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The first part of chapter 4 addresses several of the most pressing critical challenges to Frei's work leveled by evangelical theologians. The first is that he forgoes all concern for whether or not the biblical accounts of Jesus do, in fact, truly correspond to actual historical events. The second is that Frei reduces the biblical witness to a self-contained literary world. The second part of chapter 4 reassesses the Barthian dimensions of Frei's work in light of the potentially devastating criticism that Frei's reading of Karl Barth is decidedly undialectical, inordinately stressing the role of analogy therein, and that this deficiency has been transmitted to many of the so-called "American neo-Barthians" (or "postliberals") influenced by Frei. The argument critically retrieves material from Frei's dissertation, his earliest publications, and recently circulated material from his unpublished archival papers in order to make the case that Frei identified a complex interrelation of dialectic and analogy in Barth's theology dating back as far as the second edition of Barth's Romans commentary and reaching forward into the Church Dogmatics.

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 discusses how Christian Reconstructionism had grown out of Rushdoony’s hostile relationship with the editors of Christianity Today, most notably Carl F. H. Henry, as he tried to challenge other conservative Christians to see Mosaic law as the antidote to the perceived lawlessness of the 1960s. After failing to create an expedient alliance with businessman and philanthropist J. Howard Pew in an attempt to influence Christianity Today and the neoevangelical coalition it represented, Rushdoony turned his attention to fully articulating his vision of Biblical law as an alternative to the “law and order” discourse emerging among his fellow conservatives. He argued that Biblical law could provide the necessary mechanism to reconstruct America into a neofeudal Protestant state that would eventually usher in Christ’s second coming.

This chapter examines three texts of the 1930s and 1940s that built upon and went beyond the polemics of the 1920s. The first, H. Richard Niebuhr's “Fundamentalism,” appeared in a highly respected reference work published in 1931, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The second, an informal memo by Talcott Parsons called “Memorandum: The Development of Groups and Organizations Amenable to Use against American Institutions and Foreign Policy,” was written in 1940. The third text is Carl F. H. Henry's 1947 book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. During this time, antifundamentalism embedded itself in standard reference works in a way that suggested that it was a simple truth, not one side of a controversy.

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.