Fascinating history. I'd love to see a resurgent Evangelical "left." I like to think that would ease political polarization and growing tensions between religious and irreligious.
The turnabout in Evangelical political orientation was preceded by a long history of Evangelical political activity on the left. Balmer points out that Evangelicals were particularly active in the Antebellum South, though northern Evangelicals also maintained a political presence, advocating for public schools, prison reform, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. By the twentieth century, he says, the dominance of Evangelical progressives had been somewhat reduced by immigration and other political shifts; nonetheless, they busied themselves with campaigns for social justice and women’s suffrage. Progressive Evangelicals were also active in the labor movement, supplying spiritual vigor to the early growth of unions, as Valparaiso University historian Heath Carter points out in Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. (It is Professor Carter I quote in the remainder of this article, not the former president.)
By the seventies, this tradition had germinated into a thriving branch of Evangelical protestantism. These left Evangelicals were anti-war, pro-civil rights, and deeply concerned with people on the margins of society. Progressive Evangelicalism comprised a variety of different strands, from the hippie-esque “Jesus People” who viewed Christ as a counter-cultural figure (think Godspell) to the politically serious social justice advocates who founded Sojourners magazine. “The people at the center of the Evangelical left in the seventies were young, white Evangelicals,” Carter says, “but they were networked with black peers who were pushing them on issues of race, and they were in turn running with that.” Jimmy Carter, with his devotion to racial justice and commitment to alleviating the ravages of poverty, rode this wave of progressive Evangelical sentiment all the way to the White House.