Billy Graham worked behind the scenes to help his two older friends pursue this unusual vision for Christ’s kingship over the world of colleges and universities. The academic world has its own subculture and customs, and Ockenga and Henry thought this world needed Jesus Christ just as much as the homeless men at a rescue mission.

Billy Graham’s death (and his funeral on March 2) ends an era of evangelical revival that took off at the 1949 crusade in Los Angeles.

But another side of Graham, which many obituaries missed, comes in Owen Strachan’s 2015 book, Awakening the Evangelical Mind: An Intellectual History of the Neo-Evangelical Movement. It’s a challenge to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Strachan traces the lives of Boston pastor Harold Ockenga and Christianity Today Editor Carl Henry and how they pursued the lordship of Christ for higher education.

Billy Graham worked behind the scenes to help his two older friends pursue this unusual vision for Christ’s kingship over the world of colleges and universities. The academic world has its own subculture and customs, and Ockenga and Henry thought this world needed Jesus Christ just as much as the homeless men at a rescue mission.

They were swimming upstream against both the secularism of the intellectual world and an anti-intellectual bent among many Christians of the early 20th century. Billy Sunday, for example, was the Billy Graham of an earlier era, preaching in small towns, then in big cities after being a star base-stealing player in big-league baseball. Sunday was influential politically and socially but never had Graham’s ambitions for the academic world. “I don’t know any more about theology than a jack-rabbit does about ping-pong, but I’m on the way to glory,” he declared.

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