America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation by Grant Wacker
By Grant Wacker
During a profession spanning sixty years, the Reverend Billy Graham’s resonant voice and chiseled profile entered the residing rooms of thousands of usa citizens with a message that referred to as for private transformation via God’s grace. How did a lanky farm child from North Carolina turn into an evangelist hailed through the media as “America’s pastor”? Why did listeners old and young pour out their grief and loneliness in letters to a guy they knew merely via televised “Crusades” in far flung areas like Madison sq. backyard? greater than a standard biography, furnish Wacker’s interpretive research deepens our knowing of why Billy Graham has mattered lots to so many.
starting with tent revivals within the Nineteen Forties, Graham reworked his born-again theology right into a ethical vocabulary taking pictures the fears and aspirations of commonplace americans. He possessed an uncanny skill to acceptable traits within the wider tradition and engaged boldly with the main major advancements of his time, from communism and nuclear risk to poverty and civil rights. the iconic that means of his profession, in Wacker’s research, lies on the intersection of Graham’s personal artistic employer and the forces shaping glossy America.
Wacker paints a richly textured portrait: a self-deprecating servant of God and self-promoting media tycoon, an easy relations guy and confidant of presidents, a plainspoken preacher and the “Protestant pope.” America’s Pastor reveals how this Southern fundamentalist grew, fitfully, right into a capacious determine on the heart of religious existence for thousands of Christians round the world.
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Extra resources for America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation
Example text
47 Children bore testimony to Graham’s status in their own ways. Of the thousands of letters they sent to him, one, posted in 1971, probably from a first- or second-grader, seemed to speak for all. After requesting a free book, the young author signed off, “Tell Mr. ”48 Unheralded ordinary people contributed to the Graham mystique. ”50 And then there was the story of a political delegate in the 1980 Republican Convention who told Graham he would vote one way but actually planned to vote another.
The Bible was “inspired of God to help us in direction of our lives, in our salvation, and in doing what God wants us to do. . A mistake many make is that they worship the Bible, they make it into a fetish. ”33 Graham’s position was a classically pragmatic one. Some things just have to be settled. People like Templeton might be able to live a life of questions, but Graham had to take his bearings by the stars he saw in Scripture and go from there. The Bible brimmed with assertions he did not understand, he admitted.
The deeper and more difficult issue was that many of Graham’s faces continually appeared, disappeared, and reappeared, not sequentially but more or less at the same time. That pattern repeated itself throughout his career. Which was normative, the savvy CEO or the simple preacher? The uptown sophisticate or the downhome country boy? The globetrotting absent father or the attentive family man? The namedropping partisan of the White House or the humble servant of the church? Above all, the self-promoting entrepreneur or the self-effacing saint?