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If you had to choose two individuals to sum up the recovery and growth of evangelicalism in the English-speaking world in the last half of the twentieth century, you might well pick Billy Graham and John Stott. Graham's crusade in Los Angeles in 1949 and Stott's appointment as Rector of All Souls Church in London the following year nicely symbolize the beginning of the recovery, while their work together in organizing and directing the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne in 1974 reflects the global influence and coming of age of the movement.
A growing number of memoirs and biographies of key leaders from this period are appearing now that the pioneers have reached a ripe old age. Alongside several studies of Billy Graham's life and his autobiography, Just as I Am, we now have the first volume of Timothy Dudley-Smith's authorized biography, John Stott: The Making of a Leader, covering "the early years" up to 1960. These memoirs and biographies raise keenly the question of evangelical identity and self-definition.
Frankly, I find the contrasts between Stott and Graham as fascinating as the similarities. Consider their upbringing. While Billy Graham was growing up in a white frame house on a poor dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, John Stott was being raised as the son of Sir Arnold Stott (a physician to the Royal Family) in a six-floor London townhouse with a nanny, parlor maid, housemaid, cook, between-maid, and occasional chauffeur. Graham credited his father with having taught him the merits of free enterprise; Stott's father interested him in natural history and the cello.
In the early 1930s, when Graham was doing chores on the farm during the depression, Stott was attending an exclusive Anglican prep school in Gloucestershire. While Graham was struggling to stay awake at school and failing tenth-grade French, Stott was excelling in French and Latin, playing a part in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and writing amateur essays in ornithology. While Graham was chafing under the rules at Bob Jones College and Florida Bible Institute, Stott was playing cricket on the fields of Rugby, one of the most prestigious English "public" schools. As Graham began at Wheaton College, Stott "went up" to Cambridge University. In 1945, when Graham began on staff with Youth for Christ, Stott was ordained in the Church of England.
After this, their stories begin to converge and their ministries to overlap. They became good friends in the mid-1950s with Graham's Harringay crusade in London in 1954 and Stott's university missions in America in 1956. But by no means was John Stott merely Billy Graham with an English accent. Nor was English evangelicalism simply a vector of the American experience.
In broad outline, there was a similar decay in the fortunes of evangelicalism in both countries in the first half of the century. Joel Carpenter writes about the fundamentalist era in American evangelicalism as a period of withdrawal from the religious mainstream. The diaspora out of public life began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the emergence of Billy Graham in 1950.
As for the other side of the Atlantic, in Evangelicalism in Britain, 1935-1995, Oliver Barclay describes a time of similar weakness for British evangelicals. He quotes Hensley Henson's famous quip in 1928 about evangelicals as "an army of illiterates generalled by octogenarians." Barclay describes British evangelicals in the prewar years as "pietistic." They were often defensive, legalistic, and anti-intellectual. And they hugely neglected theological education. They were not, however, "fundamentalists" in the American sense, insofar as that term connotes the militant defense of Christian civilization. They were more influenced by the Keswick spirituality of personal devotions, victorious Christian living, and foreign missions, than by anti-Bolshevik, anti-Darwinian, and anti-Modernism rhetoric. Anglican evangelicals may have been outspoken against Anglo-Catholics in the Prayer Book controversy of the late 1920s, but the rhetoric of debate did not approach the pugnaciousness and irascibility of such notorious American fundamentalists as Fighting Bob Ketcham or Frank Norris, the Texas Tornado.
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