University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Graduate School Professional Papers 2019 THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, RACIAL CONFLICTS, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM, 1945-1980 Timothy Paul Ballard University of Montana, Missoula Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Recommended Citation Ballard, Timothy Paul, "THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, RACIAL CONFLICTS, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM, 1945-1980" (2019). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 11390. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11390 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, RACIAL CONFLICTS, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM, 1945-1980 By TIMOTHY PAUL BALLARD MA, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois, 2010 BA, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, 1999 Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in History The University of Montana Missoula, MT May 2019 Approved by: Scott Whittenburg, Graduate School Dean Tobin Shearer, Chair History Molly Worthen, History Jeff Wiltse, History Robert Greene History Quan Ha, English © COPYRIGHT by Timothy Paul Ballard 2019 All Rights Reserved Ballard, Timothy Paul, PhD, May 2019 History THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, RACIAL CONFLICT, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM, 1945-1980 Chairperson: Tobin Shearer This dissertation examines the history of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to understand the creation of a color-conscious theological discourse about racial identity and racial pluralism that emerged among evangelicals in the mid-twentieth century. Although a colorblind articulation of racial identity had wide currency among white and black evangelicals as a way to counter segregationists’ claims of racial superiority, it had little effect in challenging the exercise of white hegemony even among those who advocated for racial equality. The limits of colorblindness came to light as black evangelicals forged new approaches to evangelization among African Americans and white evangelicals challenged the validity of those approaches. The dissertation argues that racial conflicts–disputes about the meaning of race as well as disputes across racial lines–were a critical agent in the transformation of American evangelicalism in the postwar decades. It prompted the arrival of a movement among black evangelicals–a Black Evangelical Renaissance–defined by its vocal opposition to white hegemony and its commitment to disentangling evangelical faith from its use as a tool to maintain America’s racial order. Color-conscious theology emerged from the Black Evangelical Renaissance, prompting a reorientation of the evangelical missionary enterprise around its racially plural constituency and allowing black evangelicals to negotiate more equitable terms for their participation in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. ii The Missionary Enterprise, Racial Conflicts, and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, 1945-1980 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. iv 1. The Missionary Enterprise: A Compelling and Confounding Vision ..................... 1 2. Sitting Out the Sit-Ins? The Uneasy Conscience of African-American Evangelicals in Postwar America .......................................................................... 22 3. Coming of Age in InterVarsity: Black College Students and the Formation of the Black Evangelical Renaissance ............................................................................. 61 4. A Nexus of Conflict: America’s Racial Crisis and Mission Mobilization in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, 1969-1974 .................................................... 103 5. From America’s Racial Crisis to InterVarsity’s Racial Crisis: The Creation of Black Campus Ministry, 1974-1980 .................................................................... 146 6. Race and the Uneasy Conscience of American Evangelicals .............................. 191 iii Acknowledgments This project took shape over the previous twenty years as I became more and more acquainted with America’s legacy of racial oppression and with evangelical Christianity’s halting and uneven support for racial equality in the twentieth century. In Dr. Konrad Hamilton’s undergraduate course on the Civil Rights Movement at Knox College, I was troubled by the pervasive use of violence against African Americans and intrigued by the power of nonviolent action to enact social and political change. As a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, I saw how efforts to expose racism and unseat white hegemony could be met with enthusiastic applause and tearful confessions that sometimes erupted in heated exchanges across racial lines. During a decade of work with InterVarsity, I thus observed America’s racial order at play within the context of an evangelical organization–and, indeed, I partook in both the challenge to it and the reaction to sustain it. Although I could not have articulated it clearly at the end of my tenure with InterVarsity, I could see that America’s racial order had a formidable presence in American society that severely hampered the operations of an evangelical ministry. I took my experiences and the questions it raised to the academy to better understand the perennial contest among evangelicals to make racial equality a priority within its ranks. At the University of Montana’s History Department, I found a community of scholars who equipped me to answer my questions while also urging me to locate my research in multiple strands of historical discourse. I am grateful for the faculty whose keen historical insights were backed by careful reading of the evidence and keen iv awareness of historiographical debates; and whose seminars fostered that same approach to historical inquiry in students’ research and discussions about the past. I am also grateful to the history graduate students– James Vaughan, April Gemeinhardt, Pat O’Connor, Clinton Lawson, Johnny Barber, Sorn Jessen, Bob Lambeth, Jared Norwood, Joshua Pretzer, Liz Barrs, and Hayden Nelson. Thank you for making my research stronger, conversations richer, and my days brighter. I want to acknowledge those supported my research, especially librarians and archivists. I made hundreds of requests for Inter-Library loan items, and Pam Marek ensured that even the obscure items found their way to me. I spent a week at the Billy Graham Center Archive to gather material on InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I want to thank the archivists at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois– Paul Ericksen, Bob Schuster, Katherine Graber. I appreciate your patience in preparing one box after another for me to peruse during my week with you. The dissertation is the final step in a historian’s formal training, and my committee members warmly welcomed me to the profession. While writing the dissertation, Dr. Tobin Shearer kept my spirits up and my analysis sharp with his feedback and suggestions. Thank you for encouraging me to keep going when the task seemed too big to tackle. I’m also grateful for committee members’ sincere intellectual engagement with this project during the dissertation defense. In turn, you each made a potentially stressful test of my competence into an enriching exchange that helped me to hone the project’s argument and better express its conclusions. Along the way, I appreciated the many earnest questions from friends and family about how the project was progressing. Thank you for offering polite nods when I gave a v murky description of what I was trying to accomplish, as well as your enthusiasm for the topic of race in the history of evangelicalism. I’m especially grateful to Paul Robinson, who consistently pointed out the critical insight this project can offer to contemporary religious communities. Finally, my family has supported me in immeasurable ways as I completed this project. Thanks to my wife Jesse and my children Olivia and Benjamin for making this–and everything else in life–worth doing. vi Chapter 1 The Missionary Enterprise: A Compelling and Confounding Vision At the age of seventeen, Carl Ellis, Jr., was a veteran of civil rights campaigns to integrate public schools and to end employment discrimination in his hometown of Gary, Indiana. He had met Martin Luther King, Jr., and treasured his signed copy of Stride Toward Freedom. He had also joined demonstrations held in nearby Chicago. When Gary’s African Americans began to mobilize a campaign in 1964 to establish a human rights commission, Carl Ellis, Sr., a Tuskegee Airman during World War II, volunteered to fly over the city to distribute leaflets about Gary Freedom Movement’s activities and he invited his son to come along. Despite his years of involvement and despite being a novice pilot himself, Carl Ellis, Jr., hesitated to go along with his father.1 His hesitancy arose from his recent encounters with evangelical Christianity, a religious movement gaining momentum in the United States since the end of World