The Big Tent
...not just by the contents of his preaches but also because of his close relationship with notorious politicians and famous leaders of those times, that helped him become the symbol of the evangelism by “branding the evangelicalism as the mainstream American faith” (The Big Tent 31). Graham’s religious beliefs went from the fundamentalism in which he was raised , to a open and liberal conception of faith, ending up in what was called the New Evangelical approach to religion, a more moderate and tolerant way of interpreting God’s message. As he defined himself, he was “a theological conservative but a social liberal” (The Big Tent 28). Just like Graham, throughout the twentieth century the religious beliefs of the people went from one extreme to the other going through a more moderate expression of those beliefs, accompanying the social and political events that were taking place at the same time.
By the year 1900, the general religious belief was based on certain principles which were deemed to be the basis of the true faith: the Bible is the only truth, the divinity of Virgin born Jesus Christ, Christ’s bodily resurrection and the existence of biblical miracles. At that same time, Darwin’s theory of evolution initiated a different approach to religion that made more emphasis on Christ’s humanity and challenged the divine quality of creation. Although by 1918 there were other religious tendencies (like Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians) that differed between them, they all had a shared orthodoxy, Darwin’s theory changed this scenario by giving ground to a new expression of the religious beliefs: the modernism, that would foster the concept that God can be seen in the evolution of man on earth. As a result, some Presbyterians and Baptists started practices based on the new liberal approach to the Christian orthodoxy, while their opponents (now called the...
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