{"id":36917,"date":"2018-02-26T14:13:16","date_gmt":"2018-02-26T19:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=36917"},"modified":"2018-02-26T14:13:16","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T19:13:16","slug":"will-father-figure-put-tiny-hand-mine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2018\/02\/26\/will-father-figure-put-tiny-hand-mine\/","title":{"rendered":"I will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The death of iconic evangelist Billy Graham last week produced a host of insightful writing about the man, his ministry, and the branch of American Christianity he helped to define and elevate to its current position of cultural and political influence.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a weird paradox to most of these pieces. They all insist that Graham was singularly influential as the one person who most shaped and defined white evangelicalism in America. That\u2019s true, and it\u2019s something that has been said for years, not just a gushing, enthusiastic bit of praise arising due to some emotional response to his death. Religious historian George Marsden \u2014 probably the most respected scholar of white evangelicalism not named Mark Noll \u2014 has long joked that the most useful shorthand definition of \u201cevangelicals\u201d was \u201cpeople who admire Billy Graham.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham\u2019s unique role in shaping American evangelicalism is right there in the word itself. He\u2019s the guy who \u2014 starting back in the 1940s \u2014 successfully sought to carve off a stream of Christianity from white fundamentalism, to help it to regain a measure of social and cultural relevance and respectability. Graham dubbed this \u201cNeo-evangelicalism\u201d \u2014 an audacious bit of rebranding that sought to leapfrog over the movement\u2019s actual roots in the early 20th-century Fundamentalist\/Modernist controversy and to claim an older heritage in the revivals and \u201cAwakenings\u201d of an earlier American Christianity. That rebranding was so successful that the \u201cNeo-\u201d prefix was soon dropped completely, leaving Graham and the Neo-evangelical institutions he helped to create as simply, unqualified \u201cevangelical\u201d \u2014 the heirs of Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney.<\/p>\n

\"\"
I will be your preacher teacher, anything you have in mind<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But \u2014 and here\u2019s where the paradox comes in \u2014 at the same time as all of these pieces rightly assert that Billy Graham personally defined and embodied the meaning and substance of evangelicalism, they also all take pains to explain that white evangelicalism in 21st-century America has very little in common with Billy Graham. This seems contradictory. If the man was really influential \u2014 at all, let alone as massively and uniquely influential as they say \u2014 then it seems impossible to also say that he bears no influence on the current shape of the movement he created and defined. If contemporary white evangelicalism is such a dramatic departure from everything Graham taught and represented, then we cannot say he influenced it much at all.<\/p>\n

And yet I think these many reflections on Billy Graham are right on both sides of that paradox. Maybe the best way to understand that is to think of Graham not as a great thinker or teacher (which he really wasn\u2019t), but as a father figure. Billy Graham is the Daddy of white evangelicalism. Like every father, he influenced his children \u2014 let\u2019s just say his sons, since white evangelicalism remains overwhelmingly male-dominated \u2014 in the ways that all fathers influence their children. Those sons seek to emulate their fathers \u2014 sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing to do so. And those sons also seek to distinguish themselves from their fathers \u2014 sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing to do so.<\/p>\n

The clearest example of that is Graham\u2019s literal son, Franklin, who seems like a distillation of everything toxic and ugly in the neo-Neo-evangelicalism of the 21st century. Franklin\u2019s Daddy was Billy Graham. That\u2019s who Franklin is trying to live up to, and to rebel against, to emulate and to overcome. It explains a lot, really.<\/p>\n

But I think the same thing is true for Graham\u2019s spiritual descendants throughout contemporary white evangelicalism. Look at any white evangelical entrepreneurial parachurch organization or mega-church or quasi-denominational structure, look at the myriad ways they\u2019re just like Billy Graham and that they\u2019re totally unlike him, and you can see a similar set of Daddy issues.<\/p>\n

This father-figure dynamic also accounts for the way that many of the various tributes and memorials written about Billy Graham attempt to enlist his legacy in support of disparate claims about what evangelical Christianity ought<\/em> to be. The heirs are squabbling over the estate. Conservatives cite from a wealth of Graham\u2019s more conservative stances in support of the conservative side of these family disputes. More \u201cprogressive\u201d strains of white evangelicalism cite select \u201cprogressive\u201d aspects of Graham\u2019s life and ministry \u2014 he once paid bail for MLK! \u2014 to legitimize the possibility of a more progressive evangelical identity. And timid establishment centrists, of course, invoke the many, many ways that Graham\u2019s legacy endorses their preferred approach.<\/p>\n

This disputatious bundle of appeals to What Daddy Would Have Wanted demonstrates Billy Graham\u2019s enduring influence as the father figure of white evangelicalism. Unfortunately, it also makes a candid assessment of Graham\u2019s actual ministry more difficult. If we\u2019re busy mining Graham\u2019s long life for useful ammunition in a dispute over his legacy, we\u2019re bound to treat him more as an authority to be invoked than as a fallible person to be understood.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I think some of the best, most clear-eyed assessments of Billy Graham being written now are those coming from outside of his white evangelical family.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe the best way to understand that is to think of Graham not as a great thinker or teacher (which he really wasn\u2019t), but as a father figure. Billy Graham is the Daddy of white evangelicalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[183],"class_list":["post-36917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-billy-graham"],"yoast_head":"\nI will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Maybe the best way to understand that is to think of Graham not as a great thinker or teacher (which he really wasn\u2019t), but as a father figure. 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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"I will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine","description":"Maybe the best way to understand that is to think of Graham not as a great thinker or teacher (which he really wasn\u2019t), but as a father figure. 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