Politics & Power Quote by Tom Brokaw

Brokaw’s sentence has the calm, steady cadence of anchor-desk authority, but it’s also a quiet pivot: stop looking at emptying pews and start watching who’s filling the cultural vacuum. The ellipsis does real work here. It compresses decades of mainline Protestant decline into a backdrop, then swings the spotlight toward a countercurrent that feels more kinetic, organized, and politically legible. As a journalist, Brokaw isn’t sermonizing; he’s reframing the national religion beat as a story of substitution rather than simple secularization.

The intent is diagnostic. “Traditional churches” functions as a cultural shorthand for old-line institutions: respectable, locally rooted, and increasingly aging. “Evangelical movement,” by contrast, is framed as a force, not a denomination - mobile, media-savvy, and built for growth through networks, revival-style affect, and clear boundary-making. Brokaw’s wording smuggles in a key subtext: American religiosity isn’t disappearing so much as changing its accent. The story isn’t fewer believers; it’s different believers with different habits of worship, authority, and public engagement.

Context matters: late-20th-century America saw the rise of televangelism, megachurches, and the Moral Majority-era fusion of faith and partisan politics. So “changing the way America worships” isn’t only about guitars replacing organs. It hints at worship as a social technology: more consumer-facing, more personality-driven, more comfortable in mass media, and more likely to treat faith as identity and mobilization. Brokaw delivers it like a weather report, but it’s also a warning flare about who gets to define “American values” next.