U.S. Intellectual History Blog

John Turner on Mike Huckabee, Hipster Evangelical

For those with an interest in religion, check out John Turner’s op-ed, “The Christian Woodstock,” on Mike Huckabee in the Wall Street Journal. Turner argues that Huckabee became representative of a new evangelicalism in the early 1970s. Drawing on Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ, a student group that embraced rock n’ roll and other hip-ish expressions of American culture, Turner shows that Huckabee stands as a symbol of this shift, which helps explain his appeal to contemporary evangelicals. -DS

Hat Tip.

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  1. DS,

    Thanks for highlighting this here. I saw the piece, and was fascinating by the topic of the mainstreaming of Evangelical Christianity religion in the 1970s. When discussing the history of religion in the 1960s and 1970s, many survey texts jump from the Jesus People (if mentioned at all) to the direct-mailings by televangelists in the 1970s (always discussed in the context of politics). Even more focused texts, such as Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies, often underscore the spirituality of the 1970s outside the context of Christianity. Anyway, it was interesting to see the WSJ historically contextualize a person such as Huckabee.

    – TL

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