Billy Graham’s masculine celebrity consolidated American evangelical identity

Evidence

WHEN IT CAME TO evangelicals’ rebranding efforts, it was a handsome young North Carolina minister who would play the starring role. More than anything else, Billy Graham’s celebrity knit together the disconnected universe of American evangelicalism—so much so that historian George Marsden once quipped that the simplest definition of “evangelical” might well be “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” A one-time Fuller Brush salesman, Graham became the face of the new evangelicalism—and that face was an attractive, masculine one, a fact that rarely went unnoticed. According to his biographer, “for the better part of sixty years, virtually every newspaper article about Graham commented on his appearance.” Standing six feet two inches tall, he was the “All-American Male” with “Scottish genes and Nordic looks,” a “craggy face, blue eyes, square jaw.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 54

Categorization

• DEFINE: Marsden’s quip (‘anyone who likes Billy Graham’) is a definition-of-evangelicalism via cultural affinity rather than theology — exactly the method Du Mez uses.
• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s ‘militant masculinity as organizing center transmitted through consumer culture’ key idea — Graham’s commercialized masculine face is the first channel. — connects to: Billy Graham fused Christian identity with American patriotism as early as the 1950s — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 237