On Friday and Saturday, young evangelicals will gather at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas for TOGETHER ’22. Evangelist Nick Hall, backed by a wide spectrum of parachurch ministries, has organized the two-day conference. The architects of the event hope their jamboree of worship concerts, “breakout sessions” and “evangelism opportunities” will “activate a generation to share Jesus” and return home “with the courage, community and tools to share the Good News.”
Hall’s team is patterning TOGETHER ’22 on a week-long evangelical youth summit from 50 years ago this summer — one that drew an estimated 180,000 people. EXPLO ’72, organized by Bill Bright, founder of the evangelical collegiate ministry Campus Crusade for Christ, filled the only place in Dallas that could contain that many people: a mile-long stretch cleared for an unconstructed freeway north of downtown. Among the attractions: America’s most famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham, country music star Johnny Cash performing hymns and the sanctified rock and soul music of “Jesus People” bands.
EXPLO ’72 wasn’t a mere revival. Instead, it was a generational hinge in the history of modern American evangelicalism. “Godstock,” as Christianity Today called it, signaled the arrival of evangelical baby boomers whose faith didn’t look like their parents’ old-time religion. It served as a harbinger of the future of the evangelical movement, tracing the faint features of a rising era of conservative evangelicalism that would dominate the decades to come. TOGETHER ’22 may well offer similar signals about how Gen Z evangelicals will practice their faith in a nation polarized along political, social and racial lines.
EXPLO ’72 took place as American evangelicals confronted a transitional moment and an uncertain future. The decade and a half after World War II had filled evangelical churches with the fruits of a baby boom, and the early Cold War had fostered a “Judeo-Christian” cultural consensus into which evangelicals easily and enthusiastically assimilated.
But by the early 1970s, baby boomers were aging out of their parents’ churches and entering a culture fractured by the events of the 1960s and the ongoing Vietnam War. A terminal slide in membership in America’s mainline Protestant denominations had begun in the late 1960s, reinforcing the anxieties of evangelicals eager to pass on the faith to the next generation. These evangelicals, like Bright, relied upon innovation to prevent their faith from suffering a similar slide.
EXPLO ’72 embodied that creativity. The conference evoked the aesthetic of the “Jesus People” — an evangelical subculture birthed among California hippies in the late 1960s — and popularized it to teeming masses of young attendees from middle America. Gone were the organs, hymnals, button-down shirts and cropped haircuts that had typified Billy Graham’s youth revivals of the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, images of EXPLO ’72 attendees with shaggy hair in bell-bottom jeans and graphic tees, lifting their arms in praise to Christian contemporary music, graced the pages of national newspapers.