Mainstream Protestantism, “Conservative” Religion, and Civil Society

Just fifty-five years ago, the idea of a front-running presidential candidate from either the Democratic or Republican parties campaigning at Bob Jones University was unthinkable. After all, BJU was on the cultural periphery owing to its fundamentalist reputation. Having lost the battles in the mainline Protestant denominations and having suffered the ignominy of the Scopes Trial, fundamentalists like those who sent their children to Bob Jones in the 1940s were so busy trying to recover from these defeats that the thought of deciding a presidential election would have been delusional. Carl F. H. Henry spoke volumes for the movement when in his important little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism (1947), he lamented that for “the first protracted period in its history,” the evangelical faith of fundamentalists stood “divorced from the great social reform movements.” Henry, who was emerging as an influential leader of a new generation of fundamentalists, neo-evangelicals as they would call themselves, wrote this book as a protest against fundamentalism's self-chosen social and political isolation. In other words, the task for evangelical leaders at mid-century was to prod fundamentalists back into public life. And this is what makes George W. Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University during the weeks leading up to the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary truly remarkable. It reveals a seismic shift among conservative Protestants. Within a brief period, evangelicals went from denouncing politics as a form of worldliness to demanding a place at the table.