Years of the Evangelicals

Long before Sarah Palin met CPAC and the Duck Dynasty clan discovered A&E, George Gallup Jr. famously declared 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical.” Subsequent commentators often pluralized “evangelical.” They might have done the same for “year,” too. In many years hence—1980, say, or 2004—it was 1976 all over again, to judge from the headlines. Those election years highlighted the Christian Right, a force that was not on Gallup’s radar screen back when Jimmy Carter was the prototypical evangelical in public life.

The years of the evangelicals were not only about campaign politics, however. For a generation of observers across the cultural spectrum, evangelicalism was a sign of the postmodern times. The megachurch was the new civil society, while Habitat for Humanity was the tie that bound.

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