Unite Around the Basics: Billy Graham’s Lesson for the Left
Can the Left learn from Billy Graham style evangelicals? The answer may be yes. Christian Smith‘s brilliantly argued research monograph American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (The University of Chicago Press, 1998) is focussed on showing how and why Billy Graham type evangelicals (as distinct from both liberal mainstream and countercultural ‘withdraw from society to build our own counter society’ fundamentalists) have managed to maintain the size and strength of their churches, disproving predictions of inevitable decline due to secularization. The formula is to combine a sharp “distinction” of their religious subculture from modernizing secular society with a two-level strategy of persistent “engagement”. On a mass level, there are ongoing mass campaigns for converts. On the elite level there is an attempt to infiltrate next to top government and business leaders as moral advisers with a religiously conservative but relatively mainstream American social and political stance (conservative by any other standard).
Billy Graham Reduces His Message to the Core Beliefs and Goals that All Churches and Denominations Can Support
Most important, and this is what the Left might learn from, the Billy Graham style revival meeting crusades reduce their mass-oriented religious message to the core beliefs of evangelicalism that all the many evangelical denominations and churches can support. This allows for autonomous and divergent proselytizing for the differentiated beliefs of denominations and churches at lower levels. It is a strategy of campaigns at the level of the overall Movement that strengthens the work of those at the level of autonomous movements and of movement organizations within them respectively. It is a strategy of constantly reminding both the faithful and those outside the faith of the core beliefs and goals that unite the faithful. This is done in the hope that those in specific denominations and churches will explicitly take these shared principles as their starting point when they make their different interpretations and applications of them.
DISTINCTION PLUS ENGAGEMENT – THE BILLY GRAHAM RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
Evangelical Protestants reigned supreme in both the religious and secular institutions of American society up until about the 1880s. They succeeded in making the United States a Christian country, not by having a single official church, but by persuading the vast majority of individuals to become active church-going believers. This required repeated proselytizing campaigns to reach individuals one on one. Thereby those individuals outside the churches converted, and those nominally inside the churches who were beginning to lapse recommitted, to an active practice of their faith.
(See Michael Young’s Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (The University of Chicago Press, 2006) for an interesting description of how these religious revival campaigns, that stressed the need for individuals to let Jesus Christ guide their daily secular lives, also stimulated Christian-led social reform movements for causes like temperance and the abolition of slavery).
The Crusades Pitch ‘Jesus Saves’ — Each Local Church Can Interpret and Apply the Core Message As They Choose
By the 1880s, the psychological certainty of evangelical religious faith in America was being rapidly undermined by urbanization, industrialization and large numbers of non-evangelical (often Catholic or Jewish but also different style Protestant) immigrants. The biggest challenge came because of the proliferation of inventions based on scientific ways of thinking that raised the living standards of many and changed almost everything touching individual lives -- work, household technology, medicine, transport, communications, popular entertainment and much more. People increasingly believed in science, not just religion. The scientific discovery that proved to be the greatest existential and ideological threat was Darwinian evolution. The coming of modernity led to a persistent decline in the influence of white Protestant evangelical churches. This came mostly in the form of individuals compartmentalizing their religious faith and living their everyday lives by secular modern principles.
White evangelical Protestants fought back against the freeing of the slaves with legal segregation backed up by organized terror in the South, and de facto segregation in occupations and housing in the North. The second iteration of the white supremacist, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan recruited millions of mostly white Protestant evangelical members in the late 1910s and early 1920s. (For a social movement sociology account, see Rory McVeigh’s The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (University of Minnesota, 2009).) Failure of the largely persuasion-based Temperance movement was followed by temporarily successful campaigns to impose legal Prohibition of alcohol. Failure to keep the teaching of evolution out of the schools after the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial was followed by campaigns to keep Christian (only) prayers and religious influence in the schools. With the exception of anti-Black segregation, none of these attempts at reforming secular society succeeded for long.
