Understanding Mike Huckabee using Explo '72

Hmm. Had a sister who was there. I bet all this really sounds strange to Inside the Beltway Supply Side Conservatives. My favorite paragraphs with a great big, "Go Zachary!"

Looking back, it is hard to appreciate just how revolutionary these steps were for evangelicals in 1972. Crusade's Mr. Bright, one of the most influential evangelicals of the post-World War II generation, had long rejected rock music -- along with long hair and dancing. Less than a year before Explo, he told a reporter that rock 'n' roll "wasn't for us . . . because of the complaints of ex-addicts." At the time, conservative evangelicals strongly associated rock music with drug abuse. Mr. Bright's son Zachary remembers telling his father: "You can have a conservative view of music and keep what worked for you, or you can win [young people to Christ]." "I'd rather win," Campus Crusade's president responded.

The organization's embrace of rock music at Explo '72 went a long way toward revolutionizing evangelicalism's relationship with popular culture. Only a few fundamentalists seriously swim against the cultural tide today. Explo may not have changed the world, but it changed American evangelicalism.

Difference between evangelicals and church-going evangelicals

Wish the pollsters would change their research methodologies. It would make a difference. Not all evangelicals attend church, for instance.

My recent research for the Russell Sage Foundation indicates that evangelicals who attend religious services weekly, when compared with average Americans, are less likely to cohabit as young adults (1% vs. 10% of other young adults), to bear a child outside of wedlock (12% vs. 33% of other moms) and to divorce (7% vs. 9% of other married adults divorced from 1988 to 1993). So churchgoing evangelicals, who are also the ones most likely to be involved in political and pastoral efforts to strengthen the family, are actually achieving some success in their efforts to focus on the family.

But their nominal brethren--that is, evangelicals who attend church rarely or never--are a different story. According to my research, nominal evangelicals have sex before other teens, cohabit and have children outside of wedlock at rates that are no different than the population at large, and are much more likely to divorce than average Americans. One reason that nominal evangelicals have been particularly vulnerable to the family revolution of the past 40 years is that they are much more likely to be poor and uneducated than other Americans.

But even after controlling for class, I find that nominal evangelicals do worse than other Americans. Why? I suspect that many nominal evangelicals are products of a Scotch-Irish "redneck" culture, still found in parts of Appalachia and the South, that Thomas Sowell and the late Southern historian Grady McWhiney argue has historically been marked by higher levels of promiscuity, violence and impulsive behavior. This cultural inheritance, and not their Protestantism, probably helps to account for the poor family performance of nominal evangelicals.

So the next time one hears about evangelicals trying to impose their family values on the rest of us, remember that they are probably more concerned about the families of their nominally Protestant brothers, cousins, neighbors and friends in the Bible Belt than they are about folks in Massachusetts.

Sex and the Evangelical Teen - good grief!

From Gene Edward Veith over at World. We are the world! We are the children!

Christian parents and churches need to face up to a problem long hidden in the dark: Evangelical teenagers are just as sexually active as their non-Christian friends.

In fact, there is evidence that evangelical teenagers on the whole may be more sexually immoral than non-Christians. Statistically, evangelical teens tend to have sex first at a younger age, 16.3, compared to liberal Protestants, who tend to lose their virginity at 16.7. And young evangelicals are far more likely to have had three or more sexual partners (13.7 percent) than non-evangelicals (8.9 percent).

What about abstinence pledges? Those work—for a while—delaying sex on an average of about 18 months, with 88 percent of pledgers eventually giving up their vow to remain virgins until marriage.

Evangelical scandal

Ron Sider wrote a volume called The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. In his chapter on “The Depth of the Scandal” he starts off with a quote by Michael Horton: “Evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.” Then come the statistics and other data from the research:

• Conservative protestants are more likely to divorce than the rest of the population and the rates are higher where conservative Protestants make up a higher percentage of the population in the country.
  
  
• As evangelicals have gotten richer, we have spent more on ourselves and given smaller percentages to the church. Evangelicals give about two-fifths of a tithe.
  
  
• Born-again adults cohabit with members of the opposite sex without marriage only a little lower than the general public.
  
