Great Awakenings by David Horn

Author:David Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: church history;church history book;history of the christian church;christian history;spiritual awakening;david horn;gordon isaac;walter kaiser;gwenfair adams;kevin adams;james singleton;ed stetzer;mark knoll;george marsden;grant wacker;todd johnson;cindy wu
ISBN: 9781683072546
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
Published: 2019-01-16T16:39:09+00:00

Evangelical Culture

Let us turn now to the second broad category, evangelical culture. The short of it is this: Graham made himself a badge of credibility for evangelicals. This wasn’t something he did intentionally, but he did it effectively in several ways. One, he was not extreme, not by his own standards or by the culture’s. Graham brought evangelicals out of the cultural closet, out of the margins, and taught them how to take a seat at the table of conversation in the public square. Consider for example John Ashcroft: governor, US senator, and attorney general. Graham taught evangelicals like Ashcroft how to engage the public sphere with good manners, regardless of partisan identification. In Graham’s shadow, evangelicalism sometimes became more a style than a theological position. One of the finest historians of American religion, Samuel S. Hill, once said, tongue-in-cheek, “Billy taught evangelicals when to wear a neck tie.” Along the way Graham also taught the press that the differences between evangelicalism and fundamentalism were more than theological.

Then, for many years, Graham effectively defined the center of the evangelical and to some extent even the general religious landscape. Evangelicals positioned themselves by their proximity to him. As George Marsden once quipped, an evangelical could be defined as “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” The preacher taught many partisans that Christ did not die on the cross to save sinners from cigarettes or gambling or dancing or playing cards. Rather, Christ died to save people from our sinful natures and offer everlasting life here and in the life to come. That insight gradually formed the center of the evangelical landscape, at least in the most influential evangelical seminaries like Fuller, Trinity, Gordon-Conwell and, less directly, Duke and Princeton. Graham was no Richard Baxter or John Bunyan, but his preaching evoked a sense of where the heart of Christian commitment should lie. He didn’t smoke or drink or dance or play cards himself, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to redeem humans from their own worst enemy within.

Graham also taught evangelicals the importance of a practical approach to daily Christianity. This pattern emerged not so much in his sermons or books as in “My Answer,” a daily Q&A column that appeared in newspapers across the country. Graham didn’t write the column himself but he approved the boilerplate that his editorial assistants used. It is striking how concrete the answers were. Most offered a heavy dose of conventional evangelical theology, but the theology usually marched in tandem with common sense guidelines drawn from biblical precepts. In Graham’s mind, the guidelines worked because they came from the Bible and because they had stood the test of time. One of his favorites was “scrambled eggs can’t be unscrambled.” One woman asked if she should tell her husband about a sexual experience with another man many years back, before she was married. In so many words, Graham answered, “It might make you feel better but it will hurt him and hurt your marriage. Confess your sin to God, and then move on.

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