White Protestant Churches Were No Longer Able to Get Most Americans to Let Jesus Guide Their Daily Lives
America was getting further and further away from the evangelical goal of having most citizens be fervent believers, or at least having most leaders of secular institutions visibly apply Christian values to their decision-making. Getting involved in social reform movements, backward-looking and behaviour-control ones, was leading to less credibility and influence in mainstream institutions of the economy and government, not more. The strategy within the churches was reactive too. Instead of going out to the non-believers and the lapsed congregants in the missionary and revival spirit of the earlier days, conservative Protestants had retreated into an increasingly literal and dogmatic fundamentalism. And despite the intense indoctrination of children, and preaching to adults to apply Christian values to their daily lives, even active congregants increasingly compartmentalized their religious and secular lives.
In 1942, Billy Graham joined other leading evangelicals to form the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Their predecessors had already broken with the liberal and mainstream denominations in the 19th century. Graham and others now wanted to break away from what they declared to be a failed fundamentalist strategy of withdrawal from modern society. They would align with the mainstream secular American elite views on most social and political issues, while retaining religiously conservative views on a few issues like abortion and prayer in schools. This enabled them to get close to top decision-makers in business and government to encourage them to revive their faith and to do so as more visible Christians (in exchange for having the now mainstream sounding religious leaders certify them as good Christians).
That was the strategy to Christianize leaders. The Left can perhaps learn the most from the strategy to Christianize more Americans at a mass level. Here is what Christian Smith writes about their formula for success. While liberal Protestants have operated within their various separate denominations, the Billy Graham type NAE evangelicals have operated at a meta-level above as “an open and fluid transdenominational movement. Evangelicalism is less an organization than a vast, loose [national and international] network of small denominations,… congregations,… parachurch ministries, missions agencies, and educational institutions. Consequently, the evangelical field is structurally wide open for inventive leaders to emerge and launch new initiatives. Entrepreneurial evangelical leaders are much freer than mainline or liberal church leaders to generate their own evangelical churches, colleges, mission boards, parachurch ministries, radio programs, publishing ventures, biblical teachings, and spiritual programs” (p86).
Retreat Into Fundamentalist Dogmatism Failed — Graham United All Churches and Individuals Around a Common Mission and Tactics
The common identity of all evangelicals regardless of denomination or church is built by having all these proselytizing and socializing organizations promote a simplified message that they can all unite around (The Bible is the Word of God; Jesus saves). “No single, authoritative theological or political confession or creed binds this diverse array of believers together and sets them apart from their theological and sociological relatives… Instead, evangelicals are coordinated by a set of minimal, baseline, supradenominational theological beliefs and, perhaps more importantly, by a distinctive, shared sensibility about strategy for the Christian mission in the world.” This “relatively successful unity-in-diversity” approach unites the maximum number of denominations and churches and individuals in common missionary action and does so “while maintaining a tremendous degree of decentralization” (p87).
In sum, the evangelical strategy has been as follows. First, unite around the baseline values and beliefs of the Protestant faith that all denominations and churches can actively make reference to as the starting point for their own highly diverse interpretations and applications. This not only unites the entire evangelical subculture around a shared collective identity, but stimulates entrepreneurial innovation in creating religious products for consumers in a competitive religious market. Second, instead of seeking to create a single centralizing nation-wide or international organization, they build active unity around a Common Tactic of creating decentralized networks of organizations to engage in proselytizing campaigns for those transdenominational and transchurch baseline values and beliefs. Third, agree on a common mission or strategic goal which is to direct the campaigns at achieving change in the hearts and minds of individuals by having them be “born again”; hence the goal is NOT to directly change the institutions of society through collective action. Fourth, agree on a Personal Influence Method for winning converts and reviving the active faith of the lapsed congregants, namely to make it an obligation for all evangelicals to visibly apply Christian values to guide their lives and to seek to convert people in their personal networks through persuasion and example.
A Clear Identity Based on Core Beliefs, Mission and Tactics Freed Local Churches to Innovate and Win Converts
I am suggesting that the Left can learn from the first two points, but not the last two. Put simply, Smith finds that the first two resulted in evangelicals doing better than their competitors at maintaining and expanding the numbers of active church-going members. The last two approaches failed to make America a Christian society that explicitly applied Christian values and beliefs to override secular ones. It turns out that, while the message of saving your eternal individual soul still meets the deep psychic needs of many “consumers”, there is little appetite for making people’s secular lives subject to a Christian evangelical version of sharia law.
