The Feed

From Time: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1992463,00.html

With few job openings available for graduating seniors, recruiters are an especially welcome sight on college campuses these days. When Josh Dickson, a recruiter at Teach for America, would show up at liberal-arts colleges this year, the earnest 25-year-old would hear student after student explain that their most urgent desire had always been to teach in a low-income community.

It may sound like exactly the kind of interaction that takes place on hundreds of campuses across the country. But there’s something distinctive about the colleges and universities where Dickson has been doing his recruiting: they’re all religious schools. And Dickson isn’t your standard nonprofit recruiter. A devout Christian, he honed his persuasion techniques evangelizing to classmates as a leader of his university’s chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ.

With the touch he refined telling football players they should care more about their eternal souls than the next keg party, Dickson has been seeking out student all-stars at places like Illinois’s Wheaton College, long known as the Harvard of Evangelical schools. During interviews, he heard a lot of students say variations of what one Wheaton senior told him: “I just think God has given me a heart for social justice.”

For many people, the word Evangelical evokes an image of fire-and-brimstone conservatism. Pat Robertson’s suggestion this past winter that Haiti had brought its earthquake on itself through a Satanic pact may have been an extreme example, but it’s the kind of pronouncement we’ve come to expect from a certain generation of Evangelical leaders.

Today’s young Evangelicals cut an altogether different figure. They are socially conscious, cause-focused and controversy-averse. And they are quickly becoming a growth market for secular service organizations like Teach for America. Overall applications to Teach for America have doubled since 2007 as job prospects have dimmed for college graduates. But applications have tripled from graduates of Christian colleges and universities. Wheaton is now ranked sixth among all small schools — above traditionally granola institutions like Carleton College and Oberlin — in the number of graduates it sends to Teach for America. The typical Wheaton student, like many in the newest generation of Evangelicals, is likely to be on fire about spreading the Good News and doing good.

The Role Faith Plays in Teachers’ Lives
One of Dickson’s strongest recruiting tools is the story he shares with other young Evangelicals. The native of upstate New York grew up in a churchgoing family that valued service — Dickson’s parents used to take him along to serve dinner to the poor on Friday nights. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Dickson became involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, an international Christian evangelism organization. Before long, Dickson was leading Bible studies in his dorm and recruiting the captain of the football team to talk about his faith at a Campus Crusade event the week of the end-of-season game against rival Ohio State.

By day, however, Dickson was a political science major. In his theory and policy courses, he was learning for the first time about social inequities that he thought had been erased decades earlier. He remembers being shocked to learn that the quality of something as universal as education depended largely on one’s zip code. Once blind, he now saw systemic contributors to poverty wherever he looked.

So while he had been leaning toward joining the staff of Campus Crusade after graduation, Dickson began to seek a different way to live out his faith. He was looking for a way to serve, and he kept coming back to education. “When people are provided with a good education, that helps them have the greatest chance to reach their potential as a human being,” says Dickson. “As an Evangelical, it was really important for me to help others work toward that.”

That’s how Dickson ended up a Teach for America corps member, spending his first two years out of college responsible for a classroom of 30 kindergartners at Octavio Paz Charter School in Chicago. With few high-quality preschools in the area, the children arrived in Dickson’s class lacking basic skills like letter recognition and the ability to write their names. They left in the spring reading at grade level and writing sentences.

Dickson loved the satisfaction of knowing he was helping his young, bright students. But he also recognized that his good work could be undercut by a subpar elementary school teacher. After his two-year stint in the classroom, Dickson decided to become a Teach for America recruiter to get more talented graduates into the field of teaching.

Around the same time, Teach for America — which was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp and currently places 4,100 teachers in schools around the country — was starting to realize the role faith played in many of its teachers’ lives. Internal surveys showed that more than half of incoming corps members said they were motivated by their faith to join Teach for America. The organization decided to launch partnerships with groups like the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities; Kopp keynoted the council’s 2010 conference. Teach for America also moved to beef up its presence at religiously affiliated schools.

Dickson was the perfect match for those efforts. He became the leader of a team of recruiters who spread out among people at Bible colleges in California, the Latter-day Saints at Brigham Young University, young Catholics at Holy Cross and attendees of other traditionally religious institutions. Evangelicals are Dickson’s specialty, in part because they relate so well to his tale. When he speaks about why he joined Teach for America, Dickson talks about his “calling.” At Wheaton, one senior who is applying to the program asks if teaching affected his faith. “Absolutely,” says Dickson. “Teaching at a low-income school is tough for anyone. My faith was what made me know on my drive home every day that I was going back the next day.” (Read a TIME special: “How to Raise the Standard in America’s Schools.”)

