Big Man on Campus

Who has had a greater impact on Christianity in America, Billy Graham or Bill Bright? There is no right answer to this question, but it would be fun to discuss. While I think I might choose Bright, most people, I suspect, would not even take this question seriously. Everyone knows who Billy Graham is, but even people who have heard of Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) probably know very little, if anything, about its founder.

Here is another question: Who was the most influential religious activist in the Sixties? The names you are likely to hear are Martin Luther King, Jr., William Sloane Coffin, and the Berrigan brothers. Although King is hard to beat, a good case can be made that none of them were as active as Bright in creating organizations aimed at changing American culture. In fact, it is possible that no single individual in the 20th century worked harder to reach more people with the Gospel message than Bill Bright.

Bright (1921-2003) is not as well known as he should be because he worked behind the scenes for CCC, but John Turner’s new book puts his life and career center stage for all to see. A disappointment as a businessman and a failure as a student, Bright became the most innovative and successful promoter of Christianity on college campuses in America and across the world.

Bright grew up in Coweta, Oklahoma, in a world where there was little difference between Sunday school and public school because most of the teachers taught both. After moving to Los Angeles in 1944, he joined Hollywood Presbyterian, the nation’s largest Presbyterian Church, which was full of the rich and famous. There he came under the influence of a remarkable teacher, Henrietta Mears. With the loss of many young men during the war, Mears understood the need to inspire a new generation of Christian leaders. She did so by linking the call to Christian conversion with the defense of American values against communist influence. Mears thought that Christians should be as courageous as soldiers in their willingness to speak to anyone, anytime, about Christ. Throughout his life Bright continued to be motivated by what I have called “American providence,” the idea that America’s destiny is tied to the spread of the Gospel. [1]

Bright left first Princeton and then Fuller Seminary, because he resolved “not to be sitting here studying Greek when Christ comes!” He never let the classroom get in the way of the Gospel again. He founded CCC in 1951, the same year William F. Buckley published his scathing indictment of higher education, God and Man at Yale. Bright was as organized as Buckley was articulate. Campus Crusade took off because Bright knew how to re-create the feel of small town values within the impersonal structures of American universities, which were already becoming bureaucratic behemoths. Crusade is frequently criticized for not doing more to change the intellectual climate of higher education, but Bright viewed universities as centers of socialization, not intellectual debate, and he was probably wise to do so. As universities marginalized the role of Christianity—which occurred during the peak of Protestant liberal hegemony over American culture—students could only turn to the margins for their spiritual education.

The abandonment of the Christian roots of higher education by liberal Protestants is one of the most disgraceful and puzzling events in the history of Christianity. The idea that the faithful should never betray their faith, no matter the cost, is foundational in the Christian tradition, but in the middle of the 20th century liberal Protestants went out of their way to hand over the Christian traditions of their schools to hostile ideologies. This spectacular failure of nerve was so rapid that it almost seems as if liberal Protestants were afraid that if they did not give away their universities fast enough then evangelicals might take control.

Turner nicely captures the animosity of mainline Protestant campus ministries, which were not above lobbying universities to block Crusade’s access to students. Thanks to Bright’s persistence in identifying evangelicals with the simple act of witnessing, liberal Protestants reacted by increasingly defining themselves as Christians who never have to ask anyone if they know Jesus. Turner also shows how Bright negotiated complicated relationships with evangelical competitors (like InterVarsity Campus Fellowship) and early fundamentalist supporters like Bob Jones University. Fundamentalists wanted Bright to be clearer about what he rejected, while Bright wanted to keep the focus on what he thought everyone minimally needs to affirm.

Bright’s theological minimalism is best exemplified by the “Four Spiritual Laws,” which he formulated in 1959 and turned into a pamphlet in 1965. (Though CCC has a history of exaggerating its successes, it is no stretch to call this pamphlet the most widely distributed religious booklet in history.) Fundamentalists and liberals alike criticized the “Four Spiritual Laws” as a thin theological foundation, but Bright was not all that interested in systematic theology. Turner tells the story of Bright expounding the four laws to a group of Berkeley faculty in 1967. When a professor asked him how he would change his presentation for an intellectual audience, Bright replied, “I would probably read it more slowly.”

