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.