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This chapter examines the founding and rise to prominence of Christianity Today, the most important religious magazine of the 1960s and 1970s. It details the magazine’s founding by the revivalist Billy Graham and his father-in-law L. Nelson Bell, both of whom envisioned a periodical that would target ministers with a mix of theological content and conservative political commentary. With financial backing from J. Howard Pew and long list of conservative businessmen, the magazine soon outpaced its liberal rivals; and under the editorial guidance of Carl Henry, a noted theologian, it developed a novel critique of mainline religious authority that may well have exacerbated the divide between mainline elites and average churchgoers. Yet Henry’s insistence that evangelicals were obligated take notice of social problems such as racial discrimination ultimately created an inbridgable rift between the magazine’s editor and its financial backers, and in 1967 Henry was forced to relinquish his post.

This chapter examines the fate of liberal and moderate evangelicals from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. It argues that moderate evangelicals—an ascendant force in the 1970s—were marginalized less by the rise of so-called “values” issues than by economic anxieties and a broader white reaction against federal civil rights initiatives. That white evangelicals drifted to the political Right for essentially secular reasons—and often in the face of counterpressures from prominent evangelical leaders and institutions—provides further confirmation of religion’s limited ability to shape political behavior in an age of religious autonomy. In short, it is the weakness of evangelical institutions, not their strength, that best explains why the term “conservative evangelical” has come to seem redundant.

In the mid-twentieth century leading scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr or David Riesman wrote off conservative evangelical education as fading. William McLoughlin also saw the new revival movements as ephemeral. Billy Graham and Carl Henry had ambitions to start a major university around 1960 but did not have the resources. Wheaton College in Illinois, the leading ex-fundamentalist college, began to rise academically despite the anti-intellectualism of its tradition. Calvin College had been an ideologically isolated Reformed school but by the 1960s had produced leading Christian philosophers. Intervarsity Christian Fellowship helped raise consciousness regarding strong scholarship, and by 2000 the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities had grown to over one hundred schools with well-trained faculties. Like-minded Christian scholars founded their own academic societies. Baylor University became an intentionally Christian research university. Evangelical Protestant and Catholic scholars often cooperated. Despite many challenges, distinctly Christian scholars could hold their own in twenty-first-century academia.