The single biggest mistake of the neo-evangelical coalition, and here I’m thinking of the late 70s through the 80s and into the 90s, was its decision to glue itself to the Republican Party. Led by the architects — Francis Schaeffer, James Kennedy, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson — neo-evangelicalism lost its single-minded evangelical focus. Instead, it was intoxicated with the potential power in winning the culture war, and nothing represented its hope more than overturning Roe v. Wade. (That never happened, as you know.)
In 1981 I showed up at the University of Nottingham, and in one of my first sessions with my professor, Jimmy Dunn, he observed to me that what was going on in the culture wars in the USA was a huge mistake for the evangelical movement. He further observed that politics has its swings — now GOP soon Dem and back and forth — and that when it swung the other way, it would be the church — not the Republicans — that would lose.
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