Evangelical institutions built in the 1930s later powered their 1970s political reentry.
Evidence
But the construction of the evangelical subculture had another, longer-term effect. The time, energy, and money evangelicals invested in their own institutions in the 1920s and 1930s, often starting from scratch, began to reap dividends several decades later. Those institutions, especially schools, evangelistic organizations, and media operations, provided the foundation for evangelicals to reenter the public arena in the 1970s. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 71
Categorization
- XREF: The subculture-as-infrastructure claim echoes the mechanism in social-movement theory and appears in Balmer’s larger project of locating the religious right’s origins in institutional capacity rather than ideology. — connects to: Institutions built for withdrawal later enabled evangelical political reentry
- SEED: Angle for the trees-as-infrastructure piece: a self-imposed ‘cultural retreat’ quietly built the institutional girders that later carried political power back in — insularity as long-term capital formation.