Book description
In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a
group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to
strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical
direction through political action. When they emerged, the
Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could
"shake both political and religious life in America." The
following decades proved the Post both right and wrong-evangelical
participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end
it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement
and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral
monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such
promise, left behind?
In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the
evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions,
charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten
movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive
evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the
early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They
stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as
they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive
and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also
remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners,
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and
the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of
evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the
personal to the social and showed the way-organizationally and through
political activism-to what would become the much larger and more
influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had
witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again
president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political
wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical
Democratic Party and a hostile religious right.
In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all
political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a
fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of
transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.
"Swartz restores the evangelical left to its important place
in the annals of post-sixties American evangelicalism. A striking work
of research, recovery, and analysis, Moral Minority will stand
as an essential contribution to the new history of American
evangelicalism."-Steven P. Miller, author of Billy Graham and
the Rise of the Republican South
David R. Swartz teaches history at Asbury University.
