The Church and The Gospel – Part XIII

The Evangelical Road Not Taken

At Thanksgiving in 1973, more than fifty evangelical leaders gathered in Chicago and confessed that their churches had supported or tolerated racial injustice, economic inequality, militarism, materialism, and discrimination against women.¹

Six years later, Jerry Falwell helped found the Moral Majority.

Those two events represented different possible futures for evangelical public life. One future would develop into the Christian Right, with its formidable electoral machinery, media networks, fundraising systems, legal organizations, and alliance with the Republican Party. The other gathered around the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, Evangelicals for Social Action, Sojourners, John Perkins, Black evangelical leaders, and the emerging global theology of integral mission.

The Christian Right became the dominant public face of American evangelicalism. But that outcome was not inevitable, nor was it the only expression of evangelical theology available at the time.

The Chicago gathering brought together figures including Ronald Sider, Jim Wallis, John Perkins, William Pannell, Richard Mouw, Sharon Gallagher, Carl F. H. Henry, Lewis Smedes, Samuel Escobar, René Padilla, and others. The declaration that emerged began from explicitly evangelical commitments: allegiance to Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, conversion, discipleship, and the church’s responsibility to obey the whole counsel of God.²

Its signers did not dismiss individual salvation. They argued that personal conversion could not be separated from racial relationships, economic conduct, political responsibility, war, consumption, or the treatment of women. They confessed evangelical complicity in racial injustice, indifference to poor and oppressed people, materialism, economic inequality, militarism, and the subordination of women.

The declaration did not prescribe one political platform. It explicitly refused to identify Christian social responsibility with any political ideology or party. Its significance lay in establishing that evangelical commitments themselves required public repentance and social action.

This was not theological liberalism disguised in evangelical language. Participants believed that biblical authority required social engagement. They rejected the assumption that Christians had to choose between proclaiming salvation through Christ and confronting the conditions under which their neighbors suffered.

The 1973 workshop led to continuing meetings and organizing. Evangelicals for Social Action was formally launched as a national membership organization in 1978 and later became Christians for Social Action. Under Ronald Sider’s leadership, it attempted to function as a “think-and-do” network connecting biblical faith with justice and the common good.³

The organization addressed hunger, poverty, racism, peacemaking, consumerism, gender, housing, environmental stewardship, and public policy. It sought to demonstrate that evangelical social concern could be both biblically grounded and institutionally practical.

Jim Wallis and the community that became Sojourners emerged from a similar awakening. Their roots lay in opposition to the Vietnam War and in concern about racism, poverty, nuclear weapons, and economic injustice. Yet they retained evangelical language about conversion, Scripture, discipleship, and the lordship of Christ.⁴

They represented a Christianity that rejected both fundamentalist withdrawal and forms of liberal Protestantism that had sometimes lost confidence in evangelism.

This movement was diverse and frequently divided. Some participants held conservative positions on abortion or sexuality while opposing militarism, economic injustice, and racism. Sider eventually advocated a consistently pro-life ethic connecting concern for unborn life with opposition to war, capital punishment, racism, hunger, and preventable death.⁵

The movement’s moral framework did not fit neatly inside either major political party.

Integral Mission

The movement was strengthened by evangelical voices from outside the United States. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar challenged North American mission models that separated conversion from poverty, political oppression, cultural domination, and economic dependency.

Their theology of integral mission insisted that the gospel should be proclaimed, embodied, and demonstrated. Social service was not to become bait for conversion, nor was evangelism to become an excuse for ignoring the conditions in which people lived.⁶

Integral mission did not dissolve evangelism into political activism. It maintained the necessity of conversion and reconciliation with God while insisting that the gospel addresses whole persons living within actual communities, histories, cultures, and institutions.

The church could not credibly proclaim reconciliation with God while accommodating racial hierarchy, exploitation, or political oppression. Its social relationships were part of its witness.

John Perkins and Christian Community Development

John Perkins offered one of the movement’s most grounded institutional models. His approach to Christian community development emphasized relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution.

Relocation meant living in meaningful proximity to struggling communities rather than directing ministries from a safe distance. Reconciliation meant confronting racial alienation through repentance, restored relationships, and the gospel. Redistribution meant bringing skills, education, ownership, leadership, institutions, opportunity, and economic resources into communities from which they had been systematically removed.⁷

Perkins did not reduce mission to government policy or charitable relief. Evangelism, discipleship, economic development, institution-building, racial reconciliation, and local leadership belonged together.

