All in the Family
As Billy Graham steps down, will his kids shape the future of American evangelicalism?
What has kept him in such a position of high esteem for so long, observers say, is the simplicity of his message (he avoids potentially divisive doctrinal discourses), the integrity of his ministry (he receives a flat salary and has never handled ministry finances), and the ability to resist the seductions that have brought down so many other religious luminaries in recent decades. His dynamic manner, good looks, and personal charm haven't hurt, either. "He is the most attractive public face that evangelical Protestantism has offered to the wider world in the last half century," says Mark Noll, a historian at Wheaton (Ill.) College, Graham's alma mater, and author of American Evangelical Christianity.
Succession. Whether his children or anyone else can preserve the Graham dynasty is uncertain. Franklin is the designated successor, already heading his father's organization and often filling in when his father is too ill to preach. But he is the first to admit: "I can't be Billy Graham." And whether anyone can or should succeed the elder Graham as the pre-eminent public face and unifying figure of evangelical Christianity is equally in doubt. "A Billy Graham comes along once a century," says religion historian Martin Marty, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
That the fate of Graham's ministry and the future of American evangelicalism should be so closely intertwined is no accident. Their paths to prominence were inextricably linked in the roiling religious landscape of the mid-20th century. When William Franklin Graham II was ordained a Southern Baptist preacher in 1939, American Protestantism was sharply polarized, as it had been for decades. The fundamentalist-modernist controversies, which erupted late in the 19th century over questions of the Bible's accuracy and authority, had come to a head in the Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925, when a high school biology teacher in Tennessee was convicted of illegally teaching evolution. In the aftermath, the mainline Protestant denominations--Methodists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and northern Presbyterians and Baptists, among others--became dominated by theological liberals who rejected literal interpretations of the Bible and embraced an agenda of social activism and ecumenism. Meanwhile, the fundamentalists--conservative churchmen who believed in the "inerrancy" of Scripture and preached a gospel of personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ--formed their own denominations and seminaries, refusing association with liberals, modernists, or others who, in their view, threatened doctrinal purity.
By the end of the 1930s, says Christian Smith, sociology professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author of American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, "much of conservative Protestantism--under the banner of fundamentalism--had evolved into a somewhat reclusive and defensive version of its 19th-century self." While the movement continued to grow organizationally, says Smith, some participants saw its "factionalist, separatist, judgmental character" as "an insurmountable impediment" to spreading the gospel. "The conditions were ripe," says Smith, "for a countermovement from within."
Traveling man. Graham would become one of a handful of mostly young, moderate fundamentalists who set out after World War II to form a "new evangelicalism"--still beholden to salvation, Scripture, and soul-winning, but more culturally engaged than the fundamentalist movement had become. After graduating from Wheaton, a Christian liberal arts college, in 1943, and after a brief stint as a pastor in a Chicago suburb, Graham signed on as an itinerant evangelist with Youth for Christ, a group aimed at converting the nation's young. He traveled the country, honing his preaching skills at youth rallies and citywide revival meetings. In 1949, at the age of 30, he launched a three-week tent crusade in Los Angeles where his dynamic style and simple Bible message, tinged with anti-Communist rhetoric, caught the attention of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who instructed his editors to "puff Graham." The results, says church historian Noll, were spectacular: "The rallies extended for another nine weeks, crowds jammed the 6,000-seat `Canvas Cathedral,' and a new star had arisen on the nation's religious horizon."
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