Did Evangelicals Re-Engage Culture with Neo-Evangelicalism?

Did Evangelicals Re-Engage Culture with Neo-Evangelicalism? April 29, 2015

The standard narrative: the fundamentalist movement turned American evangelicals/fundamentalists away from cultural, political and social involvement and Carl Henry’s famous The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism called evangelicals back into the engagement. In Matthew Avery Sutton’s new book, American Apocalypse, that story is challenged, and here are three lines then the pertinent paragraph calling Henry to task, and I reformat that last paragraph to create a dialogue:

At the time of his death in 2003, the New York Times called the tall, prickly conservative the “brain” of the evangelical movement. Since the publication of The Uneasy Conscience historians and evangelicals have been seduced by Henry’s vision of the past and his call for a new, culturally engaged evangelicalism.

The problem:

But Henry did bad history.

Why?

He mischaracterized pre-World War II fundamentalism in order to give his generation a fresh start and a clean slate in the postwar period.

How did he mischaracterize the previous period? Two ways:

[1] Although his anticommunist sensibilities, conservative politics, apocalyptic premillennialism, and vision for rebuilding the evangelical movement had much more in common with interwar fundamentalism than he ever acknowledged, he tried to disavow the past. [2] He minimized fundamentalists’ intense interwar political activism and sought to disown all of the failed prophecy, ugly racism, and embarrassing internal squabbles of the interwar years.

What did he create out of this narrative he told? (Italics added.)

Beginning with the launch of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942 and continuing over the next decade and a half, radical evangelicals crafted a culturally savvy, professional movement. A new generation— along with important players from the previous generation—sanded down fundamentalism’s rough edges and relegated its most colorful characters to the sidelines. Henry, along with Harold Ockenga, L. Nelson Bell, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, and others transformed fundamentalism from a dispersed, decentralized movement into one carefully directed by a powerful and culturally influential white male elite. 

Pp. 294-295.


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