THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER BILLY GRAHAM, BECAUSE THE WORLD THAT MADE HIM POSSIBLE IS GONE:

“The America that emerged from World War II and the Great Depression was exceptionally unified and cohesive, and possessed of an unusual confidence in large institutions,” Yuval Levin wrote in his 2016 book, “The Fractured Republic.”

“But almost immediately after the war, [America] began a long process of unwinding and fragmenting,” Levin wrote.

And so, the fact that American Christianity hasn’t given rise to a leader like Graham over the last two or three decades isn’t just a result of the fracturing of evangelicalism into different factions — the slick prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen, the strident right-wing triumphalism of Graham’s son Franklin and the theologically precise new Calvinists, to name just a few.

It’s also a story about the fragmentation of American life — arguably a reversion to the norm in American history rather than a departure from it.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Jon Gabriel.)