Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton, asked us to think back to the 1960s and early 1970s. There was “division all around us”: the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.; the Kent State shooting and deadly rioting in cities nationwide; the Watergate break-in and needless bloodshed of Vietnam; the drug-culture explosion and pornography epidemic and Roe v. Wade ruling. “And then 1976 was called ‘the year of the evangelical,’” Stetzer said, shrugging, as if to say, go figure.
