http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ ... e-of-unionI just shared the link above with the Limestone Prez minister's son who finished Gaffney High a year ahead of me and was in Beta Club with me and Ben Bernanke's first cousin. He now sings in a choir in the NE and teaches college there after his doc in rhetoric from MIT. We understand Billy Graham.
Billy Was good for the faith development of some, but bad for those who got stuck there. If I were to dismiss Billy's influence I would cast aspersions on about 90 percent of my extended family and at least one UGA grad who was a Rhodes Scholar Nominee and now leads a CBF congregation in middle Georgia. He drank the kool aid for a while after Billy Gee's Montogmery crusade of 1970 or so.
We've traveled this territory before.
Al Mohler said Billy was a tremendous behind the scenes player in the fundamentalist takeover of the
Southern Baptist Convention. So place him in the timeline and spectrum of the new Yorker piece above, and he watered down, or racheted up the dim wit quotient of his time.
Still, as James Dunn says, it's messy.
FTR, I do not apologize for engaging and promoting the insights of Molly Worthen; nor being convinced Pressler's legacy has bent out country's trajectory for the worse.
That's all I got right now.
Which reminds me to go on facebook and recommend to the BJC Library in DC a copy of my friend Stewart Newman's book on the Free Church Movement. Everybody who visits BJC should know of Newman's influence on James Dunn and be encouraged to read his book so a remnant can see in future generations how Billy Graham's lack of vision coulda been corrected a little if only he'd understood Newman in his time.