WHAT THE LEFT CAN DO TO UNITE AROUND CORE PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY
The Billy Graham evangelicals gave priority to building an assertive religious subculture of converted individuals, in order to then go on to have those individuals reform secular society. They only achieved an expanding subculture. The primary goal of the secular Left is not to win converts to a subculture of people who share values and beliefs that are different from the prevailing dominant ideologies. The main goal is to build non-sectarian and non-dogmatic popular movements that struggle to change the power relations and guiding principles prevailing in the economic, cultural and political institutions of society. Nevertheless, reading Smith’s book suggests lessons for the secular Left.
The Left is no longer united organizationally and ideologically around a common programme of institutional and policy changes, let alone a shared strategy and tactics for winning popular power. There are promising signs of experimentation with Movement parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and arguably with the Sanderistas operating within the US Democratic party and the Momentum group supporting the leadership of Corbyn in the British Labour Party. But these parties and blocs within parties have not developed a new programme and strategy-tactics (beyond practicing direct democracy internally as much as possible in the case of the new parties) based on a thorough critique of past political lefts (Marxist-Leninist, social democratic and anarchist).
The Left is Not Seeking Converts — But We Too Can Unite Around Core Beliefs, Mission and Tactics and Be Pluralist in Applying Them
The various autonomous social movements have not succeeded in providing a leadership that addresses any of these issues either. They have developed spaces like the World Social Forums to learn from one another’s best practices and to debate. They have succeeded in many massive popular mobilizations by creating coalitions to organize extraparliamentary protests around single issues. They have succeeded in breaking through to the mainstream with actions that educated the public about a key fact about society that was not given attention by elite media and opinion leaders – Occupy on inequality, Me Two on sexual harassment, Arab Spring on denial of basic liberty and democracy.
The Movement electoral parties and the social movement Coalition campaigns are moving the Left forward to uniting as a cohesive organizational and ideological force again. What else can be done? I am proposing that we learn some lessons from the American evangelicals. I am suggesting that we do two things. First, we should identify the baseline values and beliefs that we can agree we hold in common. We should also agree that these ideas should be the starting point for interpretation and application by individual left social movement and political organizations. Second, we should promote these common ideas to the general public in everything we do. We should make clear that our more specific critiques of what is and specific suggestions for changes in any given campaign are interpretations and applications of these bedrock shared ideas. By doing this we will be saying two very important things. First, that There is An Alternative and it is expressed by these guiding values and beliefs. Second, that Our Movement is not a Dogma or a Sect. We embrace Science as well as Moral Values. We advance our principled critique of what is in order to then debate interpretations and try out applications, to investigate problems and then test solutions. We want to build a society that is both Progressive and Open.
We Want a Society Based on Definite Progressive Principles — But We Want an Open-Ended Society Too
This brings us to the magic question. What are the baseline values and beliefs that the Left can agree upon? I suggest two possible answers, a short list and a longer list. The first answer is an updating of the famous slogan of the French Revolution to Liberty, Equality, Democracy (or Democratic Citizenship -- it is my understanding that Fraternity referred to the idea that citizens of the French nation had rights and obligations that were independent of their social characteristics). The second answer adds seven other ideas: Democratic Socialism; Peace and Disarmament; International Solidarity and No Empires; Preserve Planet Earth; Equal Justice and Policing; Systemic Equality for Women, LGBTQ+, Ethnic and Racialized Minorities and All Unjustly Subordinated Groups; Both Science and Morality. The first list may be too vague to differentiate a left approach. The second list may be seen by some as differentiating too much (I think it is inclusive). Both lists require more precise definitions of each idea. But I hope it is a start on a different approach to reorganizing and uniting the left around a set of positive alternatives AND making it a priority task for the Left to link every immediate struggle and claims to its Alternative Baseline Goals and to develop media, schools etc to educate the mass of people in the Left alternative.