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This chapter focuses on the story of William Rohl Bright, or Bill Bright, who was born to parents Forrest Dale and Mary Lee Rohl Bright. As a child, Bill's main activities were ranching and reading. Bill's first chores were collecting eggs and gathering dry corncobs and wood to heat the family's stove. Throughout Bill's entire childhood, the ranch did not have electricity, but running water was provided by a windmill that pumped water into an elevated tank, from which it was fed by gravity into the house. As he grew older, Bill “took his place alongside his four brothers and other hired men in milking the cows, feeding the hogs, caring for the horses and cattle, working in the fields, plowing, cultivating, harvesting, threshing the grain, and baling hay for the cattle.”

This chapter focuses on Bill Bright's support of Christian Citizen, which provides an early example of evangelical political activism. Evangelical political efforts in the mid-1970s, however, became far more influential and noteworthy. One simple yet often overlooked reason for evangelicals' newfound political significance was the dramatic growth of evangelical institutions. In the 1960s, few evangelical leaders commanded large and visible institutions that held the potential for political influence. By the mid-1970s, the evangelical universe seemed crowded with a new generation of stars: Robertson, Rex Humbard, and Jim Bakker were all notable television personalities with large audiences. Campus Crusade had, by the early 1970s, evolved into a ministry of several thousand staff members. Politicians took note of these personalities and institutions, and identified them as vehicles through which they could court an emerging constituency.

This book concludes with a discussion of the Crusade's 2003 staff conference, which marked an indelible turning point in the organization's history. Shortly before the end of the conference, Bill Bright died in his Orlando condominium. Over the last decade of his life, he gradually evidenced his mortality, starting with treatment for prostate cancer in 1993. In 2000, beginning to lose his energy, Bright was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable disease that slowly diminishes lung capacity. Unlike Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts, he did not groom one of his sons as his handpicked successor, instead turning over Crusade's presidency to Steve Douglass in 2001. Over his last two decades at the helm of Campus Crusade, Bright became an evangelical elder statesman.

This book presents the history of Campus Crusade for Christ as a window into the world of American evangelicalism since 1945. Campus Crusade, founded by Bill Bright at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1951, had, by the century's end, grown into a global evangelical empire. The ministry's staff talked about Jesus Christ at fraternity meetings, evangelized students from Daytona to Balboa on spring break trips, organized evangelistic advertising campaigns in American cities, brought a film about Jesus to remote overseas villages, and hosted conferences designed to “rekindle the fire” of Christian marriages. Alongside Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, Bright was one of the most influential evangelical power brokers of the late twentieth century, able to mobilize large coalitions of conservative Christians for both evangelistic and partisan ends.

This chapter further documents the decline of mainline Protestant influence over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows how the rise of the antiwar and black power movements, together with the emergence of a new generation of free market-minded corporate leaders, exacerbated the demographic and social trends that had been undermining Protestant moral authority since the mid-1960s. A particularly vexing problem, from the perspective of mainline leaders, was the exodus of young professionals from the church. As a result of this trend, the nation’s churches were increasingly dominated by politically conservative older churchgoers. As they worked simultaneously to address the concerns of young activists and assuage the fears of an aging churchgoing population, mainline elites found themselves caught in an insoluble demographic bind.