Billy Graham and Franklin Graham and Samaritan's purse and new yorker

It isn't often that one expects to find a filiopietistic portrayal of Billy Graham and modern Protestant Evangelicalism in the pages of the New Yorker. Nevertheless, Peter Boyer, whose well-written pieces have received some "thumbs-down" for whitewash jobs on conservatives and unfairly critical portrayals of moderates and liberals, devotes several pages to a comparison of this father/son duo of Evangelists/Christian leaders in the August 22 issue of the New Yorker. Though the piece is quite uneven in its quality and investigatory skill (he is much more confident at mapping the historical womb which gave Billy Graham birth than he is at charting the contours of more modern Evangelicalism), his thesis is fairly simple: Billy Graham decided, in his New York Crusade of 1957, to break from fundamentalist Protestantism by recognizing more moderate and liberal Christian leaders in his Crusade, and thus helped launch the modern American Evangelical movement.

Because this thesis dominates the work, it is difficult for Boyer to "fit in" his account of eldest son Franklin, other than to say that Franklin represents a considerably different approach to Christian faith from his father and that both father and son have played/are playing significant roles in American politics and religion. In the remainder of this review I will stress some of the helpful historical points Boyer makes and then correct some overemphases and skewed impressions that Boyer provides.

Boyer's History

I suppose that Boyer's story of the rise of American Evangelicalism as a response to forces of higher biblical criticism and Darwinian science in the mid-twentieth century is not familiar to everyone, even though it is more than a twice-told tale. He chooses, not unexpectedly, the New York dimension of the conflict between the "Fundamentalists" and "Modernists," centering on the role of Harry Emerson Fosdick (he gives the mistaken impression that Fosdick was a Presbyterian minister and pastor of 1st Presbyterian Church), his famous 1922 sermon ("Shall the Fundamentalists Win?") and the subsequent founding of the Riverside Church. Into this broadly sketched picture, he places Billy Graham, by 1957 a 38 year-old Carolinan who already had most of a successful decade of Crusades behind him. Boyer emphasizes the interracial nature of Graham's previous Crusades, certainly a laudable feature, and stresses Graham's progressive values in preaching the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ when his more conservative brethren would have wanted a doctrinally fundamentalist Crusade. He mentions the famous snub given the Evangelist by Reinhold Neibuhr of Union Theological Seminary, then the preeminent Protestant theologican in America. And then he asserts that the irenical values instantiated in Graham's Crusades became of central importance for a "Big Tent" Evangelicalism that flourishes today. Son Franklin, President of Samaritan's Purse Ministries, has taken decidedly more conservative political and social stands than his father, even as he has been lauded by no less an American than Richard Holbrooke for his work in dealing with the worldwide AIDS scourge.

Corrections/Skewed Emphases

In so portraying Billy Graham, Boyer wants to see him as a religious conservative but social liberal. I am afraid that this just won't do. Certainly Billy Graham has shown the most remarkable staying-power for more than 50 years at the heart of American political and religious influence. He has assiduously cultivated the good will of American Presidents and appears genuinely to like and respect people of diverse beliefs. But this doesn't make him a social liberal. He studiously avoids hot button social issues in American life so that his ministry might be maximized; the one issue on which he was a liberal (race relations) showed him to have been with the curve (if the curve is represented by the Supreme Court in 1954) of American culture. In contrast, his attacks against homosexuals well into the 1960s reflected probably nothing more than the bigotry that was part of the American scene at the time. Historical revisionism is happening right before our eyes.

In addition, though Boyer is correct to note Graham's importance for American Evangelicalism, I would rather say that Graham and his organization were one narrow, but important, sliver in the post-WWII movement of American Evangelicals to try to claim the center of American life. What Boyer doesn't mention is the crucial factor--that the Evangelical movement really was a product of a meeting in St. Louis in 1942, and that the leaders in the first generation of the movement were men, like Harold John Ockenga (whom he mentions) who were nurtured in the heart of Fundamentalism but who got their doctorates in "real" subjects (like political theory, etc) at secular universities. That is, though an important part of the modern Evangelical movement was through the Crusade, the more enduring legacy will be the intellectual movement begun haltingly in the 1940s through the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena) and other "parachurch" groups which specifically wanted to work with the coming generation of college leaders (InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, for example). Boyer's emphasis is thus skewed.

Then, he just makes mistakes. He mentions that Timothy Keller, pastor of the largest Protestant congregation in NYC today, is a graduate of Westminister Seminary. Well, he is, but his ministry degree (M. Div.) is from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, another Evangelical school presided over by Ockenga (its merged life began in 1970). This fact actually would have helped Boyer, because he gives the impression that Keller is a modern Evangelical and thus a sort of "heir" of Graham, yet he mentions the Westminster connection, a Seminary founded by J. Gresham Machen, the Fundamentalist from the 1920s. If he straightened out his facts, he would have even had a better point to make.

Conclusion

All in all Boyer has given us a breezily-written and informative piece which attempts to 'habilitate' Graham's reputation while he is still alive. I would have to agree with some of the criticisms made of his work in general--that he wants to smooth out the rough edges of a conservative person, and dish him up (calling him a social liberal) as palatable in the modern secular culture. Make no mistake about it, however. Billy Graham was without peer in his contribution to 20th Century Evangelicalism. But also make no mistake about another point: the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association could not have given us a more uncritical rendition of his ministry.

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