Communities were not to remain permanent recipients of outside generosity. They were to become owners, leaders, builders, and agents of their own development.

Perkins’s model also corrected a weakness in some national evangelical social movements. Declarations and policy positions mattered, but social teaching had to become visible in neighborhoods, congregations, businesses, schools, housing, employment, and institutions that communities could control.

Black Evangelical Criticism

Tom Skinner and William Pannell contributed an equally important theological challenge. They exposed the contradiction between preaching individual salvation and refusing to confront white supremacy.

Skinner’s widely remembered address at the 1970 Urbana missions convention challenged white evangelicalism’s identification with American power and racial hierarchy. Pannell’s My Friend, the Enemy described the estrangement of Black Christians from a white evangelical culture that preached reconciliation while failing to recognize the social realities of racism.⁸

They argued, in different ways, that white evangelicalism had narrowed its understanding of sin.

Racism could not be treated simply as a collection of individual prejudices when it was also sustained through churches, neighborhoods, schools, employment, political power, and accepted interpretations of American history.

Their presence made it impossible to dismiss racial justice as a liberal distraction from the gospel. They insisted that evangelicalism apply its doctrines of sin, repentance, conversion, reconciliation, and sanctification to racial power as seriously as it applied them to personal morality.

Tony Campolo later became another recognizable voice for socially engaged evangelicalism. He emphasized poverty, racial reconciliation, youth, urban ministry, and public responsibility while retaining a strong commitment to evangelism.

These leaders differed on policy, biblical interpretation, and strategy. What joined them was the conviction that conversion should alter social relationships and that the category of “moral issues” should include more than abortion and sexuality.

Budgets, wages, housing, racism, war, environmental harm, access to health care, and the treatment of workers were also questions of life and morality.

The Rise of the Christian Right

The Christian Right developed at the intersection of several historical forces. These included conflicts over school prayer, private Christian education, school desegregation, federal pressure on racially discriminatory schools, tax-exempt status, the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, abortion, sexuality, anti-communism, pornography, and the perceived decline of Protestant cultural authority.

Historians disagree over the relative importance of these factors.

Randall Balmer has argued that conflicts involving segregated Christian schools and federal tax policy were important catalysts and that abortion later supplied a more publicly compelling organizing issue. Daniel K. Williams and other historians have emphasized a longer history involving anti-communism, opposition to abortion, family politics, education, and the increasing alliance between conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party.⁹

The evidence does not require reducing the rise of the Christian Right to one cause. It shows that political strategists successfully gathered several evangelical fears, moral concerns, resentments, and institutional interests into a durable political movement.

The founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 marked an important organizational turning point. Falwell brought a nationally recognized media ministry and established donor networks. Conservative political organizers contributed electoral strategy, direct-mail expertise, issue framing, and party relationships.

The organization helped turn diffuse cultural anxiety into voter registration, fundraising, lobbying, media messaging, and support for candidates.¹⁰

The Christian Right did not prevail simply because conservative Christians cared more deeply about their issues. It developed a translation system capable of moving ideas into repeated congregational and political practice.

National organizations supplied messages. Radio and television supplied repetition. Churches supplied local networks. Voter guides supplied electoral direction. Fundraising systems supplied continuity. Legal organizations carried selected principles into courts. Party alliances connected moral concerns to appointments, legislation, and political power.

The evangelical social-action movement never developed comparable capacity. It influenced seminaries, publishers, mission organizations, community-development groups, and individual congregations, but it did not become the dominant public expression of American evangelicalism.

Its problem was not an absence of moral conviction. It was an absence of institutional translation.

Declarations did not automatically become sermons. Books did not automatically become congregational curricula. National conferences did not automatically reshape church budgets. Charismatic leaders did not automatically produce organizations capable of surviving them.

A social ethic becomes durable only when churches learn to transmit it through preaching, discipleship, ministerial formation, budgeting, investment, mission partnerships, leadership selection, public discernment, and the routine evaluation of institutional practices.

The Christian Right built that machinery more successfully, even when its moral agenda was narrower.¹¹

The Weaknesses of the Alternative

The evangelical road not taken should not be romanticized.

