Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 81–120, ISSN: 1052- 1151; electronic ISSN 1533-8568. © 2011 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rac.2011.21.1.81. Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left David R. Swartz On Thanksgiving weekend 1973, a full six years before the rise of the Moral Majority, a group of pastors, academics, and social activists met at the YMCA Hotel on Chicago’s South Wabash Street in an attempt to consolidate a politically progressive movement among American evangelical Protestants. The YMCA was a fitting site for proclaiming evangelicalism’s return to social justice. Its dingy interior testified to simple living, its urban location to a rejection of suburban isolation, and its South Side location to an embrace of social concern. As Paul Henry, a Calvin College political scientist and candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, delivered a speech declaring that evangelicals “dare no longer remain silent in the face of glaring social evil,” stray gunfire from outside the “Y” echoed through the hall. After several days of intense discussion, reported the Washington Post, the group emerged with “The Chicago Declaration,” a manifesto for an emerging evangelical left. The declaration denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and “Nixon’s lust for and abuse of power.” The Post reporter, newly aware of the growing vitality of a non-rightist political impulse in an evangelical tradition usually por- trayed as passively conservative, suggested that the gathering of evangelical leaders, led by Messiah College professor Ron Sider, might “launch a religious movement that could shake both political and religious life in America.” 1 The Chicago Declaration was the culmination of a growing and vibrant evangelical left movement that has escaped notice by many scholars. The flashy protests of evangelical radicals affiliated with the Post-Americans in Chicago and the rigorous intentional communities of groups like the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley, California, were combining with the technical, politically conventional approach of progressive realists associated with Calvin (Michigan) and Wheaton (Illinois) colleges. The years surrounding