The title line is a blessing, but this book's goods are in the subtitle: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The whole revival business was foreign to them, not as all-American as Kristin Kobes Du Mez makes it in her fascinating and fine book Jesus and John Wayne. ![]() When I was a little shaver, not yet participating in theological discussions around the dinner table, I remember my father being, well, skeptical of the all that frothy grace-"cheap grace"-front and center at Billy Graham's immodest extravaganzas, thousands and thousands of repentant sinners marching forward, in tears, to confess their troubled need for "Jeee'zus." Really, all of that in a football stadium? What they'd seemingly forgotten was that they once did so themselves. How could their son besmirch the great evangelist's name with such cheap-shot criticisms? I was their son, but who was I to say bad things about a living saint? ![]() My folks, proud of their son's writing appearing there, were more than a little disappointed and even annoyed. A couple of decades ago, I suggested a few negative things about Billy Graham in a piece I wrote for the Banner, the denominational magazine of the church in which I was reared, the Christian Reformed Church of North America.
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