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US may never see another spiritual leader like Billy Graham
Evangelist leaving legacy of love, understanding
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Lyn Warwick of Black Mountain, N.C., photographs a memorial display of Rev. Billy Graham inside Chatlos Chapel at the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove on Wednesday in Asheville, NC. Warwick is friends with Gigi Graham, Billy Graham's daughter. - photo by Associated Press
MONTREAT, N.C. — In the wake of the Rev. Billy Graham's death, religion scholars say this much is clear: There will never be another American spiritual leader with his reach and influence.The evangelical movement that Graham helped solidify and embodied for much of the second half of the 20th century has splintered. The media he used so effectively has fragmented, too, since the days when baby boomers had a choice of only three TV stations in their living rooms. And politics has become more polarized, even toxic.It's hard to imagine another U.S. religious leader like Graham filling a stadium for days on end and moving so deftly through the corridors of power that he could minister to Democratic and Republican presidents alike."I think his legacy will be the inclusiveness of his understanding of the Gospel," said Grant Wacker, a retired professor at Duke University's divinity school and author of the 2014 biography "America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation." ''Bring as many people in as possible."Graham, who died Wednesday at 99, reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide through his preaching engagements and his pioneering use of modern mass media, especially television.Bill Leonard, a professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School in North Carolina, said there will never be an evangelist as influential as Graham, owing partly to the fracturing of audiences and media since the pre-cable, pre-internet era in which Graham commanded his large audiences."The media that Graham used so well early in his crusades then became so pluralistic, so diverse, that there was no longer room for one central person who could pull together those evangelical subgroups," Leonard said.Even by the 1980s, Leonard said, it was clear there wouldn't be a single evangelist after Graham who could wield such broad clout, because of the emergence of "a variety of 'Billy Grahams'" with their own followings and because of the rise in politics of the hard-line religious right, from which Graham kept a certain distance."Evangelicalism itself became more polarized," Leonard said.
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