The Faith-Based Generation
It isn’t just Dickson’s enthusiasm and persuasive pitch that have led to the noteworthy increase in Teach for America recruits from Christian colleges and universities. Over the past decade, a remarkable cultural shift has taken place among young Evangelicals that has surprised even longtime observers.

There is a long history in the Evangelical community of caring for “the least of these,” whether as full-time missionaries or through religious entities like World Vision, one of the biggest international relief and development organizations on the planet. Churches often collect special offerings to support aid groups or to focus on local needs through soup kitchens and clothing drives. Evangelical involvement in the pro-life movement is well-known, of course, but at least a century earlier, Evangelicals held leading roles in the effort to abolish slavery.

In general, however, Evangelicals’ political and social activism was discouraged on the grounds that it took focus away from the greater cause of preparing individuals for the eternal world. Some Evangelicals were involved in the civil rights struggle and opposition to the Vietnam War, and a faction of Wheaton students even launched the U.S.’s first Evangelicals for McGovern chapter. But many agreed with their fundamentalist cousin the Rev. Jerry Falwell when he criticized Martin Luther King Jr.’s political activism in 1964, arguing that “preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners.”

Fifteen years later, Falwell changed his tune when he founded the Moral Majority, and an important debate within Evangelicalism simply ended. “The question was no longer whether you could make a case for political involvement,” says Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington. “The issue became which side you were on.” (See how religious groups are pushing for immigration reform.)

While their grandparents might have considered political and social engagement inappropriate and their parents may have spent their energies on culture-war issues such as abortion and school prayer, the members of the newest generation of Evangelicals are less interested in choosing sides. They focus on nonideological causes like fighting for clean water and poverty relief and fighting against sex trafficking. The issues lend themselves to what the late Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer called “co-belligerents,” the idea that people who disagree on other issues can work together for a common cause. No one is pro-malaria, so everyone is a potential ally to fight malaria. That may seem simply logical, but just four years ago, when Rick Warren invited then Senator Barack Obama to address his annual AIDS conference, the megachurch pastor was attacked by religious conservatives who sent him a letter warning that Obama’s support for abortion rights rendered him an unfit ally on any issue. “You cannot fight evil while justifying another,” they wrote.

Many younger Evangelicals have also dispensed with the idea — once considered gospel truth by older generations — that only private institutions like churches and charities should care for the needy. “Young Evangelicals are not constrained by the sacred-secular dichotomy their parents had,” says Cromartie. “They see the whole world as their neighborhood.” They are the faith-based generation, having grown up with George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives and the assumption that it is right and good for government to partner with religious organizations. “We need all hands on deck,” Obama declared in a 2008 campaign speech about faith-based organizations. For young Evangelicals, all hands on deck includes the government.

Like many of their secular peers, young Evangelicals have also been influenced by globalization. Their parents would have heard about third-world poverty once a year via slide shows from visiting missionaries at a Sunday-night church service. Younger Evangelicals’ exposure, on the other hand, is more direct and sustained. They download videos about child soldiers in Uganda and hear their favorite Christian musicians talk about building orphanages in Haiti. When students at Wheaton and other Christian schools go on short-term missions during spring break or over the summer, they may expect to spend their time painting churches or handing out Bibles. But once on the ground, they’re faced with first-order problems like a lack of clean drinking water or safe housing, and they return with a sense of poverty’s scope that cannot be alleviated simply by prayer. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world.)

Young Evangelicals are politically involved for that most prosaic of reasons as well: it’s popular. Bono talks about his faith at the National Prayer Breakfast and challenges world leaders to forgive the debts of poor countries. Relevant magazine, a publication for young Evangelicals with 100,000 subscribers, urges its readers to “reject apathy” and educate themselves about issues ranging from “unjust war” to “creation care” (the Evangelical phrase for protecting the environment). A young minister named Tyler Wigg-Stevenson launched an Evangelical movement in 2008 to abolish nuclear weapons. And at a revival gathering called Passion 2010 in Atlanta over New Year’s weekend, more than 22,000 Evangelical college students donated nearly $700,000 of their own money to support organizations working to dig wells in Africa, help children in poverty and save women from sex trafficking.

