8] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 839.
[9] Douthat, p. 22.
[10] Ibid., pp. 22-23, 40-41.
[11] Ibid., p. 44.
[12] Ibid., p. 41.
[13] Ibid., quoting Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church.
[14] Ibid., pp. 33, 35.
[15] Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 839
[16] Douthat, pp. 32.
[17] Richard W. Flory, “Promoting a Secular Standard,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 405-406.
[18] Douthat, p. 32.
[19] Ibid., pp. 35, 37.
[21] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, (New York: Harper One, 1952, 2002), pp. 5, 11.
[21] Douthat, pp. 287-287.
