130801 NYT Op-ed Draft

8/1/13

New York Times Op-Ed draft 2

WC: 862

In her recent op-ed article for the New York Times, Jennifer Scheussler considers Christianity’s lasting influence on the American religious consciousness. She credits the Protestant mainline churches for the growing “spiritual but not religious” cadre of believers who value tolerance, racial and sexual equality, and ecumenicalism over doctrine. In doing so, she presents evangelical and mainline Protestant Christians as pitted against each other in a zero sum game.

Whatever the future outcome for Protestant Christianity in America—and no matter how murky the present landscape—one would be remiss to overlook the legacy of preacher Billy Graham, whom Scheussler invokes to illustrate the mobilization of evangelicals against mainline-endorsed leftist causes in the 1950s; Graham comes off the page as little more than a firebrand polemicist. Quite to the contrary, Graham’s impact on American Protestantism has been one of inclusion—of uniting not only the ecumenical and evangelical, but also Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, under one standard for Christ. Dr. Grant Wacker, professor of theology at Duke Divinity School, agrees in part with Scheussler’s estimation that the mainline establishment “still exerts enormous influence on the culture-shaping agencies of our society,” but argues that Billy Graham’s mixture of revival-inspired oratory, his message of God’s unconditional love, and sheer magnetism “placed him in the moderate forefront of American Christians’ social conscience.”

Graham’s preaching had its genesis in hardline fundamentalism, but by 1957 he had demonstrated to the world that he was an unstoppable force for the burgeoning “New Evangelical” movement: an effort to draw evangelical Christians away from fundamentalists’ separatism and toward the mainline’s more inclusive emphasis on one’s personal relationship to God. Graham’s biographer William Martin observes in A Prophet with Honor that as “non-Evangelicals watched the streams of people who responded to [Graham’s] invitation, they wanted to channel at least a trickle of them into their own churches.”

Essentially, the conflict between conservative and liberal Protestants boiled down to the matter of intellect versus emotion. Mainline Protestants accused evangelicals of anti-intellectualism, and evangelicals saw ecumenicists as lacking the impassioned strategy required to spread the gospel message. Theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued evangelicalism’s triumph in bringing fresh faces through their doors—he viewed evangelicals’ membership gains as the product of their “oversimplification of difficult issues.”

Graham’s response to Niebuhr’s criticisms exhibits why Graham was so effective in spanning the divide between conservative and liberal Christians: he humbly acknowledged Niebuhr’s superior intellect and education, but observed that the mainliners’ overwrought concern for theology had a poor track record in recruiting new adherents: “I feel inadequate before [Niebuhur’s] brilliant mind and learning,” Graham said, adding, “If I tried to preach as he writes, people would be so bewildered they would walk out.” Graham’s strength lay in his ability to synthesize heady orthodoxy and salt-of-the earth evangelicalism, embodying a captivating faith that integrated head and heart.

As Graham’s following gained momentum, mainline institutions such as divinity schools and Anglican churches in England and Scotland began to entreat Graham to address their constituents. Having turned down invitations from the Protestant Council of the City of New York in 1951 and 1954, in ’57 Graham finally agreed to organize a campaign in Madison Square Garden that spring. The Protestant Council represented some 1,700 churches in the New York City metro area. Roger Hull, an executive at Mutual of New York, chaired Graham’s campaign committee, an assemblage that included such heavy-hitters as Chase Manhattan’s George Champion, corporate executives Walter Hoving and Eddie Rickenbacker, and media frontrunners such as William Randolph Hearst, Jr. and Herald Tribune editor Ogden Reid. Fundamentalists, uncomfortable with Graham’s affiliation with the mainline, his rejection of their exclusionary dispensationalist beliefs and his cooperation with liberals, lambasted Graham. They complained he had sacrificed “the cause of evangelism on the altar of temporary convenience.” Graham responded to this criticism by declaring, “I would like to make myself clear. I intend to go anywhere, sponsored by anybody, to preach the Gospel of Christ if there are no strings attached to my message.”

Graham’s engagement in New York opened on May 15, 1957 to a gathering of 18,000. It was originally slated to conclude at six week—it ended after sixteen. When all was said and done, the total count of individuals who’d packed the streets to hear Graham speak topped 2 million, with at least10,000 new members added to mainline church registers.

In Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century, David Aikman reflects that Graham, more so than any other Protestant leader in ages past, has “successfully articulated the central features of the Christian doctrine…and at the same moment mobilized global Protestant Christianity in pursuit of them.” Graham was able to do so by emphasizing that Christians’ disagreements over particular doctrines were inferior to the beliefs they held in common.

Ross Douthat writes in Bad Religion that Graham “almost singlehandedly revitalized” the tradition of revivals in America; his crusades encouraged evangelicals to relinquish the more exclusionary tenets of fundamentalism, and to foster cooperative relationships with the mainline. No evangelist leader since Graham has, in Douthat’s eloquent phrasing, managed to achieve a “delicate balance between Evangelical rigor and openhanded ecumenicism, between a Christian particularism and a universal Americanism, between warnings of God’s justice and promises of God’s all-encompassing love.”