Just As He Wasn’t
The Legacy of Billy Graham: Critical Reflections on America’s Greatest
Evangelist
edited by Michael G. Long
Westminster John Knox Press, 2008
(229 pages, $19.95, paperback)
reviewed by Gerald J. Russello
He has preached to more than two billion people worldwide, and he has been a fixture on the national political scene since the early 1950s. He was one of the most important religious figures of the last century. As the editor of this new collection notes, “no Christian minister, after all, has been more influential in global politics, economics, and faith in the twentieth century” than Billy Graham.
In The Legacy of Billy Graham, Michael Long, a professor of religious studies at Elizabethtown College, collects more than a dozen assessments from religious scholars, including John B. Cobb, Jr., Harvey Cox, and Gary Dorrien, to provide a critical portrait of Graham. The essays are broken down into four sections, covering his preaching and theology, his positions on social issues, comparisons of Graham with his contemporaries, and his legacy.
Writing with a great amount of respect for Graham and an honest approach to his life and ministry, the contributions are nevertheless rather critical. Their criticisms can be grouped into three categories.
Critical Respect
First is their critique of Graham as a Christian minister. While he never claimed to be a theologian—indeed just the opposite—his sermons are, on this account, somewhat simplistic. Long argues that they “do not show evidence of significant interpretation of the biblical text at all,” but shoehorn biblical exegesis into “the die-cut sin-to-salvation theological template that dominates almost every sermon.”
Graham, he argues, does not have much time for modern biblical scholarship, preferring to use biblical texts as illustrations of a straightforward, uncomplicated narrative. And he lets others work out the tough questions of linguistic ambiguity while he returns to the rhetorical safety of “The Bible says . . .”, a phrase as common in Graham’s sermons today as it was fifty years ago. What goes unexplored in this book is the possibility that modern biblical scholarship might carry with it ideological assumptions that Graham rejects as incompatible with his understanding of Christianity.
This simplistic theology leads to simplistic ethics, Karen Lebacqz, an emerita professor at the Pacific School of Religion, argues in a critique of Graham’s treatment of sexual sins. Graham, supposedly ignorant of “second wave feminism,” focuses on questions of purity and not enough on contextual power relations, which she believes make the social sin of marginalization more important than chastity.
Ultimately, though, she offers only a humdrum “progressive” attack on traditional Christian ethics, preferring instead academic ipse dixits like “Compulsory heterosexuality is then one of the contemporary forms of sexual injustice.” Well, of course . . . if you already accept the current scholarly paradigm. Graham clearly does not, and so her arguments do not meaningfully engage him or his tradition.
Better on this score is Ellen Ott Marshall’s “feminist response” to Graham’s position that vocations are sex-specific, and that a woman’s role should be almost exclusively in the domestic sphere. He has come close to asserting that biological nature determines destiny, but only for women: modern technology, healthcare, and education open up multiple new paths for men, but women remain circumscribed in the home.
Gerald J. Russello is Editor of The University Bookman and a Fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University.
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