From news editor Daniel Silliman: Sometimes you don’t notice how much things have changed until you do some historical work and dig around in the archives. 

Consider this three-person Q & A that CT ran in 1996. Tony Campolo, who died yesterday, joined Ralph Reed and Chuck Colson to talk about evangelicalism and politics. It was an election year, and Campolo was actively supporting Bill Clinton; Reed was head of the Christian Coalition and backed Newt Gingrich’s "Republican Revolution"; Colson believed in culture war but was also wary of the ways political operatives could co-opt pious people (one of his specialties when he worked for Richard Nixon before his conversion). They were coming from really different places. From the vantage point of 2024, the fact they sat down together to chat on the record kind of boggles my mind.

And the conversation is so strange by today’s standards. The liberal gives credit to the Religious Right for politicizing Christians. The Religious Right leader speaks about the urgent moral concern of … tobacco. And gambling. And child tax credits. Then there’s general philosophical talk about the purpose of law. 

I remember 1996, and it was not, by any stretch, a golden era. There are also things each of these men say that could legitimately raise eyebrows, if not hackles. It’s not impossible to see how we got from there to here. But I’m most struck by how different things were and how different evangelicals sounded not that long ago.