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"You won! What are you grousing about? You won!" Sociologist Talcott Parsons was speaking. In his range were American Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish scholars and advocates enjoying a coffee break at a Vatican Conference in 1978. What could "winning" have meant to any part of the American Christian church? With the Second Vatican Council still in recent memory, it looked to him that ecumenical Christianity had won, and denominations and confessions did not have to be isolated or at war but could relate positively. Major elements of the Protestant social gospel, the Catholic Bishops' Program, and the black Christian civil rights leadership had "won" as governments enacted what they stood for. Culturally, the same churches had "won" by having contributed to the liberal or open society, which mixed secular reasoning and religious prophecy; support for tolerance and respect among religions; celebration of individual freedom; and selective affirmations of popular culture.

Christians both within and beyond the groups to which Parsons was referring now tend to participate, with some critical reserve, in a culture that now takes for granted what these achieved, but first had to call hard-won.

Harvard professor Parsons did not have in mind, scope, or speech the one-fourth or one-third of America that his sociologist colleagues now lump together as "evangelical." This refers to the nexus of fundamentalist-evangelical-Pentecostal-Baptist-conservative Protestant denominations. Were he alive today, he would find that more media attention, more governmental access and influence, more new wealth, more popular cultural expression comes from that group than others. Anytime from the 1920s to the 1970s, had he been wearing historians' spectacles, he probably would have said to those churches: "You lost!" Today he would have good reason to say in respect to many aspects of their movement: "You won!"

Evangelicals won, first, by contributing to a new kind of ecumenism, which old-style ecumenists have also been evolving. Yes, there are still some fundamentalist separatists around, but most evangelicals, whether within their denominations or not, move rather blithely in a pattern (or in the chaos of) ad hoc witness and activity (e.g., "parachurch") that pays little attention to historical confessional definition.

Second, evangelicals won by moving from what I used to call "private Protestantism" to visibility and at-homeness in the genus "public" and the species "political" religion. While by no means do all evangelicals rally around a single set of political signals, enough of them have banded together in a sequence of Majorities and Coalitions until they have become the core constituency of the political party in power.

Culturally, which refers to the third sphere of earlier victories by other Christians, many citizens would regard evangelicalism as a winner. On the face of it, such a claim sounds absurd. Listen to the evangelical breeds of whiners, moaners, groaners, mopers, and fair-minded observers who speak about cultural decline and the raw secularity that comes with it. And they have reason to grouse, sharing whining rights with Catholics, Protestants, Jews, African American Protestants, Mormons, secular moralists, and citizens who possess eyes and consciences in all camps. A glance at the covers of the publications peddled at airport newsstands, at the entertainment advertised in the free metropolitan weeklies, at most films and cable television, at most of what goes on in the market and the mall—all this would make a visitor wonder whether a hint of a tinge of a whisper of a reminiscence of a "Jewish-Christian" culture exists.

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February 2004, Vol. 48, No. 2