.Earlier, we noted the importance of the fundamentalist controversies of the early twentieth century in the United States. A perception that American culture was becoming increas- ingly secularized and hostile towards faith led conservative American Protestants to disengage from mainstream culture, and form counter-cultural communities. The Puritan writer Roger Williams’s 1644 reference to a “wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world” was taken up by many in the 1930s, who saw their churches as outposts of theological orthodoxy, separated from the secular world by rigid criteria of membership.
As the Second World War came to an end, it became clear to some conservative Prot- estant observers that this strategy had been counterproductive. Two conservative Protes- tants spearheaded a new approach. William Franklin Graham Jr. (born 1918), better known as “Billy Graham,” and Carl F. H. Henry pioneered a sea-change in conservative attitudes within North America. Initially referred to as “neo-Evangelicalism,” this movement quickly became mainstream, and came to be known simply as “evangelicalism.”