EVANGELICALS AND EMERGENT MORAL PROTEST

This article provides a comparative analysis of two religiously inspired protests that fed broader social movements: the “rebellion” of immediate abolitionists at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati in 1834 and the new-left “breakthrough” at the Christian Faith-and-Life Community in Austin in 1960. The two cases are examples of moral protests breaking out of Protestant institutions and shaping social movements. From the comparison, we draw general lessons about the meso- and micro-level processes of activist conversions. We show how processes of “rationalization” and “subjectivation” combined in the emergence of new contentious moral orders. We apply these lessons to help explain the creative interactions of evangelical Protestants in the history of American moral protest. Our approach accords with pragmatist and new social movement theories of emergent moral orders. The history of American social movements is shot through with moral protests breaking out of the world of evangelicals. Any shortlist of important American movements includes those deeply marked by protests emerging from evangelical institutions: temperance, antislavery, women’s rights, populism, money radicalism, civil rights, the new left, prolife, and the list goes on. 1 A few of these movements challenged the basic cultural orientation of American society and introduced new contentious moral orders that became widespread. Immediate abolitionism and the new left are among a small number of movements that can lay claim to revolutionizing American moral sensibilities. By drawing a comparison of moments of radical adjustment in the moral orientation of activists at the center of the emergence of these two movements, this article addresses a general sociological question of how new moral orders emerge in social movements and a more particular question of why evangelicals are repeatedly found at the center of these creative moments in the United States. To this end, we compare the Lane Seminary “rebellion” outside of Cincinnati in 1834 and the “breakthrough” at the Christian Faith-and-Life Community (CFLC) in Austin in 1960. The events at Lane and the CFLC occurred at critical junctures in the emergence of abolitionism and the new left. Antislavery organizing was not new to the 1830s, but during this decade calls for immediate abolitionism gave rise to a form of antislavery activism so different in tone, method, and membership as to constitute a new movement (Stewart 1997). An evangelical impulse propelled this new movement by deepening a personal sense of guilt for the immense institution that shackled millions (Young 2007). The students at Lane Seminary provided one of the earliest and most influential articulations of this evangelical impulse, fusing the religious revival spirit of immediate personal repentance with the national campaign to abolish slavery (Abzug 1980; Barnes 1933). The Lane rebels became leading agents in the spread of immediate abolitionism in the early years of the movement.