The Only Hope for America

This past April, my wife and I had the opportunity to enjoy the hospitality of the Westminster Seminary California community as the Westminster Student Association Lecturer. We had a wonderful time and hopefully were able to contribute a bit. My lecture was entitled, "The Only Hope for America: Southern Presbyterians, Billy Graham, and the Mission of the Church."

While these may seem to make an odd grouping, the thesis was this: "While Graham and his team sought to lead interdenominational meetings and while he held his church membership in the Southern Baptist Convention, southern Presbyterian conservatives felt extremely invested in Graham's ministry in the 1950s. Both as a result of their ideology, which merged political, cultural, and religious conservatism seamlessly together in their southern brand of modern American conservatism, and their biblical and theological reflection, Graham represented a symbol of hope both for their nation and their church, the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). Convinced that the PCUS was veering off-track by not focusing appropriately on the church's true spiritual mission of evangelism, southern Presbyterian conservatives used Graham's evangelistic success and international prominence to bolster their position and make plain their deep differences with progressive fellow-churchmen. They earnestly believed that as the church returned to its fundamental commitment to evangelism, not only would they be in the place of God's revival blessings, but God would use them to reverse America's apparent downward decline by bringing spiritual renewal to the entire nation. In this way, God's remnant people in his 'Southern Zion'--and their southern Prophet--would be the means of salvation for the whole of his 'Redeemer Nation' and even the world."

If you are interested to read the whole thing, you can find it here, here, and here.