The Evangelical Road Not Taken

At Thanksgiving in 1973, more than fifty evangelical leaders gathered in Chicago and confessed that their churches had supported or tolerated racial injustice, economic inequality, militarism, materialism, and discrimination against women.¹

Six years later, Jerry Falwell helped found the Moral Majority.

Those two events represented different possible futures for evangelical public life. One future would develop into the Christian Right, with its formidable electoral machinery, media networks, fundraising systems, legal organizations, and alliance with the Republican Party. The other gathered around the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, Evangelicals for Social Action, Sojourners, John Perkins, Black evangelical leaders, and the emerging global theology of integral mission.

The Christian Right became the dominant public face of American evangelicalism. But that outcome was not inevitable, nor was it the only expression of evangelical theology available at the time.

The Chicago gathering brought together figures including Ronald Sider, Jim Wallis, John Perkins, William Pannell, Richard Mouw, Sharon Gallagher, Carl F. H. Henry, Lewis Smedes, Samuel Escobar, René Padilla, and others. The declaration that emerged began from explicitly evangelical commitments: allegiance to Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, conversion, discipleship, and the church’s responsibility to obey the whole counsel of God.²

Its signers did not dismiss individual salvation. They argued that personal conversion could not be separated from racial relationships, economic conduct, political responsibility, war, consumption, or the treatment of women. They confessed evangelical complicity in racial injustice, indifference to poor and oppressed people, materialism, economic inequality, militarism, and the subordination of women.

The declaration did not prescribe one political platform. It explicitly refused to identify Christian social responsibility with any political ideology or party. Its significance lay in establishing that evangelical commitments themselves required public repentance and social action.

This was not theological liberalism disguised in evangelical language. Participants believed that biblical authority required social engagement. They rejected the assumption that Christians had to choose between proclaiming salvation through Christ and confronting the conditions under which their neighbors suffered.

The 1973 workshop led to continuing meetings and organizing. Evangelicals for Social Action was formally launched as a national membership organization in 1978 and later became Christians for Social Action. Under Ronald Sider’s leadership, it attempted to function as a “think-and-do” network connecting biblical faith with justice and the common good.³

The organization addressed hunger, poverty, racism, peacemaking, consumerism, gender, housing, environmental stewardship, and public policy. It sought to demonstrate that evangelical social concern could be both biblically grounded and institutionally practical.

Jim Wallis and the community that became Sojourners emerged from a similar awakening. Their roots lay in opposition to the Vietnam War and in concern about racism, poverty, nuclear weapons, and economic injustice. Yet they retained evangelical language about conversion, Scripture, discipleship, and the lordship of Christ.⁴

They represented a Christianity that rejected both fundamentalist withdrawal and forms of liberal Protestantism that had sometimes lost confidence in evangelism.

This movement was diverse and frequently divided. Some participants held conservative positions on abortion or sexuality while opposing militarism, economic injustice, and racism. Sider eventually advocated a consistently pro-life ethic connecting concern for unborn life with opposition to war, capital punishment, racism, hunger, and preventable death.⁵

The movement’s moral framework did not fit neatly inside either major political party.

The movement was strengthened by evangelical voices from outside the United States. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar challenged North American mission models that separated conversion from poverty, political oppression, cultural domination, and economic dependency.

Their theology of integral mission insisted that the gospel should be proclaimed, embodied, and demonstrated. Social service was not to become bait for conversion, nor........

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