All in the Family
As Billy Graham steps down, will his kids shape the future of American evangelicalism?
Graham put that star status to use. He organized the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to plan and finance his crusade ministry, which soon would go international with radio and television broadcasts, movies, books, and a syndicated newspaper column. "He came to prominence at a moment when there was an emergence of media technology, and he jumped on them and exploited them brilliantly," says Randall Balmer, a professor of American religion at Columbia University. A few years later, he was a major force in the founding of Christianity Today magazine, to "give theological respectability" to the movement and "show that there was concern for scholarship among evangelicals."
But the great transitional moment came in 1957 when Graham rejected an overture from New York City fundamentalists and instead enlisted the city's mainline churches to help organize what was to have been a six-week crusade in Madison Square Garden. Fundamentalist leaders were furious, but Graham insisted that he was "willing to work with all who were willing to work with us." The breach between the "new evangelicals" and the old fundamentalists was complete as Graham made "practical ecumenism" a hallmark of his ministry. Meanwhile, the New York crusade ran for nearly four months, resulted in thousands of "decisions for Christ," and drew national newspaper and network radio and TV coverage.
Graham's stature grew even further as he struck up a friendship with President Eisenhower, setting what would become a career pattern as a confidant of presidents and potentates. "Seeing Billy Graham at the White House was a source of pride for evangelicals," says Columbia's Balmer. Graham's close friendship with Richard Nixon, however, would nearly prove disastrous. In his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am, he relates how he became a fixture at the Nixon White House and allowed himself to be drawn too tightly into Nixon's inner circle, sometimes participating in partisan deliberations. A recently released tape captured Graham making antisemitic remarks in the Nixon Oval Office in 1972 (Graham has since apologized for the comments). Sobered and chastened by the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation, Graham became decidedly more circumspect in his dealings with public figures. He has also carefully avoided criticizing those with different political or religious views.
While Graham's influence was key in defining and consolidating a religious movement, it was the election of Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, to the White House in 1976 that produced the great cultural coming out for evangelicals. Through media coverage of Carter's religious behavior--he taught Sunday school and prayed and read his Bible daily--the nonevangelical world was introduced to what until then had been an all but invisible subculture of born-again Christians, with its conservative social values. The 1980s saw evangelicals venturing as a group into the political arena, first under the banner of Falwell's Moral Majority and later under the Christian Coalition, a grass-roots get-out-the-vote group that grew out of Pat Robertson's unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign. The attempts at harnessing and brokering the evangelical vote produced mixed results, however, as evangelicals proved not to be the monolith that some had expected. But they succeeded in energizing conservative voters who previously had put little stock in electoral politics or political solutions. By the 1990s, the religious right was a major force in the Republican Party.
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