Turner also does a nice job of showing how much CCC learned from campus radicals. Crusade speakers like Josh McDowell borrowed their tactics and sometimes even seized their platforms. Ironically, New Left groups created a culture of dissent that made the Sixties and Seventies the golden age of evangelical campus ministry. Crusade leaders were as idealistic and alarmist as radicals but often better organized and more effective in communicating their message, even if they did not look the part. (Turner quotes a Los Angeles Times reporter’s comment that Bright looked “less like a revolutionary than anyone since Mahatma Gandhi.”) While mainline Protestant ministries tried to accommodate or even endorse student radicals, Bright ran a tight ship, forbidding his male staff to grow long hair, though many did grow out their sideburns and crew cuts as they worked to counter the counterculture. The media began to take notice. In 1970, Esquire magazine placed CCC at the top of a list of ten movements to avoid in college—ahead of the Weathermen and the Communist Party, USA.

The campus radicals failed in their bid to take over the universities, but they went on to dominate them as professors. They also went on to dominate our collective understanding of the Sixties, but their scholarship systematically overlooks student movements that do not fit their narrow understanding of social activism. Liberal professors have exhaustively examined Woodstock as much as they have studiously neglected “Explo ’72” (short for “spiritual explosion”), but the 85,000 college and high school students who gathered in Dallas to listen to Christian rock and learn how to witness to their faith went on to impact their universities as much or more than the crowds who partied on Max Yasgur’s farm. Likewise, precious few university history courses would ever acknowledge that the “Four Spiritual Laws” have had a cultural impact completely disproportionate to the much acclaimed 1962 Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society.

Turner’s biography is not hagiography. Bright had an authoritarian management style, basing major decisions on what he thought God was directing him to do. Consequently, he was not above questioning the faith, as well as the loyalty, of staff who disagreed with him. He also ran Crusade like a sales organization, demanding results by requiring staff members to file a weekly performance report. He was an unflagging and innovative fundraiser, but, as Turner points out, he lived modestly, even as he kept making extravagant plans for fulfilling his great passion for the Great Commission.

Parachurch organizations have so much influence in the Protestant world in part because they cross denominational lines and thus unite Christians from diverse theological traditions. By articulating very specific social agendas, however, they also tend to divide Protestants politically. Bright was an early player in the emerging evangelical alignment with the Republican Party, to which liberal Protestant leaders often reacted with shock and resentment. In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, Jim Wallis, editor of the left-leaning evangelical magazine Sojourners, accused Bright in the Seventies of being involved in covert action to get more right-wing Christians involved in politics. Turner has little sympathy for Bright’s lifelong anti-communism, but he does show how Bright tried to avoid politicizing the CCC organization itself.

Protestant parachurch organizations (in contrast to Roman Catholic lay ecclesial movements, which answer to a religious hierarchy) also tend to become autonomous subcultures and, over time, begin to function like a church. Bright always resisted the pressure to go ecclesial, which was at its height in the late Sixties, when some key staff members departed for the Orthodox branch of Christianity.

Crusade experienced slow growth in the late Seventies and Eighties, when students grew disenchanted with Sixties-style activism, but in recent years Crusade has been recruiting about one thousand staff members annually, with the majority coming from American campuses. Still, new challenges face CCC, with campuses becoming less residential and faculty becoming even more liberal. A recent study found that over 80 percent of professors in literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies departments are self-identifying liberals, while fewer than 5 percent call themselves conservatives.[2] The Campus Crusade chapter at my college, which calls itself the Wabash Christian Union, is the largest student club, but very few of my colleagues know anything about it, and none outside of the religion department are aware of its connection to CCC. I am torn between wanting it to have a greater impact on the college and hoping that it will stay just where it is—off the faculty’s radar screen but at the center of the spiritual lives of so many students. Sometimes faculty ignorance is Christian bliss.

Stephen H. Webb is professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. He is currently working on a book about creation and evolution, entitled The Dome of Eden.

1. Stephen H. Webb, American Providence: A Nation with a Mission (Continuum Press, 2004).

2. Stanley Rothman, et al., “Political and Professional Advancement among College Faculty,” The Forum, Vol. 3 (2005). Available at www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2.