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. In the twenty-first century,
evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions
view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the
faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important
legacy of the evangelical left.
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