When a public person you know and care for dies too soon, there is a temptation to elevate their historical significance, to cast them as an era's representative figure in order to persuade easily distracted readers to pay closer attention to the life they lived.
I'm going to give in to that temptation in this column. In the life of Michael Cromartie, an evangelical-Christian impresario dead of cancer last week at 67, you could see a larger generational story in archetype — the story of certain boomer-era evangelicals, heirs to an embattled and often self-segregated subculture, who tried to abandon anti-intellectualism and separatism and to establish a new religious center for a fragmenting and secularizing age.
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