Word: revivalists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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William Franklin Graham Jr., known to all the world as Billy, is now 80 years old, and has been our leading religious revivalist for almost exactly 50 years, ever since his eight-week triumph in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1949. Indeed, for at least 40 years, Graham has been the Pope of Protestant America (if Protestant is still the right word). Graham's finest moment may have been when he appeared at President Bush's side, Bible in hand, as we commenced our war against Iraq in 1991. The great revivalist's presence symbolized that the gulf crusade...
Still, one can ask how so theatrical a preacher became central to the U.S. of the past half-century. Always an authentic revivalist, Graham has evaded both doctrine and denomination. He sounds not at all like a Fundamentalist, even though he affirms the fundamentals--the literal truth of the Bible: the virgin birth, atoning death and the bodily resurrection of Christ; the Second Coming; salvation purely through grace by faith and not works. Graham's most important book, Peace with God (1953), is light-years away from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, which is revered by Fundamentalists. Everything that is harsh...
...back in Harry Hope's bar, an end-of-the-line booze joint, where a dozen or so wasted regulars are waiting for the annual appearance of Hickey, a gregarious salesman who never fails to perk them up. But Hickey arrives with a teetotaler's resolve and a revivalist's mission--to get them to cast off their phony dreams. In this career-making role (it helped make Jason Robards Jr. a star), Kevin Spacey gives the performance of his life. Prowling the stage in a half-crouch, his voice oozing with snake-oil self-confidence, using silences as cagily...
...heart is many chambered. The hero of Sinclair Lewis' great novel about oversize human frailty, made into an even better movie that starred Burt Lancaster and his aggressive teeth, was, like Clinton, a born embracer: "He had a voice made for promises." Discovering his calling as a revivalist preacher, Gantry rose to prominence on the words, "Love is the morning and the evening star." That was his sermon, which did double duty as his seduction line for women. Eventually his wandering eye brought him down; his once adoring congregation hurled eggs and spat in his face. The nonapologetic address...
Such a vision, expressed so unabashedly by a bona fide member of the academic elite, stands to make a splash in the upmarket reaches of academia, theology and perhaps even among mainline Protestant preachers. In the meantime, however, a fellow revivalist is stirring up more populist waters. Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic since a diving accident at age 17, is well-known in conservative Protestantism. She appeared on a Billy Graham Crusade, wrote a best-selling autobiography whose royalties she used to found a religious organization to aid the handicapped, and has a radio program airing on 700 stations. Like...