The bond between God and power

reposted from The Economist

Evangelicals in America, Aug 23rd 2007, From The Economist print edition

Once looked down upon, American Evangelicals have now risen triumphantly to the heights

Eyevine

ON PALM SUNDAY 2002 George Bush and his entourage were flying home from El Salvador. Not wishing to miss church, they decided to improvise. Before long 40 worshippers were crammed into Air Force One's conference room. Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser, led the worship, Karen Hughes, then Mr Bush's counsellor, gave the lesson and the service ended with everybody singing “Amazing Grace” and hugging each other.

In the first half of the 20th century, H.L. Mencken, a freethinker, dismissed Evangelicals as backwoods bigots and Richard Niebuhr, a theologian, said that theirs was a “religion of the dispossessed” (or, as one sociologist put it, of the “disadvantaged ranks of the stratification system”). Even as late as the 1990s there was a widespread perception that Evangelicals were poor, uneducated and easily led.

How did these supposedly ignorant buffoons arrive at the heart of the American power structure? Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University, who has interviewed 360 Evangelicals who have made it into the American elite, including two former presidents, answers this question with a rare degree of skill and learning. The past 30 years have seen a revolution. Evangelicals have almost drawn level with other religious groups in terms of wealth and education. And they have penetrated almost every area of the American establishment. Look at the top of many a professional tree and you can find an arboreal gathering of born-again Christians.

The role of Evangelicals in the Bush administration is particularly notable.

But any European who thinks that they will simply disappear back into their caves when Mr Bush retires is in for a disappointment. Billy Graham has been a spiritual adviser to every president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Bill Clinton cultivated Evangelical leaders, such as Bill Hybels, the founder of the Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. He also mentioned Jesus more frequently in his public utterances than Mr Bush has, at least so far (5.1 times a year compared with 4.7). Over on Capitol Hill politicians of all parties attend prayer breakfasts and Bible classes.

Evangelicals have become much more visible in the boardroom as the South prospered and people became more willing to mingle work and faith. Prominent business figures such as John Tyson, a chicken magnate, and Wayne Huizinga, a serial entrepreneur, now talk openly about their faith. Evangelical businessmen form networks such as the Business Leadership and Spirituality Network. And a growing number of bosses are trying to incorporate Evangelical principles into the operation of their businesses. Chick-fil-A, a fast-food chain, refuses to open on Sundays and holds devotional services at its corporate headquarters every Monday. And Interstate Batteries, a Texan company, helps its employees to go on missions.

Evangelicals are even invading America's two greatest bastions of secularism—Hollywood and academia. Mel Gibson forced Hollywood to wake up to the power of the Evangelical dollar with his formidably successful “The Passion of the Christ”. Phil Anschutz, an Evangelical billionaire in Denver, finances Walden Media, which had huge success with two films: “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Amazing Grace”. Evangelical colleges, such as Regent University and Biola, support state-of-the-art film studios. Act One, a Los Angeles programme, trains Christian screenwriters and executives (even if the notion of a Christian Hollywood executive seems a contradiction in terms).

Evangelicals have been purged from the ivory tower more thoroughly than any other religious group (and have often made up for the fact by denigrating the life of the mind). But even there, they are now on the march. Evangelical colleges have been expanding rapidly—they increased their enrolment by 60% between 1990 and 2002, a time when the general university population was static—and are trying to improve their academic profiles.

Evangelical high-flyers have been making it into the Ivy League: in a recent year a quarter of Princeton's students were attending Evangelical meetings.

The Pew Foundation has invested money in a cadre of first-rate Evangelical academics, and other patrons have created scholarships for Evangelical students. Mark Noll, one of America's finest historians, is also a proud Evangelical.

Mr Lindsay demonstrates that the arrival of the Evangelicals is changing both the American elite and the Evangelical movement itself. It is bringing the elite much closer to ordinary Americans (Peter Berger, another sociologist, once joked that, if Indians are the most religious people on the planet and Swedes the least religious, then America is a land of Indians governed by Swedes). But it is also creating new divisions within the Evangelical movement between a cosmopolitan establishment and the populist masses.

“Faith in the Halls of Power” is not a perfect book. Mr Lindsay's prose style suggests that he spends too much time reading his fellow sociologists. His failure to discuss the American armed services is bizarre given the number of Evangelicals there. But he has nonetheless written an impressive and admirably fair-minded book: anybody who wants to understand the nexus between God and power in modern America should start here.