“We’re Not Like Our Parents”
Does all of this social activism mean young Evangelicals are liberals? Hardly. Theologically, they remain fairly conservative, but mostly they reject political and religious labels. In fact, many would rather you didn’t even call them Evangelical (simply Christian is the preferred term). “For a lot of younger Evangelicals, it steals our identity,” says Don Miller, whose spiritual memoir Blue like Jazz has sold more than 1 million copies and has developed a cult following among under-30 Evangelicals. “We’re not like Pat Robertson. We’re not like Republicans. We’re not like our parents.”

Miller is a registered Democrat who delivered a prayer at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and hit the road as a campaign surrogate for Obama during the last month of the 2008 campaign. In general, however, young Evangelicals overwhelmingly supported John McCain in the presidential election. (Obama improved only slightly over John Kerry’s showing among white Evangelicals under 30.) Those votes for McCain aren’t terribly surprising, given the strong pro-life beliefs of many young Evangelicals, the nearly nonexistent outreach of the Obama campaign to those voters and the decades-strong connection between many Evangelicals and the GOP. Just as Catholic homes used to display photos of FDR or JFK, Ronald Reagan was a patron saint of many Evangelical households.

There are, however, signs that young Evangelicals’ disaffection with labels could carry over to politics. From 2004 to 2007, the percentage of white Evangelicals who identified themselves as Republican declined from roughly 50% to 40%, driven in part by a rising number of young Evangelicals who registered as Independents. A January 2008 TIME survey of voters ages 18 to 29 found that 35% of Democrats and 35% of Independents called themselves “born again.”

Perhaps the most significant change shaping the Evangelical community today is the growing generation gap in political attitudes and positions. On a wide array of issues, you can get completely different responses from Evangelicals over 35 and those under 35. An October 2008 poll by Public Religion Research showed that by a margin of 21 points, young Evangelicals were more likely than older ones to favor expanding government to provide more social services. While they remain staunchly antiabortion, young Evangelicals are twice as likely as their parents to support same-sex civil unions. And 56% (vs. 44% of older Evangelicals) believe that diplomacy is a better road to peace than military strength.

It’s no wonder that traditional Evangelical organizations like Focus on the Family that built membership lists by fighting the culture war are worried about their ability to connect with this new generation of Evangelicals. When Focus founder James Dobson retired in 2009, he was replaced by the mild-mannered, 40-something Jim Daly, whose mission is to appeal to young Evangelicals. The much hyped but extremely tame Tim Tebow ad during the Super Bowl was part of the organization’s effort to rebrand itself as a kinder and gentler Christian presence.

Focus will have to compete with the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a new organization launched by Richard Cizik, a former official at the National Association of Evangelicals who irritated religious-right leaders with his work on environmental issues and was ultimately cast out in 2008 for the sin of reconsidering his opposition to civil unions. Cizik’s group went public in January with support from an impressive lineup of young Evangelical leaders. Its first official act was to (successfully) lobby the Obama Administration to forgive Haiti’s debt.

The Difference Between Justice and Mercy
Teach for America is famously obsessed with data and results, trying to figure out what makes a good teacher. Spokespeople for the nonprofit won’t comment on whether teachers from religious colleges and universities have an advantage in the classroom. But the organization has seen enough to focus its energies on schools like Wheaton.

As Josh Dickson prepares to enroll this fall in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government — where he plans to study social and urban policy, with a focus on educational opportunities in low-income communities — he points to Teach for America members like Adam Brown and feels pride in his generation. Brown is a 2007 Wheaton graduate and a Teach for America corps member in East Baton Rouge, La. He is bright and easygoing, with a good sense of humor, and had planned on a career in politics. Law school, not high school, was in his future. “If you’d asked me what I was going to do after graduation,” says Brown, “teaching wasn’t even on my radar.”

Like many of his classmates, though, Brown felt called to service and says the experience has deepened his faith. “We talk about justice and mercy all the time,” says Brown, referencing the oft quoted verse Micah 6:8. “But they’re not the same thing. I went down [to Baton Rouge] thinking, ‘These kids have gotta know that I could have gone into whatever and not be teaching down here in south Louisiana.’ That they’d be grateful.”

Instead, Brown says, he’s grateful to his students. “It’s not about me giving them something they don’t deserve out of the goodness of my heart,” he explains. “That’s mercy. This is something the kids deserve and they just didn’t get it like I did.” Brown’s two years as a high school English teacher concluded last spring. But he extended his tour another year, signing up to help coach basketball and baseball, and just might stay a little longer. That might not be the Good News, but it’s good news for his students.