Rethinking Campus Evangelicalism

John A. Schmalzbauer

November 4, 2025

My rear-view mirror reflection focuses on two pieces on evangelicals and social justice, a trend that I exaggerated in the early 2000s. Published as “Social Engagement in an Evangelical Campus Ministry: The Case of Urbana 2006” (2010) and “Whose Social Justice? Which Evangelicalism? Social Engagement in a Campus Ministry” (2013), my research heralded a progressive turn in evangelical discourse that was real but limited.

I now see things differently. 

Looking back over the decades, I am struck by how our current political moment has changed my understanding of the recent past. I am not alone in this sentiment. For many historians and sociologists, the 2016 election marked a sea change in the way we see the past, present, and future of American religion. 

Things looked very different prior to 2016.

In the early 2000s, many of us perceived a resurgence of progressive religious activism within American evangelicalism, reminiscent of the “moral minority” days of the 1970s when the evangelical left first emerged. While other observers remained skeptical, the election of Barack Obama—a candidate who spoke openly about faith-based social activism—seemed to confirm this perception. While never post-racial, the political and religious zeitgeist reflected the growing diversity of American society, symbolized by a president with roots in both Kansas and Kenya. 

I caught a glimpse of this new religious landscape at a 2006 gathering of 23,000 evangelical college students and wrote about it in 2010 and 2013. Drawing on ethnographic field observations at InterVarsity’s massive Urbana student missions conference, these two overlapping pieces chronicled the emergence of a “group on the center-left of evangelicalism” that was “increasingly progressive on issues of poverty, the environment, and race.” Taken together, they captured my naïve optimism about evangelicalism’s growing social awareness. 

To be clear, this was not my first exposure to what some have called the “evangelical non-right.” As a graduate of an evangelical liberal arts college, I was familiar with Evangelicals for Social Action, Sojourners, and The Other Side, and had heard figures like Tony Campolo preach in my college’s chapel. Focusing on people of faith in American journalism and the social sciences, my doctoral research only deepened my awareness of evangelicalism’s ideological and political diversity. 

Despite this awareness, I was unprepared for what I witnessed at InterVarsity’s Urbana student missions conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Held in the Edward Jones Dome, then home to the NFL’s St. Louis Rams, Urbana represented a strand of evangelicalism seldom profiled in the popular press. 

To begin with, only 60 percent of attendees were white, a demographic diversity that included the plenary speakers, worship leaders, and the emcee. While most of the non-white attendees were Asian American, Urbana 2006 was much more diverse than the student body of my undergraduate alma mater. 

Reflecting this cultural and ideological diversity, the speakers focused on themes that were largely absent from conservative evangelical political discourse. While one speaker spoke about God’s “relentless concern for the poor,” a video celebrated the contributions of Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Archbishop Oscar Romero. The week’s social justice focus reached its climax with the appearance of U2’s Bono on a giant jumbotron. Declaring that “God is in the slums” and “God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war,” the Irish musician quoted Matthew 25, urging the audience to take out their cell phones and fight poverty by joining the ONE Campaign. 

Race was also on the agenda of Urbana 2006, as it was at Urbana 1970 and Urbana 2015. While some speakers used the more conservative language of “racial reconciliation,” the book exhibit included works on structural and systemic racism, including Cornel West’s Race Matters, Christian Smith and Michael Emerson’s Divided By Faith, and The Heart of Racial Justice, one of many titles on race published by InterVarsity Press. While a video condemned the theft of land from Native Americans, a breakout session on “Being White” focused on the social construction of whiteness. 

In short, this wasn’t your grandmother’s evangelicalism, at least not my grandmother’s. My grandmother wrote checks to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and subscribed to the Moral Majority Report. She would not have felt at home at Urbana 2006.

In the early 2000s, even the Heritage Foundation sponsored an initiative on faith and social justice, a development I discussed in 2013. Focusing on the non-governmental sphere of civil society and “compassionate conservativism,” Heritage tried to redefine, rather than eliminate, the term, publishing the Seek Social Justice Bible study with Southern Baptist Lifeway.

Ten years later, the nation’s leading conservative think tank has abandoned such initiatives, joining the chorus of anti-wokeism and championing Project 2025. Today the Heritage Foundation ridicules social justice rhetoric, rather than coopting it. Writing in the Daily Signal, a young conservative thanked Heritage for helping “deprogram me from the cult of social justice as a teen.”

The turn against social justice has also influenced some evangelical campus ministries. In 2020, a group of disgruntled staff members with Cru (formerly known as Campus Crusade) published a 179-page document lambasting the organization for embracing CRT, DEI, and the social gospel. Temporarily appearing on Cru’s main webpage, this document took a swipe at fellow evangelicals at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, noting that “outside ‘experts’ do not share Cru’s missional philosophy.” Battered by the controversy, Cru’s in-house diversity unit shut down. Disillusioned by the toxic rhetoric directed at their work, the leaders of Cru’s Lenses Institute opted to close the organization. 

We have mapped these tensions in the Landscape Study of Chaplaincy and Campus Ministry in the United States. Chronicling this “Evangelical Civil War on the college campus,” Landscape researcher Rebecca Kim has described how members of the white evangelical right use the rhetoric of colorblind-othering to “fight against [the] co-evangelicals that support racial justice.” 

To be sure, social justice evangelicals remain a part of the larger movement, including those in the ranks of campus ministries. A “minority report” in evangelicalism, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship continues to advance the perspectives I observed in 2006. Following the murder of George Floyd, InterVarsity’s Taiwanese American president Tom Lin issued the following statement: “InterVarsity unequivocally condemns racism and white supremacy.” 

And yet the rightward drift of evangelicalism continues on campus. At my own university, hundreds of people, including young evangelical college students, crowded a campus plaza to remember Charlie Kirk. The event culminated in a sermon and altar call presided over by a veteran of the Jesus movement of the 1960s. Likening Kirk to a Christian martyr, the event melded praise and worship music with conservative politics, fusing religion and nation.

Much has changed since I wrote about evangelical activism in the early 2000s. So has my view of evangelicalism.