Postwar evangelicals built a nationwide media empire outside denominational structures

Evidence

Boone wasn’t a revivalist, but he fit well with postwar evangelicals’ efforts to expand their reach through modern media. In accord with Ockenga’s plan—and with Graham as their lodestar—evangelicals began to fashion a vibrant media empire, along with a national network of institutions and parachurch organizations that flourished outside of denominational structures. Graham himself published two dozen books, and in 1956 he helped found Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism. Nearly 700 stations carried his radio program across the nation and around the world. He helped evangelists Robert Schuller and James Robison get their start, and he lent his support to other evangelical organizations and institutions, including Wheaton College, Fuller Seminary, the National Religious Broadcasters, the NAE, Campus Crusade for Christ, Young Life, and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. All this was only a fraction of an emerging evangelical infrastructure that would come to support a vibrant religious consumer culture. Assisted by an expanding postwar economy, entrepreneurial evangelicals would bring Ockenga’s vision to fruition. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 71

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete data point for assessing Du Mez’s method: this is the institutional-empire claim her consumer-culture thesis rests on. Connects to the reader’s analytic purpose of weighing whether this strand is THE white evangelicalism or just a dominant one.