WASHINGTON (ABP) — There's no question that in the last few decades evangelical Christians have asserted their growing power in America's public life.
The question, according to two new books, is: By what methods, and to what end?
Former Washington Post reporter Hanna Rosin and Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay both recently wrote books detailing evangelicals' attempts to move into the corridors of power, with results that many of them probably didn't expect. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently invited the authors to tell journalists what their research reveals about evangelicals' evolving role in American public life.
Rosin spent more than a year observing life at Patrick Henry College, a seven-year-old liberal-arts school in a Virginia town just outside the nation's capital. The result was God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. Patrick Henry, named for the famous Founding Father and headed by home-schooling activist Michael Farris, aims to give ambitious evangelical students the ammunition they need, via a classical liberal-arts education, to fight the so-called “culture wars.”
“They explicitly put themselves close to Washington because they kind of see themselves as a training academy for politics,” Rosin said of the college. She noted that its early graduates have already made a mark on Washington, with many of them rising through the ranks of President Bush's administration as well as serving powerful Republican members of Congress.
The students, faculty and administrators at Patrick Henry tend to be very conservative, and most favor using government to advance what they believe to be the Christian cause.
“They are much more successful and driven than your sort of average ambitious college student,” Rosin said. “You've got the most extreme in religion and the most extreme in ambition, and you try to marry those two together.”
However, she said, many former Patrick Henry students — who often come from sheltered backgrounds — get to Washington or the statehouse and discover that politics isn't always as pure a calling as they imagined.
“They discoverer that young Republicans drink, and they sleep around, and they go to Oktoberfest and all the things that … young conservative Christians are not supposed to do,” Rosin said.
And, since legislative work in a democracy often requires significant compromise to get anything done, ideological purity becomes difficult to maintain when holding the reins of power.
“As we all know, becoming part of the mainstream tends to dull your edges a little bit,” Rosin said. “I think there's just an inverse relationship between vocalized religious extremism and political success.”
While Rosin did her research, Patrick Henry went through a significant amount of turmoil due to a conflict over academic freedom between administrators and many of the faculty and students. Several faculty members left the school.
Rosin noted that many would-be culture warriors, when confronted with ideas in the books that Patrick Henry's curriculum very purposefully includes, often reach conclusions other than those the school's founders might have envisioned.
“It's perfectly possible that Nietzsche and Kant are much more interesting to you than your Bible class, all the sudden,” she said.
Far more apolitical kinds of culture warriors are the focus of Lindsay's book. Titled Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, the work asserts that evangelicals have had mixed results from their foray into political involvement but have had success in America's other culture-shaping institutions.
“Evangelical influence is a whole lot more than we think and a whole lot less than we think at the same time,” he said. “If you just pay attention to what's going on in Washington and don't pay attention to Silicon Valley … you miss a lot of the principal ways in which evangelicals have been mobilized over the last 30 years.”
Lindsay asserted that evangelical donors and organizations are investing as much, if not more, resources in creating new leaders who bring a Christ-centered approach in other areas of culture: entertainment, the arts, academia and business. Those people, he said, have an impact on the culture far beyond any political activism.
He posits a difference between what he calls “populist evangelicals” and “cosmopolitan evangelicals.” The populist camp makes up much of the old-guard leadership of the Religious Right, and many younger evangelicals have begun to question their style and goals.
“I think that generation is dying off and is being replaced with” the cosmopolitans, Lindsay said. “This is the evangelicalism of the establishment, where the edges have been softened.”
Lindsay — who counts many of the new evangelical cultural leaders among his cosmopolitans — said they are the ones who “rub shoulders in the secular world all the time, but they don't lose their faith as a result of that.”
As an example he quoted Peter Gomes, the longtime Baptist chaplain at Harvard and minister of Harvard's Memorial Church, who recently said there are more evangelicals at Harvard now than at any other time in his tenure.
The evangelicals at Harvard and their equivalents in other culture-shaping institutions are learning how to change culture through small spheres of influence, believing they'll have bigger long-term results than if they had used only political power.
“These provide sort of the institutional apparatus, the long-term repositories, that evangelicals can sort of organize around,” Lindsay said.
-30-