By Francesca Jarosz The Daily Northwestern

Chase Woodward never thought he’d harbor a passion for AIDS relief, immigrant rights and urban poverty eradication because of his evangelical Christian faith.

Growing up in a 5,000-member Omaha, Neb., “megachurch,” he was taught to focus on values like prayer and preaching the Gospel. If Woodward discussed political issues, they were gay marriage and abortion, which he opposes.

The Weinberg senior said he still embraces those causes. But he’s also broadened his scope of concern by looking critically at other social matters and taking a stance on them. “If you look at Jesus’ life, he heals the sick, he eats with the poor,” said Woodward, president of Northwestern’s MultiEthnic InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (MEIV), which has dedicated this academic year to focusing on justice issues. “He’s going around with the low people, and he tells his disciples to do the same. It’s not all about me – it’s about the broken world we live in.”

Woodward’s statement echoes the mantra of evangelical college students nationwide who are discovering that – along with prayer and preaching – religion also means pushing for social change. In the past few years, experts say the call to faith-based activism that mobilized in the 1940s through a group called the “neo-evangelicals” has seen a revival with the church’s increase of racial diversity and political seasoning. And young believers are not only embracing this movement; they’re leading it.

“Evangelicals’ view of the Bible and God’s will extends to care of the environment, social justice and foreign policy issues – those concerns have not traditionally been concerns of the evangelical church,” said John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and senior research fellow at Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “It’s a generational change. Younger evangelicals are more open to this broader agenda.”

At NU this year, MEIV created a “justice team” of six students who bring in speakers on topics from AIDS to human trafficking and promote volunteer opportunities in these areas. Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in Wheaton, Ill., boasts the second most-active chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign, trailing only Harvard, where the secular national group was founded. As part of their outreach, members of the campaign offer tutoring to a group of mainly gay men who are HIV positive or have a loved one affected by the illness.

And at North Park University, a Christian school in Chicago, a group of about 100 students sleep outside city hall every year to draw politicians’ attention to youth homelessness.

“The way my parents’ faith worked for them is not the way mine will work for me,” said Tara Allison, a North Park junior who leads the event, called ‘Sleep Out.’ “My faith is a lot messier than going to community Bible study.”

NEO-EVANGELICALS RESURGE

A little after 7 p.m. on a blisteringly cold Friday, about 100 students gathered in Harris Hall room 107, ready to hear about the AIDS epidemic. They listened to the facts – like how every minute, five people in Africa die of the disease. Through a video, they heard the story of a woman whose life had been torn apart by AIDS after she was raped and impregnated twice by the same man. Then they digested a challenging message.

“Why is the church so impotent that it does nothing in the midst of that tragedy?” asked Sandra Van Opstal, director of the Chicago Urban Project, a faith-based student outreach program in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood. “Shouldn’t the people of God be involved?”

In the past few years, evangelical Christians young and old have been answering “yes.” But the concept of action-based faith isn’t entirely new.

In the 1940s, a group of “neo-evangelicals” branched off from hard-line fundamentalists to advocate the church’s role in reforming society and taking a stance on problems such as racial segregation.

A chorus of liberal, mainly college-aged, voices began to arise in the evangelical community in the 1970s. The Chicago Declaration, published in 1973 by a group of neo-evangelicals, connected evangelism and justice, stating, “We cannot … separate out lives in Christ from the situation in which God has placed us in the United States and the world.”

But most evangelicals instead embraced the more conservative doctrine of their faith. In the 1970s and 80s, “religious Right” leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gained national recognition for their campaigns to preserve traditional values.

With the turn of the millennium, though, some religious scholars say the social movements that started with the neo-evangelicals have begun moving into the mainstream. Influential leaders like Rick Warren, pastor of a ‘megachurch’ in Lake Forest, Calif., have called fellow evangelicals to pay attention to highly politicized topics like AIDS and the environment. In February 2006, he and 85 other evangelical Christian leaders backed an initiative to fight global warming.

They’ve also collaborated with leaders outside of the church. Rock musician Bono has appeared across the evangelical circuit to garner support for his poverty eradication ONE campaign. Pro-choice Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama spoke at last December’s Global Summit on AIDS and the church at Warren’s fellowship.

“I see (the social justice movement) growing organically out of the things that were there in evangelicalism for 30 years,” said John Schmalzbauer, a professor of American religion at Missouri State University and co-author of “The Post-Secular Academy,” about the comeback of religion on college campuses. “It’s not exactly brand new, but it’s stronger now than it was emphasized before.”

