Secondary Separation

I'll have to disagree with you here, paidagogos. The original New Evangelicals took conservative Christianity in an entirely new direction by advocating dialogue and cooperation with liberals. To be a real New Evangelical by the standards of the originals, you have to at least want to cooperate (not just associate) with liberals.

The New Evangelical mantra is, "Can't we all just get along?" Of course the liberals are happy to take converts from Graham's meetings into their churches, etc., but they will never respect evangelicals. My son recently attended a lecture by an evangelical archaeologist who had recently debated a liberal. The liberal used his whole time to say that archaeology can never prove the Bible right, and never would discuss the findings of the evangelical. Liberals just plain look down on evangelicals as long as they refuse to deny their Biblical faith. But the evangelicals just keep on trying! </font>[/QUOTE]John, I agree with your assessment. The "New Evangelicals" as coined by Ockenga sought dialogue with liberals.

Many today who are called "New Evangelicals" have never sought dialogue with liberals. In fact, I would submit that the vast majority of those called new evangelicals in the 50's didn't dialogue with liberals. However, supporting Billy Graham became the litmus test of whether one was a fundamentalist or a new evangelical. </font>[/QUOTE]You are perfectly correct in as far as you go but someone has pointed out that the terms have evolved as the controversy evolved. In the 1970’s, the publication of books by Charles Woodbridge, an early Fuller faculty member who turned back into Fundamentalism, and John Ashbrook on neo-evangelicism further defined it as a kind of neutralism when viewed from the Fundamentalist perspective. With polarization of the people and an evolving definition, neo-evangelicalism included those who did not dialogue directly with liberals but they were neutral (i.e. they didn’t fight them) toward them.