  
• 26 percent of traditional evangelicals do not think premarital sex is wrong and 13 percent says it is okay for married persons to have sex with someone other than one’s spouse.
  
  
• The percentage of Christian men involved in pornography is not much different than that of the unsaved.
  
  
• Coach Bill McCartney of the Promise Keepers thinks a major reason attendance dropped dramatically in his organization’s stadium events was their stand on racial reconciliation.
  
  
• Husbands who attended conservative Protestant churches or held conservative theological views were no more or less likely to engage in domestic abuse than others. Theologically conservative Christians commit domestic abuse at least as often as the general public.
  

Sider also quotes Peter E. Gillquist who says that “All the evangelism in the world from a church that is not herself holy and righteous will not be worth a hill of beans in world-changing power.” Modern evangelicalism, is in a “modern Babylonian captivity and we do not yet know it.” But Sider ends with what he deems a “ray of hope.” Cited is research in the early nineties by George Gallup Jr. and Timothy Jones called The Saints Among Us. A twelve-question survey was used to identify heroic and faithful individual Christians.

1. My religious faith is the most important influence in my life.
2. I seek God’s will through prayer.
3. I believe that God loves me even though I may not always obey him.
4. I try hard to put my religious beliefs into practice in my relations with all people, regardless of their backgrounds.
5. I receive comfort and support from my religious beliefs.
6. I believe that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine.
7. I wish my religious beliefs were stronger.
8. I believe in the full authority of the Bible.
9. I do things I don’t want to do because I believe it is the will of God.
10. God gives me the strength, that I would not otherwise have, to forgive people who have hurt me deeply.
11. I try to bring others to Christ through the way I live or through discussion or prayer.
12. I wish my relationships with other Christians were stronger.

“Saints” were those who agreed with every question. “Super-saints” was the name for those who agreed “strongly” with every question.

The “saints”, found Gallup and Jones, lived differently:

• 42 percent of the strongly uncommitted (answered all questions with disagree or strongly disagree) spent “a good deal of time” helping needy people compared with 73 percent of the “saints” and 85 percent of the “super-saints”
  
  
• 63 percent of the spiritually uncommitted reported they would not object to having a different race neighbor. But 84 percent of the “saints” and 93 percent of the “super-saints” said they would not object.
  
  
• 71 percent of the spiritually uncommitted believed it is important to forgive people who had hurt them. 98 percent of the “saints” and 100 percent of the “supersaints” agreed.
  
  
• 71 percent of the spiritually uncommitted and 100 percent of both the saints and supersaints “try to follow a strict moral code.”
  

The idea of “saints” for Gallup and Jones are what we call, in this volume, “witnesses.” The content of the “witness’” character is different and uncommon. And it makes a difference in life. Gallup/Jones says that

There appears to be a great deal of self-centered, provincial faith – extrinsic religion…that makes little difference in people’s lives. Extrinsic faith tends to be more institution-centered, and primarily something to be called on in crisis.

But, say the authors,

For a society tempted to think that only a highly visible few – the Billy Grahams and Mother Teresas – make a difference, our research shows otherwise. Our interviews with the friends, associates, and neighbors of the saints among us lead us to conclude that they have an impact on society far out of proportion to their numbers.

Campolo...on conservatives

This is from a Tony Campolo interview.

Q. How do you feel about evangelicals becoming involved in environmental issues?

A. Evangelicals have tended to be conservative and that has led them to take positions that are anti-biblical. The environment is one. The God of Creation calls us to be good stewards of creation. I worry sometimes when the church becomes so tied into a political mind-set that it's more committed to the politics of a party than it is sensitive to what the Scripture teaches.

Tony, Tony. C'mon. "Tended to be conservative...[thus] anti-biblical"?

Dr. Campolo is so much better than this. Wants, along with Jim Wallis and company, to be the great Evangelical Middle in coming elections that he just can't stand not to take a swipe when one is not warranted. Conservative...anti-biblical. Cheap.

And, for whatever it is worth, some of us worry about the Campolo/Wallis crowd becoming so tied to a political mind-set that they are far more committed to the politics of the Democrats than what the Scripture teaches.

Be careful, Tony. Be very careful. You are becoming that which you are railing against - politically captive.