NOT TYPICAL ‘JESUS FREAKS’

Raised by a Quaker, Irish mother and a Puerto Rican, Episcopalian father, Communication senior Emlyn Torres grew up steeped in diversity. In her mainly Hispanic, East Los Angeles neighborhood, she said she remembers the riots that shook her city in 1992 and the tent cities that rose up at 5 p.m. when the factories closed. When she got involved with MEIV through friends in her dorm freshman year, Torres said she took comfort in the diversity that she found there.

In the past 40 years, the church as a whole has gone from a mainly Southern, rural constituency, to a place for people of various ages and backgrounds, said Green of the Pew Forum. Today about 26 percent of InterVaristy’s members identify as minorities, compared with about 29 percent of college students at large. The organization offers ministries specifically targeted toward black, Latino and Asian communities.

Green said demographics play a role in the church’s drive toward social justice.

“There’s a broader set of perspectives in the church,” Green said. “(Evangelicals) have been able to spread the Gospel to different people.”

Social justice provides a way for college-age evangelicals to spread the Gospel even more. While the movement includes connecting Christians to causes, it also means showing secular reformists that Christians care about the same things they do. Earlier this month, for instance, NU evangelical groups like Greek InterVaristy encouraged its members to sign a petition urging the school to divest from genocide in Darfur.

“Our campus doesn’t give a rip about Jesus, but our campus cares about justice,” Torres said. “Justice provides a great opportunity to engage in a dialogue with people – not only about what people deal with in the world, but also about faith.”

Part of engaging the secular world means understanding it. For many young evangelicals, faith is as much about politics as it is about prayers.

Weinberg junior and Asian-American InterVarsity member Natalene Ong spent her summer and fall registering voters at Kennedy-King College on Chicago’s South Side. For her, providing people with political access is a means of ministry.

To change the world, some
students say, they have to understand what’s going on in it.

“To turn on CNN or to read The New York Times is hard for me,” said Weinberg senior Tim Lee, a member of the group. “(But) if I really believe that God is passionate about justice, politics is a big part of that.”

LEFTWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS?

Engagement in politics doesn’t mean that college-age evangelicals get involved in partisan loyalties.

The embrace of social justice has caused a tendency toward split-ticket voting among young people. Because college-age evangelicals tend to support more conservative political issues and more liberal social justice issues, they’re politically situated more toward the middle than their parents were.

“There’s a segment of the emergent church that has swung the opposite way,” said Brian Lair, a 24-year-old divinity student and Evanston Bible Fellowship college minister. “They’re starting to go more centrist rather than just Republican.”

Some groups are capitalizing on that momentum. Jesse Lava, founder of Faithful Democrats, a Web site aimed at forming a Christian community of Democrats online, said the Kerry campaign did a poor job of reaching out to religious communities in 2004. But many issues, from environmentalism to poverty awareness, fall in line with the Democratic rhetoric, Lava said.

“We’re saying we’re Democrats – not in spite of our faith, but because of it,” Lava said.

Members of the college generation say their priorities differ from those of the more conservative evangelical camp. Some personally oppose abortion and homosexuality, but those shouldn’t be the only issues to receive attention.

“People point and say, ‘Oh, you’ve had an abortion or, ‘Oh, you’re gay,'” Ong said. “But this country doesn’t take care of its homeless.”

But some more traditional evangelicals worry about the social justice movement’s exclusion of traditional causes such as abortion, which, they say, is abandoned because of its controversy.

“There seems to be a case of ignoring some of the key issues of our day, ” said Ryan Rush, senior pastor at Bannockburn Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. “(But) it’s just as important to look at abortion as it is world hunger and the AIDS crisis.”

Some evangelical college students also have reservations about the social justice movement. Andrew Sturdy, a North Park junior involved with the school’s overseas missions program, said he supports the church’s involvement in such causes, but he’s wary of religion becoming too political.

“Behind the pulpit, that’s a time for the Bible to be preached – not time to bring in a guest speaker to be talking about political agendas and how we need to be out protesting,” Sturdy said. “Rather than picking out the agenda from the Gospel, you need to be picking out the Gospel from the agenda.”

Despite these concerns, many social-justice types predict the next generation of evangelicals will help heal the age-old split between reformists and fundamentalists. Both evangelical leaders and students say – unlike with previous movements – today’s young social ‘crusaders’ embrace the justice agenda without abandoning evangelistic goals.

That’s one sign, they say, that evangelicalism is changing, as Christians step out from behind the church doors into the messy world of real reform.

Woodward himself is proof that change can happen.

“If I would have looked at myself four years ago, I would have thought, ‘Chase, you’ve gone soft,'” Woodward said. “I’m realizing I’m not a liberal, but I care about these social justice issues a lot. If you wear the lens of justice when you read the Bible, it’s in there. You just have to tune your mind to see it.”

Reach Francesca Jarosz at [email protected].