Moral minority : the evangelical left in an age of conservatism

Resource Information

The work Moral minority : the evangelical left in an age of conservatism represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Union Presbyterian Seminary Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Moral minority : the evangelical left in an age of conservatism

Title remainder

the evangelical left in an age of conservatism

Statement of responsibility

David R. Swartz

Creator

• Swartz, David R

Subject

• Christian conservatism -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• Christianity and politics -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• Evangelicalism -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• United States -- Politics and government -- 20th century

Language

eng

Summary

"In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong--evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way--organizationally and through political activism--to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right."--Publisher's website

Member of

• Politics and culture in modern America

Cataloging source

PU/DLC

Dewey number

261.70973/09045

Illustrations

• illustrations
• portraits

Index

index present

LC call number

BR1642.U6

LC item number

S93 2012

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Politics and culture in modern America