Younger evangelicals and the future of the Christian Right

Now that James Dobson has stepped down as the head of Focus on the Family, many are speculating what it will mean for the future of the Christian Right. At The Public Eye, Pam Chamberlain’s exploration of the relationship between younger evangelicals and the conservative movement adds to the conversation:

That establishment is aging. Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, and Paul Weyrich, all founding fathers of the Christian Right, died within the past year and a half. While megachurch pastors, political movement spokespeople, and others are jockeying for media attention, evangelical Christian college graduates will be a major source of future leadership. They will be expected to maintain evangelical traditions and step up to direct evangelical social and political movements as well. A 1982 study of nine evangelical colleges by James Hunter uncovered students increasingly moving away from traditional conservative evangelical religious beliefs, an effect of growing secularization, even at these enclaves of evangelical thought. The update of the study, published in 2002, by James Penning and Corwin Smidt, revealed some interesting changes among students at the identical set of schools polled by Hunter.

The more recent study seemed to suggest that evangelical students had returned to more conservative religious views, in line with their parents. While students continue to believe that a personal faith in Jesus was the only hope for heaven and that the devil actually exists, a higher percentage of the more recent cohort of students believed that the Bible is to be taken literally. In fact Penning and Smidt suggest that by 1996, at least, younger and older evangelicals’ views had converged on most issues except homosexuality. In recent years, however, younger evangelicals appear to be once again shifting their attitudes regarding religion and politics in ways that currently are difficult to explain.

[…]

Are younger evangelicals a kind of collective bellwether, presaging developments within the Christian Right and among conservative Christian voters? More likely we are witnessing a representation of the diversity of political and theological ideas across generations that constitute current evangelical Christianity.

Read her entire report here, and see Daniel Vaca’s here & there post on Dobson’s retirement.