The Evangelical Generation
As a rather secularist guy--but one who respects the diversity of religious thought, is curious to explore more, and has more than his share of religiously/spiritually minded loved ones around him--I'm more than a little weirded out by the Christianist demagoguery of late (from the culture of life to comparing opposition to out-of-mainstream, Right wing judicial nominees as Nazis). I keep hoping that the Dobsons and their school of Remora (i.e., the Right Rev. Sen. Dr. Bill Frist) are finally seen as overreaching on their push to their ultra-conservative agenda and ultimately deemed detrimental to a democratic society.

But I don't think I'll be holding my breath for that one after reading an article in last week's Sunday NYTimes about the rise of Evangelicals on the campuses of the power-training centers of the Ivy League. (Now, Evangelicals come in all stripes, with Jim Wallis championing a more liberal view of Evangelical Christianity--focusing on peace, justice, and economic equality; but the Evengelicals who typically make their voices heard the loudest are the more fundamentally minded conservatives.)

The growing power and influence of evangelical Christians is manifest everywhere these days, from the best-seller lists to the White House, but in fact their share of the general population has not changed much in half a century. Most pollsters agree that people who identify themselves as white evangelical Christians make up about a quarter of the population, just as they have for decades. What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. [...] Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical C.E.O.'s pray together on monthly conference calls, evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street and deep-pocketed evangelical donors gather at golf courses for conferences restricted to those who give more than $200,000 annually to Christian causes. [...] On The Chronicle of Philanthropy's latest list of the 400 top charities, Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical student group, raised more from private donors than the Boy Scouts of America, the Public Broadcasting Service and Easter Seals. [...] Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants are pulling closer to their mainline counterparts in class and education. As late as 1965, for example, a white mainline Protestant was two and a half times as likely to have a college degree as a white evangelical, according to an analysis by Prof. Corwin E. Smidt, a political scientist at Calvin College, an evangelical institution in Grand Rapids, Mich. But by 2000, a mainline Protestant was only 65 percent more likely to have the same degree. And since 1985, the percentage of incoming freshmen at highly selective private universities who said they were born-again also rose by half, to 11 or 12 percent each year from 7.3 percent, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

With the creation of several Evangelical-focused groups on campuses from Yale to Princeton (such as The Christian Union), students and alumni are making their voices heard loudly about the direction they'd like to see these institutions of higher learning move toward. And this won't just affect the colleges, but the mindset of graduates:

And trends in the Ivy League today could shape the culture for decades to come, he said. "So many leaders come out of these campuses. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are Ivy League grads; four of the seven Massachusetts Supreme Court justices; Christian ministry leaders; so many presidents, as you know; leaders of business - they are everywhere." He added, "If we are going to change the world, we have got, by God's power, to see these campuses radically changed."

Here's a bit more from the article on The Christian Union:

The Christian Union is the brainchild of Matt Bennett, 40, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Cornell and later directed the Campus Crusade for Christ at Princeton. Mr. Bennett, tall and soft-spoken, with a Texas drawl that waxes and wanes depending on the company he is in, said he got the idea during a 40-day water-and-juice fast, when he heard God speaking to him one night in a dream. [...] While working for Campus Crusade, Mr. Bennett had discovered that it was hard to recruit evangelicals to minister to the elite colleges of the Northeast because the environment was alien to them and the campuses often far from their homes. He also found that the evangelical ministries were hobbled without adequate salaries to attract professional staff members and without centers of their own where students could gather, socialize and study the Bible. Jews had Hillel Houses, and Roman Catholics had Newman Centers.

The article also goes into an interesting history of how the numbers of Evangelicals attending college has grown over the year. A very good article; a little on the long side, so take a nice coffee break this afternoon and check it out.