Word: billye
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BILLY GRAHAM: A PARABLE OF AMERICAN RIGHTEOUSNESS
His predecessors belonged to a fiercer school of Gospel-booming sockdolagy: back-country camp-meeting divines, like Charles Finney, exhaling vivid damnations and, later, out of the '20s, Billy Sunday, in white spats and straw skimmer, ranting indictments of "hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mush-fisted, jelly-spined...
In postwar America, Billy Graham delivered a somewhat mellower, suburban version of revivalist hellfire. "In the end," writes Biographer Marshall Frady, "it was somehow an oddly denatured variety of the harsh vinegars of frontier Calvinism -reconstituted into a kind of mild, mass-consumption commodity, a freeze-dried instant sanctity, a...
Frady, son of a Southern Baptist preacher and author of a shrewdly vivid biography of George Wallace, approaches Graham with a complicated and sympathetic understanding. He also lavishes upon Billy an extravagantly garish prose style, a hot-wired Southern lushness of phrase and fluorescence of effect that would be insufferable...
To the conventionally sophisticated over the years, Frady observes, Billy has never seemed "much more than a kind of marcelled Tupperware Isaiah," who, when he so energetically preached, resembled "some dandily appareled young department-store floorwalker caught in gales of epilepsy." The man who wore J.C. Penney suits as bright...