Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham: Moral Man and Immoral Society

The following e-mail was posted on February 23, 2018

This week the nation mourns the passing of Billy Graham, the evangelist who is called the "Presidents Pastor" for the number of United States Presidents he counselled and befriended.  


While Graham was widely admired and accomplished a great deal during his lifetime, not everyone agrees that what he accomplished was for the good


What caught my attention the most in this critique were these words: 

Liberal Protestant and Catholic leaders have long articulated and ably defended many variations on the old faith that accommodate what modern science and scholarship have discovered about our world.  But Mr. Graham, who could have done the same, acquiesced in the provincial suspicions of modern intellectual life -- suspicions that keep millions of the faithful away from an honest engagement with the Darwinian revolution in natural history and with historical and archaeological findings about the origins of the Bible as a human document.  Never was the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr more right than when he warned in 1957 that Mr. Graham promoted childlike religious emotions and obscurantist ideas.

Mr. Niebuhr presents a revealing contrast to Mr. Graham.  Mr. Niebuhr was a key leader of the so-called Protestant establishment, the complex of liberal, ecumenical denominations that dominated the public face of Christianity in the United States until the 1970s. Mr. Graham was the most conspicuous leader of the rival, evangelical Protestantism that gradually but decisively seized control of the symbolic capital of Christianity from the Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans and other mainstream  groups within the Protestant establishment.

From the 1970s onward the Grahams of American religion triumphed over the Niebuhrs, largely because the evangelicals continued to espouse a cluster of ideas that remained popular with the white public while the liberal, ecumenical leadership abandoned these same ideas as indefensibly racist, sexist, imperialist, chauvinistic, homophobic and anti-intellectual.

If Mr. Hollinger's assessment is accurate, then what is the legacy of Billy Graham, the man whose body lies in state in the Nation's Capitol?  Was he a force for good or ill? Did he ultimately preach a doctrine of light or a doctrine of darkness?

I wonder  ... do you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr


Peace, 

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

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