Evangelicalism as we Know it
In Catholic and Jewish no less than Protestant circles, there remained real differences obscured by Herberg’s framing. Most strikingly, within Protestantism was the emergence of the evangelical movement, in no small part cohering around the towering figure of Billy Graham. The North Carolina-born Baptist preacher had been anointed by an aging William Bell Riley, and Graham, at the age of 28, took over after Riley’s death in 1948 as president of Northwestern Bible College. Graham served only four years in that role, finding his calling in traveling revivals he characterized as “crusades.” But Northwestern and the Twin Cities for years served as the world headquarters of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Organization, which organized Graham’s global crusades for decades, operated KTIS Christian radio.
That evangelical (and Catholics) had to begin their own radio stations to get a public airing bespeaks their marginal position in the public life of the day. The 1950s may have been the high-water mark of Protestant-Catholic-Jew religiosity, but the radio networks --CBS, NBC, and ABC -- allocated time on Sunday mornings only to the liberal Protestant churches of record.
The year 1950 saw the reorganization of the liberal ecumenical organization known since 1908 as the Federal Council of Churches, renamed the National Council of Churches. The National Council of Churches brought mainline liberal Protestant denominations together with some of the Eastern Orthodox communions, historically Black denominations, and the peace churches. In some respects shut out and in other respects reluctant to join with the liberal churches, a range of more conservative church organizations formed a parallel organization, the National Association of Evangelicals. Like Graham, many self-styled evangelicals stressed conversion and regeneration – becoming born again, active and emotional evangelizing to promote powerful experiences of grace and conversion, and biblical truth, but without the thoroughgoing literalism of the Fundamentalist movement, and without necessarily opposing all of modern culture and technology.
Minnesota developed its own state-level counterparts to these organizations: the Minneapolis Council of Churches formed in 1951 and evangelicals formed the Greater Minnesota Association of Evangelicals in 1965 (now TransformMN). Minnesota also played home to one of the nation’s first Interfaith organizations concerned with public policy. The Joint Religious Legislative Coalition was formed in 1971, a collaboration between the Minnesota Council of Churches, the Minnesota Catholic Conference, and the Jewish Community Relations Council to lobby the state legislature and educate the public about issues identified as of common concern to the member organizations. In 2004, JRLC grew to formally include the Islamic Center of Minnesota, a sign of the sea changes to Minnesota’s religious diversity that arose following the relaxation of immigration restrictions in 1965, and subsequent waves of migration and refugee resettlement in Minnesota in the decades since.
