Anthropology and the Making of Billy Graham: Evangelicalism and Anthropology in the 20th‐Century United States

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn theorizing the relationship between Christianity (or religion) and anthropology, scholars have often emphasized the “incommensurability,” tension, or distance between two seemingly opposed epistemological frameworks. In this article, I take the case of Billy Graham, one of the most famous Christian leaders of the 20th century, as well as an undergraduate anthropology major, to illustrate how anthropology was imagined to serve Christian purposes, defined by the theological categories of religion. In the modernist Christianity of Graham's 20th‐century evangelicalism, anthropology could be comfortably subsumed under Christian categories. Rather than seeing anthropology, or any science, as being a product of, or coterminous with, secularism, Graham, and his college professors before him, understood anthropology to be fully amenable to Christian uses, so long as secular or atheistic influences were expunged. [Christianity, evangelicalism, secularism, science, race]