Campus Apostles: The Institutional Origins of Student Christian Activism in the 1960s

During the long 1960s, thousands of religious youth and clergy engaged in civil disobedience in the name of Biblical justice. They staged sit-ins in Chicago’s streets and chained themselves to altars, ritually burned draft cards and built underground abortion networks, to advance the causes of racial equality, peace, and women’s liberation. In this, they saw themselves as prophets. When asked to explain their activism, they described themselves as merely obeying the call of their conscience. And historians have largely taken them at their word. Most narratives of the mid-century religious left naturalize religious activism, depicting it as a reflexive reaction to the moral outrages of Jim Crow, Vietnam, and criminal abortion laws, or else as a mere sign of the turbulent times. Yet consciences are forged, not found. And the moral framework of this religious left - its concern with the dispossessed, its invocation of a higher moral law, its use of a disruptive politics of witness - emerged out of the very specific crucible of the postwar church.

This paper connects the church to the streets, revealing the role of Protestant campus ministry in catalyzing a generation of activists. It explores the emergence of Protestant concerns about student apathy in the 1940s. It charts the corresponding rise of social action programming on campus, including everything from citizenship seminars to national conferences on race relations to study guides that placed the prophetic tradition at the center of ‘authentic’ faith. And it uses dozens of oral histories of activists to connect experiences in these programs to later involvement in civil disobedience. In the process, it highlights the often invisible role of institutional programming in defining the contours of lived religious life at the grassroots.