October 2005: Big Tent
It seems I never get as much reading done in the summer as planned, and especially as vacation time is deliciously taken up with more important family matters such as building sand castles with grandchildren or solving the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles with my daughter or kayaking the waters of Cape Cod with Janet. I did enjoy reading some fiction this summer - The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth; The Life of Pi (fascinating!) by Yann Martel. I am a few hundred pages into Bill Clinton's My Life - that thick one will be a long-termer, I think, for dipping into when there is a free half hour here or there. I also appreciated a few slim books by William Sloane Coffin, someone I have long admired - Letters to a Young Doubter and The Heart Is a Little to the Left. And many magazines, mainly the Christian Century and the New Yorker. One of the most compelling articles I read this summer was a piece on Billy Graham, his rise to prominence and the future of his organization, in the August 22 New Yorker.
I have long had high regard for Billy Graham, even though I have not always agreed with him on all issues. This admiration began in the late 1950's when I was a teenager, when our associate pastor described in some detail to me Graham's remarkable courage in refusing to hold an evangelistic rally in the South that was not open to all races, this in an era when many Christians still believed that the separation of the races was biblically mandated. Incidentally, Bill Clinton in his memoir, points to that same courageous stand against segregation as the beginning of his lifelong esteem and later, his deep and abiding friendship with Graham that continues today.
The remarkable thing about Graham, as this article points out, was his willingness to let the sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ trump lesser issues that might divide Christians - not just race, but biblical and theological issues as well. This openness cost him the support of many more conservative evangelicals and certainly the fundamentalists. In his move away from dogmatic fundamentalism, "Graham had embarked on a long, inexorable march to the middle, from which he never retreated, and through the years he has progressively softened his views, even on matters touching on core doctrine." (New Yorker, August 22,2005, p.51),
Billy Graham, in other words, opted for "the big tent," when others, focused on preserving the "purity" of Christian faith and belief and insisting on dogmatism and biblical literalism, splintered over and again into schismatic sects. The article provides a wonderful concise history of the course of Protestantism and the liberal/fundamentalist controversies over the decades of the 20th century. I commend this article to all.
In the Christian church, and in the Presbyterian Church in particular, badly battered by divisions... in a nation in which the religious right has taken a mean-spirited, "my-way-or-the-highway" approach to issues of faith, I long for more of the spirit of Billy Graham - holding fast the essentials but acknowledging that on the nonessential issues related to faith, people may disagree but still be embraced as brothers or sisters in Christ, In fact, one of our Presbyterian "historic principles" is that "there are truths and forms with respect to which men (sic) of good characters and principles may differ. And in all these we think it the duty both of private Christians and societies to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other." (Book of Order G-1.0305).
I believe that what is called for in both the church and in the land so polarized today and engaged in "cultural warfare,"is a good measure of that mutual forbearance and the kind of "big tent" spirit that Billy Graham promoted so that the one great priority of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ might not get sidetracked by partisan squabbles about important but nonessential issues.
Faithfully ,
Rev. Dr. Floyd W. Churn
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