Progressive evangelical institutions sometimes relied too heavily on national personalities, magazines, conferences, and books. They did not consistently develop deep congregational constituencies. Broad concern for poverty or justice was not always matched by economic knowledge, policy discipline, organizational strategy, or persuasive communication to ordinary church members.

Some organizations gradually became predictable members of progressive political coalitions. When that happened, they faced the same temptation they criticized in conservative evangelicalism: allowing a political coalition to determine which biblical concerns received emphasis and which contradictions were ignored.

Social concern does not automatically produce sound policy. A compassionate proposal can fail. A government program can become ineffective or coercive. Structural explanations can underestimate culture, family, agency, entrepreneurship, or personal responsibility. Churches can substitute fashionable political language for careful theology.

Yet criticism from the evangelical right often concealed its own ideological captivity. Market individualism, nationalism, military power, racial hierarchy, and concentrated private power could be treated as neutral or natural, while structural analysis was condemned as political.

Churches were warned against “politics” when addressing poverty or racial injustice but encouraged to organize politically around conservative priorities.

Both evangelical awakenings were organized by fear.

The emerging Christian Right feared secularization, changing sexual norms, feminism, government intrusion, and the loss of Christian cultural authority.

Evangelical social activists feared that biblical orthodoxy had become compatible with racism, poverty, militarism, consumerism, and indifference to suffering.

Both sets of fears identified real dangers. The decisive question was which fears would organize evangelical institutions.

Recovering the Road

The historical importance of the evangelical road not taken lies in the possibility it preserved.

Evangelicalism did not have to choose between private conversion and secular social reform. It could proclaim Christ, make disciples, build local institutions, confront racism, address poverty, pursue peace, affirm family responsibility, support productive enterprise, care for creation, and evaluate public policy through a biblical social ethic.

Recovering that possibility would require more than reviving old organizations or celebrating neglected leaders.

Seminaries would need to teach evangelical social thought as part of ministerial formation. Congregations would need to examine their budgets, employment practices, investments, property, neighborhood relationships, and political formation.

Churches would have to receive correction from the global body of Christ rather than allowing American party politics to define the boundaries of Christian concern.

Social teaching would need to survive beyond charismatic founders through institutions capable of preserving memory, measuring practice, testing policy, and admitting error.

The Chicago Declaration, Evangelicals for Social Action, Sojourners, John Perkins, Black evangelical leaders, and integral mission never produced an evangelical equivalent to Catholic social teaching.

They did, however, create part of a distributed social tradition.

That tradition remains available to a church willing to recover it.

The Christian Right is one stream within evangelical public theology. It is not the whole river.

A church cannot recover possibilities it has forgotten ever existed.

Endnotes — Chicago Notes Style

1. “A Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern,” adopted November 25, 1973, Chicago, reprinted as an appendix to John Bower, “Social Action—A Christian Mandate,” Direction 7, no. 1 (January 1978): 10. See especially the declaration’s confessions concerning racial injustice, economic inequality, materialism, militarism, and discrimination against women.
2. Emily Banas, “‘A Prophetic Document’: The 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern,” Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, November 1, 2023.
3. Wheaton College Archives records the formal national launch of Evangelicals for Social Action in 1978. Palmer Theological Seminary describes the later Christians for Social Action as a “think-and-do” network associated with Ronald J. Sider.
4. Jim Wallis, “From a Shoebox to a Movement,” Sojourners, November 2011; see also the institutional history of Sojourners and its origins in evangelical opposition to war, racism, and poverty.
5. Ronald J. Sider, Completely Pro-Life: Building a Consistent Stance on Abortion, the Family, Nuclear Weapons, the Poor (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987).
6. C. René Padilla, Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1985); Samuel Escobar, The New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).
7. Christian Community Development Association, “CCD Philosophy,” sections on relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution; John M. Perkins, Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993).
8. Tom Skinner, “Racism and World Evangelism,” address delivered at Urbana 1970; William E. Pannell, My Friend, the Enemy (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1968).
9. Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2021); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). The two works place different weight on racial-school controversies, abortion, anti-communism, party development, and other sources of conservative evangelical mobilization.
10. William C. Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996); Williams, God’s Own Party.
11. David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Brantley W. Gasaway, Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).