My good friend Glenn Lucke sent me this excellent interview that he has conducted over the past few months with noted sociologist Michael Lindsay (for the record, Glenn recently attained his Ph.D in Sociology from University of Virginia while working with James Davison Hunter; Glenn is also wicked smart). I read Michael's book back in the fall and while I wasn't blown away, the depth of research in the book is very impressive.

Below is Glenn's introduction along with the first half of the interview. I will post the second half of the interview tomorrow. I welcome all comments especially those from readers of Glenn's blog, Common Grounds Online.

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Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University, recently published Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined America’s Elite. The endorsements for this book demonstrate that historians and sociologists of American religion are taking Lindsay and his work seriously.

For this project, Lindsay interviewed 360 evangelical elites in business, politics, academia and entertainment/media. While his labors in this regard are impressive (it is difficult to get access to many of these leaders), and have garnered most of the publicity that I’ve seen, a greater strength of the book in my estimation is the vast amount of history, sociology and political science scholarship that Lindsay read and synthesized. The breadth and depth of Lindsay’s work commend it to specialists.

Lindsay’s prose is very readable and he tells the story of evangelical ascendance well. I was drawn into his narrative, though I already knew much of it from my own research. All to say, Lindsay as a storyteller is really good.

This book is accessible for a high school reading level, though the interest will likely be for college and above. It is in the endnotes that Lindsay’s scholarship shines brilliantly. I’ve spent several hours reading, thinking about and making notes about the endnotes. For a sociologist of culture and religion, the material in the endnotes actually merits the overused phrase, ‘worth the price of the book.’

While I hope the conversation that unfolds will be stimulating to a wide swath of readers, and while I hope to push Lindsay where appropriate and he’ll likely push me, too, what ensues is the conversation of friends with a passion for understanding the place of American evangelicals in our contemporary society. Lindsay and I met a number of years ago, and he has been a good friend who has helped me in a variety of ways. I don’t think my appreciation of Faith in the Halls of Power is sourced in our friendship, though my friendship happily affects how I read the book, and I thought it relevant to disclose this to readers before posting the fruits of this email conversation.

At Common Grounds Online we strictly do not do politics, and so the political section of this conversation will be posted at another blog, Good Will Hinton (GWH).

GL: Michael, the narrative you write in Faith in the Halls of Power is about evangelical ascendance from obscurity and relative powerlessness to prominence and position. I think it would be interesting for readers to read your perspective, in brief, on what was the status of evangelicals circa 1965? What were evangelicals like? How would you characterize their status (vis-à-vis center & periphery)? What was their self-perception? What were their goals for themselves? What was their vision for the United States?

Because we’re doing this in the blog medium, you can’t attend to these questions with the complexity that they deserve. Given that you must be brief, can you sketch out a picture of evangelicals in the US roughly 1965?

ML: Glenn, first let me say what fun it is to be in conversation with you. Thanks very much for this opportunity. I’m honored by your kind words about Faith in the Halls of Power, and I hope your readers will give the book a look as well.

Researchers largely ignored evangelicals in the 1960s. The moniker didn’t become popular until the 1970s when Jimmy Carter used the term on the presidential campaign trail. Nevertheless, there were some important things that happening at the time. One involves the nascent conservative political coalition that was being formed in the post-Goldwater era after his failed presidential bid in 1964. Phyllis Schlafly, a Harvard graduate and Goldwater supporter, founded her own political newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, and by 1972 she had established a formidable organization that is now called the Eagle Forum, a women’s group originally formed to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Another Goldwater supporter, Paul Weyrich, had witnessed the coordination of strategy and communication among disparate liberal groups, and with the financial sponsorship of Joseph Coors, head of the Colorado brewing family, pushed conservatives to do the same. Two entities birthed by Weyrich’s leadership, the Heritage Foundation and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, were major players in uniting evangelicals to conservative politics in the 1970s. Ironically, neither Weyrich nor Schlafly came from the evangelical world of Billy Graham and Bill Bright; both grew up Roman Catholic. But conservative politicians knew Billy Graham and his world quite well.

Indeed, Billy Graham was the most prominent evangelical in 1965. That year, he preached fourteen crusades, including several in Hawaii and Alabama. In Alabama, his travels included a stop at the Tuskegee Institute—a bold move since so many of his fellow believers opposed the Civil Rights movement. President Johnson attended Graham’s last crusade of 1965, which was held in Houston’s newly-opened Astrodome. As you know, Graham and Johnson were quite close, so evangelicals were not entirely removed from the halls of power in the mid-1960s. But they tended to be advisors and confidants to power-brokers; they, themselves, couldn’t be found in many political backrooms or corner offices within the executive suite.

At the same time, American-pastor-turned-philosopher Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith were regularly hosting American kids in their home in the Swiss Alps, called L’Abri. Thirteen percent of the leaders I interviewed for Faith in the Halls of Power mentioned the influence of L’Abri, Schaeffer, or his writings on their own personal development. As Preston Shire’s intriguing book, Hippies of the Religious Right, suggests, many hippies of the 1960s became involved in the Jesus Movement of the 1970s—a reality that continues to influence American evangelicalism even today.

So that’s a start, at least, on some of the things that were taking place in the mid-1960s, all of which I think are important developments in the shaping of the contemporary evangelical mosaic.

GL: Do you have a sense of how evangelicals saw themselves in the 1960s? And what were their aspirations? My hunch would be that overwhelmingly most of them committed to or at least influenced by dispensational theology, and thus unlikely to prize cultural engagement.

ML: I think you’re right, Glenn. I’m not sure how theological the average evangelical was in the 1960s—perhaps more so than today, but that’s not saying much. So I don’t want to suggest that theology was driving their actions. Nonetheless, I do think evangelism was the main thing championed by white evangelicals in the 1960s. For many of them, the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, and the Vietnam War were emblematic of why the world needed salvation. They were happy to focus on “saving souls” and leave the rest of human affairs for others to manage.

In the 1960s, evangelicals did not represent a significant voting bloc in national politics. Also in the ‘60s, they were not especially hostile toward Hollywood—a posture that would change dramatically two decades later by the time Martin Scorsese released The Last Temptation of Christ. And on elite college campuses and within the world of ideas, evangelicals were “running scared,” to quote one of the people I interviewed for Faith in the Halls of Power.

If in 1900, evangelicals were so influential that it was “virtually a religious establishment,” as historian George Marsden has argued, then the 1960s represent the nadir of evangelical cultural engagement and influence.

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Here is Part 2.