How evangelicals reshaped themselves and reshaped America
On Friday and Saturday, young evangelicals gathered at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas for Together ‘22. The architects of the event hoped their jamboree of worship concerts, “breakout sessions” and “evangelism opportunities” will “activate a generation to share Jesus” and return home “with the courage, community and tools to share the Good News.”
Together ‘22 is patterned on a week-long evangelical youth summit from 50 years ago this summer, that drew an estimated 180,000 people. Among Explo ‘72’s attractions: America’s most famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham, country music star Johnny Cash performing hymns and the sanctified rock and soul music of “Jesus People” bands.
It wasn’t a mere revival. It was a generational hinge in the history of modern American evangelicalism. “Godstock,” as Christianity Today called it, signaled the arrival of evangelical baby boomers whose faith didn’t look like their parents’ old-time religion. It served as a harbinger of the future of the evangelical movement, tracing the faint features of a rising era of conservative evangelicalism that would dominate the decades to come. This year’s event may well offer similar signals about how Gen Z evangelicals will practice their faith in a nation polarized along political, social and racial lines.
Explo ‘72 took place as American evangelicals confronted a transitional moment and an uncertain future. The decade and a half after World War II had filled evangelical churches with the fruits of a baby boom, and the early Cold War had fostered a “Judeo-Christian” cultural consensus into which evangelicals easily and enthusiastically assimilated.
But by the early 1970s, baby boomers were aging out of their parents’ churches and entering a culture fractured by the events of the 1960s and the ongoing Vietnam War. A terminal slide in membership in America’s mainline Protestant denominations had begun in the late 1960s, reinforcing the anxieties of evangelicals eager to pass on their faith to the next generation. These evangelicals relied upon innovation to prevent their faith from suffering a similar slide.
The conference evoked the aesthetic of the “Jesus People” — an evangelical subculture birthed among California hippies in the late 1960s — and popularized it to teeming masses of young attendees from middle America. Gone were the organs, hymnals, button-down shirts and cropped haircuts that had typified Billy Graham’s youth revivals of the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, national newspapers carried images of Explo ‘72 attendees with shaggy hair in bellbottom jeans and graphic tees, lifting their arms in praise to Christian contemporary music.
Explo ‘72’s casual, pop-cultural vibe would only spread within American evangelicalism as baby boomers aged. Music that had been innovative then would become boilerplate over the coming decades as congregations exchanged hymnals and choirs for slide projectors and drum kits. The megachurch phenomenon, which blossomed in the 1970s, mimicked the come-as-you-are posture and event-oriented spectacle that Explo ‘72 popularized. This style sought to attract younger non-evangelicals who found evangelicalism’s traditional stylization off-putting — and who in many cases were searching for meaning and community after leaving the mainline congregations of their youth.
Crucially, however, while Explo ‘ 72 embraced the edgy aesthetic style of the Jesus People, it discarded the movement’s earnest attempts to synthesize evangelical theology with left-leaning social concerns. When a group of Jesus People from Illinois unfurled an anti-Vietnam War banner and chanted during an evening worship service, the surrounding crowd quickly pressured them into silence.
An informal poll conducted by the Dallas Morning News confirmed the attendees’ conservative politics. The newspaper found that 58% of them backed President Richard M. Nixon’s reelection that fall, while only 11% supported his probable challenger, Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.). The rest split between undecided voters and supporters of Mr. McGovern’s waning Democratic rival (and former segregationist) George Wallace. These numbers were particularly significant because the 26th Amendment (ratified in 1971) had lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
But one didn’t need a survey to tell that the crowds at Explo ‘72 leaned to the right. Reporters highlighted their effusive treatment of law enforcement during the festival — including several spontaneous standing ovations for Dallas police officers — which suggested their sympathies for the Nixonian touchstones of law and order. Indeed, Billy Graham had predicted before the conference that reporters would encounter “the ‘silenced’ majority” of “great, wonderful young people.”
And the event made clear that if the civil rights movement and the Vietnam era had galvanized many young Americans to liberal activism, this spirit was taking more traditionalist, conservative forms among young evangelicals. “We, too, believe that young people want change,” a collegeage attendee told the Dallas Morning News, “but it does not necessarily have to be brought about by liberals or Democrats.”
In fact, Nixon himself almost attended Explo ‘72. The founders used Graham’s White House connections to lobby Mr. Nixon to appear, and his staff proved receptive. Yet they eventually walked back the invitation under pressure from other organizers who feared his presence would distract from the event’s proceedings. An appreciative presidential telegram, read from the stage, would have to suffice.
What observers witnessed in embryonic form at Explo ‘72 — a confident conservatism laced in a casual aesthetic — would become a key characteristic of American evangelicalism in the coming decades. The conference revealed a nascent relationship between evangelical baby boomers and the GOP that ultimately strengthened during the Reagan years, solidified under George W. Bush and, if anything, grew in the Trump era.
A cascade of voices inside and outside American evangelicalism have claimed in recent years that the movement now finds itself in a state of “crisis” against a broader backdrop of political and social polarization in American life reminiscent of 1972. As they pay homage to Explo ‘72, organizers of Together ‘22 are praying their event launches another generational revival that charts a path forward. Whether this past weekend’s rally fulfills their hopes, it could offer telling hints about the future of American evangelicalism as a new generation assumes its place in the movement.