Billy Graham and American Evangelicalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 187-219
Author(s):  
Dawk-Mahn Bae
Keyword(s):  
Billy Graham ◽  
American Evangelicalism

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bendroth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Long Term Impact ◽  
American Evangelicalism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter assesses Billy Graham’s long-term impact on American evangelicalism and American culture. At last estimates, he evangelized over two billion people during his sixty-year career. He remained culturally nimble enough to stay in the public eye through all the tumultuous years of the late twentieth century. Billy Graham did not just reflect his times—he also changed them. Exactly what that means is a matter of debate. Despite the evangelist’s durable popularity, his legacy is surprisingly difficult to measure. This chapter identifies that there are uncertainties about the future of the evangelical world Billy Graham shaped, and that the long-term prospects for religion in American society remain uncertain. It also discusses the possible successors to Graham and posits that a successor—if there will be one at all—is unlikely to be an American.

Cultivating Intimacy

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bielo
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Bible Study ◽  
Relational Spirituality ◽  
Restoration Movement ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Study Experience ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
American Evangelicalism

In this article I contribute to the sociology and anthropology of American Evangelicalism by examining the discourse of group Bible study. Every week millions of Christians in the U.S. meet for group study, and in doing so, actively negotiate the categories of meaning central to their faith. Yet, this crucial practice has received scant attention from scholars. This study is grounded in theories of social practice and symbolic interaction, where cultural life is understood through its vital institutions, and institutions are treated as inter-subjective accomplishments. I employ the concept of ‘interactive frames’ to define how Evangelicals understand the Bible study experience. Ultimately, I argue that the predominant interactive frame for Evangelicals is that of cultivating intimacy, which directly reflects the type of personalized, relational spirituality characteristic of their faith. This, in turn, has serious consequences for how Bible reading and interpretation are performed in groups. I use a case study approach, providing close ethnographic analyses of a mixed-gender group from a Restoration Movement congregation.

Parenting and Politics: The Personal and the Political in the Evangelical Family Values Movement

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-75
Author(s):  
Hilde Løvdal Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Christian Family ◽  
Conservative Protestants

Today, evangelical Christians in the U.S. are known for their passion for the so-called traditional family and engagement in political and cultural battles over children and child rearing. That has not always been the case. This article examines how parenting became a cultural and political battleground for evangelicals in the last decades of the 20th century. Conservative Protestants have engaged with politics and culture in the past. They supported the Prohibition movement; they opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution; they worried about the decadent culture of the 1920s. In the late 1900s, however, child rearing and parenting became a catch-all framework for all their concerns. Parenting took on new, profound meaning. Preachers like Billy Graham would reject his former notions that he was called to preach, saying he was first and foremost called to father. Evangelical Christian family experts like James Dobson and Larry Christenson linked parenting to social order. Family experts guided evangelicals in their political and cultural activism, telling them that the personal is political and that political issues can be solved one family at a time.

Billy Graham Was a Transfer Student

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Laats
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
Transfer Student ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
Bob Jones University ◽  
The World ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Time Faculty

By the 1950s, tensions within the world of fundamentalism led to a new effort at reform. Self-proclaimed neo-evangelical reformers hoped to strip away some of the unnecessary harshness of fundamentalist traditions while remaining truly evangelical Christians. Often these reforms were personified in the revival campaigns of evangelist Billy Graham. The network of fundamentalist schools struggled to figure out its relationship to this new divide in the fundamentalist family. Some schools embraced the reform, while others decried it. At the same time, faculty members at all the schools wrestled with strict supervision of their religious beliefs and teaching. From time to time, schools purged suspect faculty members, as in the 1953 firing of Ted Mercer at Bob Jones University.

The Bible in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark P. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Anglophone World

This chapter looks at the tensions between biblical interpretation and the political, social, and cultural context of dissenting Protestant churches in the twentieth century. It notes that even a fundamental category, such as the ‘inspiration’ of Scripture, shifted across time as the nature of public debates, social and economic structures, and Western definitions of public knowledge shifted. The chapter progresses by looking at a number of examples of key figures (R. J. Campbell, Harry Emerson Fosdick, H. G. Guinness, R. A. Torrey, and R. G. McIntyre among them) who interpreted the Bible for public comment, and their relative positions as the century progressed. Popularization of biblical interpretation along the lines of old, new, and contemporary dissent, is explored through the careers of three near contemporaries: Charles Bradley ‘Chuck’ Templeton (b. 1915, Toronto, Canada), William Franklin ‘Billy’ Graham, Jr (b. 1918, North Carolina), and Oral Roberts (b. 1918, Oklahoma).

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