On January 4, 2021 I introduced this Series of Stories with a post describing the circumstances that led to my pursuit of a PhD. I describe a poignant moment at Portland State University when a young woman being surveyed by my friend and me indicated that she had never heard of Jesus or the Bible. During that time, I was traveling every four-to-six weeks for my job and had many opportunities to engage in conversation with all sorts of people from a variety of different backgrounds. I discovered that America’s religious and societal demographics were changing, and I was unprepared.

The more discussions I had, the more inadequate my training felt. Sometimes it was as though my training was actually getting in the way of meaningful dialogue, and, honestly, I felt kind of lost.

I was often tempted to stop having conversations all together and at the same time, I was compelled. I really wanted to understand the difference between today’s context and the twentieth-century context in which most evangelism training was designed and developed. In particular, I homed in on Cru’s (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, CCC) founder, Bill Bright, and the mid-century context in which he developed Four Spiritual Laws—a booklet that presents the plan of salvation by way of a simple four-point outline. I quickly began to discover some fundamental ways his 1950s context differed from today’s.

For example, Bright experienced conversion in a post-World-War II context. It is important to remember that WW II included the horrors of the Holocaust, the US use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which led to the Cold War with Russia. An estimated 70–85 million people lost their lives in this war all over the world—that was three percent of the world’s population in 1940. In an American context, the end of the war included the end of Japanese American internment; the Civil Rights movement in its infancy; Jim Crow laws firmly in place along with strict segregation. Notably, the population in the U.S. at the time of the 1940 census was just under 90% white and 10% African American.

This era also marked the emergence of the civil rights movement spearheaded by Black activists at the local, state, and national levels and backed by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. In addition, a key factor in Bright’s development of Four Spiritual Laws was the Cold War and his dogged determination to fend off the evolving threat of communism,[1] which factored into his evangelism strategy.[2]

What stood out to me as I conducted research was the religious context of Bright’s day, which historians describe as “tri-faith”[3] and included Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions. Jewish sociologist-theologian Will Herberg described the context:

“The outstanding feature of the religious situation in America [mid-twentieth century] is the pervasiveness of religious self-identification along the tripartite scheme of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew.… America has, as we have seen, become the ‘triple melting pot,’ restructured in three great communities with religious labels, defining three great ‘communions’ or ‘faiths.’”[4]

In contrast, Demographer, William Frey, in his analysis of the US Census of 2010 states, “I am convinced that the United States is in the midst of a pivotal period ushering in extraordinary shifts in the nation’s racial demographic makeup.”[5] These shifts are due in large part to immigration. Jynnah Radford of the Pew Research Center reports that the US has more immigrants than any other country in the world, with as many as 40 million people living in the US who were born in another country.[6] These demographic shifts also include a host of different religions and worldviews.

So, as I began to understand some of the reasons behind the shifts in American culture and society, I began to consider the possibility of approaching meaningful gospel conversations from different vantage points and discovered the significance of a robust theological framework based on True Story of the Whole World (you can read about the TSWW in my January and February posts). Over the next several weeks I will highlight the juxtaposition between what I describe as a twenty-first century secularized context and that of the mid-twentieth century.

Let me know if you have made similar observations or if your faith has felt fragile. I hope that this Series of Stories encourages you in your faith journey.

*Portions of this post are taken from: Monaco, Cas. “Bill Bright’s (1921–2003) Four Spiritual Laws Reimagined: A Narrative Approach to Meaningful Gospel Conversations For An American Twenty First Century Secularized Context,” PhD Diss, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Wake Forest, NC, 2020.

[1] Gaustad, Noll, and Carter, in Documentary History, 484, add, “As the Cold War cast its pall, the whole world seemed divided between communist (despotic and atheistic) and noncommunist (free and godly) halves. In the 1950s the Americans’ pledge of allegiance to the flag was amended to include the phrase ‘under God,’ as if to emphasize that the Cold War was also, to some degree, a Holy War.” The passions aroused on all sides were equal to such a crusade. This comes to bear in Bright’s “crusade” and his early statements of purpose and urgency.

[2] Bill Bright, “A Strategy for Fulfilling the Great Commission,” Dallas Lay Institute of Evangelism, February 13–20, 1966, Campus Crusade for Christ Archives, Orlando, FL.

[3] Gaustad, Noll, and Carter, Documentary History, 485.

[4] Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1960), 256.

[5] Frey, Diversity Explosion, 3.

[6] Jynnah Radford, “Key Findings About U.S. Immigrants,” The Pew Research Center, June 17, 2019 (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/), n.p.