“This dissertation explores the role of the evangelical college ministry Campus Outreach in recruiting and training Black evangelicals, and how those Black evangelicals then refashioned and reinterpreted its practices and contours when they staffed and led evangelical organizations of their own. ”
I explore the history and expansion from 1978 to 2018 of Campus Outreach, an evangelical college ministry based in the American South and operating in partnership with local churches on midsized public and private university campuses. I investigate CO’s role in recruiting minoritized Southern participants into evangelicalism and the impact of its discipleship training on these participants’ adult faith journeys. I argue, first, that campus ministries became key sites for recruiting Black university students into conservative evangelicalism; and second, that fledgling interracial coalitions forged between participants bent under the weight of cultural and economic residues of Jim Crow segregation.
My research demonstrates the impact of college ministries as gateways into American evangelicalism and its racial reconciliation efforts at the turn of the 21st century.
In so doing, I address considerable gaps in evangelical historiography, which has largely overlooked the role of university-based parachurch organizations and the complicated racial, gender, and class dynamics within these organizations. By investigating dynamics at entry points, and the discrepancies between institutional insiders, self-proclaimed boundary keepers, and those who cross in and out of the network’s borders, I provide a case study for how American evangelicalism functions, expands, and calcifies along racial lines.