The modern or New Evangelicalism is commonly believed to have evolved principally out of Protestant fundamentalism during the 1940s. New organizations arose, such as the National Association of Evangelicals and Youth for Christ, a new phenomenon appeared in evangelism in the person of Billy Graham, and a number of conservative young scholars appeared to contend for the historic Christian faith and to challenge the social myopia of traditional fundamentalism. One of these bright young intellectuals was Carl F. H. Henry, whose explosive book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) chastened fundamentalism for lacking “social passion” and also dared to characterize fundamentalism as “the modern priest and Levite, by-passing suffering humanity.” Carl Henry’s charge that fundamentalism had failed to apply Christian teachings to “the cardinal social issues of the times” struck a responsive chord among thoughtful coreligionists, and earned him recognition as a “young prophet” of evangelicalism.
At the same time that Henry spoke, a second pioneer scholar of the New Evangelicalism, Harold J. Ockenga, similarly deplored the “ethical indifferentism” of traditional fundamentalism, and challenged his fellow believers to a biblically-sensitized social concern: If the Bible-believing Christian is on the wrong side of social problems such as war, race, class, labor, liquor, irnperialism, etc., it is time to get over the fence to the right side. The church needs a progressive fundamentalism with a social message.
Dr. Ockenga later reaffirmed this care for social ethics when he stated: "My personal concern as the originator of the New Evangelicalism has been to stir the interest of evangelical Christianity in meeting the societal problems through the context of Biblical Christianity."
The summons of Carl Henry and Harold Ockenga to confront social problems with the compassion and perspective of biblical Christianity was answered in 1956 by the creation of Christianity Today, a forthightly religious magazine that spoke for evangelicalism’s
emerging leadership. With Carl Henry as editor-in-chief, and with Harold Ockenga and Billy Graham included among an impressive array of Contributing Editors, the first issue heralded the magazine’s reason for being: to serve as evangelicalism’s “clear voice ... to state its true position and its relevance to the world crisis.” As this “clear voice,” the editors laid claim to a quasi-biblical authority, for they purposed to “apply the biblical revelation to the contemporary social crisis, by presenting the implications of the total Gospel message for every area of life.” This claim to special authority was repeated later, as when the editors reaffirmed their earnest attempt “to make no statements beyond those we think can be supported from the Word of God.”
Given then the New Evangelicalism’s repudiation of fundamentalism’s lack of social concern, and given its own claim to a biblically-enlightened social conscience, how would this principal organ of the New Evangelicalism meet and interpret the social crises of civil rights for black Americans and the war in Vietnam? What would this “clear voice” say? The appearance of Christianity Today in 1956 coincided chronologically with the start of the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama. However, ideologically the editors und the integrationists were some distance apart, as appears from the editors’ counter-solution to the racial crisis, and from their attacks upon the integrationists.
The editors announced that the solütion to the race question lay in Christ and in the teachings of scripture. They then developed the “biblical point of view” by explaining that this view condemns racial pride and discrimination on the one hand, while on the other it approves “voluntary segregation.” “This meant that integrationists violated biblical ethics, because “forced integration is as contrary to Christian principles as is forced segregation.” It also legitimized segregation for the Christian church, because: A voluntary segregation, even of believers, can well be a Christian procedure. ... Churches in which integration is not practiced may be just as Christian as those where it is found.
The attacks upon integrationists followed logically from the biblicizing of voluntary segregation, and were consistent with the editors’ concern to “apply the biblical revelation to the contemporary social crisis.” The attacks challenged the leadership and the tactics of the Civil Rights movement, and on one occasion praised Southern resistance to racial integration. In addition, the editors repeatedly condemned interracial marriage.
The magazine attacked integrationists for promoting “Big Government,” “Federal controls,’’‘‘semi-socialistic schemes,” and a “quasi-socialistic political economy.” They condemned even the moderate leadership of Martin Luther King, charging that “communism ... is implicit in his integrationist ideology.” When Dr. King complained that the F.B.I. was remiss in its civil rights responsibilities, the editors reported that this “slur” was met by Director Hoover’s “reply” that Dr. King “is the most notorious liar in the country.” Later, two months before Martin King’s death, the editors called upon black Americans to “decisively repudiate leaders who incite hatred and violence,” including “possibly even the Martin Luther Kings.” This critical stance toward Dr. King changed three months later, when, following his death, the magazine belatedly hailed him as the nation’s “greatest Negro leader.”
The nonviolent tactics of the Civil Rights movement fared no better than did its leadership. Executive Editor L. Nelson Bell not only condemned civil disobedience, but questioned whether Christians should demonstrate against any law, “just or unjust.” In like manner, the 1963 March on Washington, at which Mahalia Jackson sang and Martin King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, was denigrated as a “mob spectacle.” The editors characterized this demonstration as an exercise of “mob pressures” and questioned the propriety of church support for such “mob political demonstrations.” The editors noted that this “Washington spectacle was void of official evangelical representation,” and they commented that from the “outrageous judgement” to suggest that America intends to profit from the war in Vietnam. They frequently rebuked churches and clergy for opposing the war, as when they recommended that protesting District of Columbia clergy “put their hands to their mouths.” They told Christian ministers to reassure young men that it is “worthwhile” to serve in Vietnam, and charged that a minister who doubts the “validity of our bountry’s position will be of no spiritual help to the young man with a letter from his draft board. The minister dare not let his personal beliefs keep him from his ministry.” They favored enforcement of the law against persons who destroyed draft cards or selective service records, yet rpcommended “that justice will be tempered with mercy” when an American lieutenant was charged with war crimes in Vietnam.
The editors’ defense of America’s “great” and “just cause” in Vietnam ended with America’s withdrawal from the conflict. They then reversed their earlier statements of support of the war, concluding that the United States had “fought under mysterious conditions and for no means convincing reasons.” And, even though they had earlier charged the civilian population of North Vietnam with “responsibility” for the war, they now exculpated American soldiers of all moral blame, concluding that “even if historians subsequently decide that the rulers were in the wrong, no individual blame will attach to the individual soldiers.”
In conclusion, the record of Evangelicalism’s response tothe war in Vietnam repeated the pattern of its respohse to the blacks’ cry for civil rights. In each instance, the “clear voice” of Christianity Today affirmed a position that it later abandoned as untenable. It relinquished its 1950s dogma of “voluntary segregation,” and it repudiated its 1960s credo of sinless intent (i.e. the “United States has no ulterior motives” in Vietnam). Yet, in each of these humbling and painful first tests, Evangelicalism did dare to change and to grow. And, having erred itself, it is now readier to embrace the gracious spirit of John R.W. Stott, who declares that evangelicals can yet learn from their critics, some of whose “rejection of our position is not a repudiation of biblical truth, but of out evangelical caricatures of it.”
John W. Oliver was associate professor of history at Malone College in Canton, Ohio, when this article appeared in The Post-American.
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