Introduction

The introduction embeds the revival meetings American evangelist Billy Graham organized in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the 1950s in the existing historiography of religious life in the 1950s, America’s spiritual Cold War, and the interplay between religion, consumers, and business culture. It contends that transnational phenomena such as Cold War culture, white middle-class economic aspiration and increasing prosperity, and religious revivalism blended in Graham’s spiritual and ideological offer and explain its attractiveness on both sides of the Atlantic. By introducing the concepts of everyday and lived religion, the introduction argues for a fresh interpretation of the status of religious life and the process of secularization in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. In centering the voices and practices of ministers and ordinary Christians, this new approach makes the contours of a transatlantic revival visible.

Living Religion

The chapter explores the everyday contributions of ordinary Christians to the running of Graham’s crusades. In forming prayer groups and organizing bus rides, ordinary Christians blurred the boundaries between private religiosity and public mass evangelism, as well as between the religious and the secular. They filled the organizational structures implemented by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association with life and by doing so turned the crusades into a powerful force of renewal for local churches and everyday religious life in London, Berlin, and New York. Women played a crucial role in this everyday running of the crusade machine. Religious practices such as prayer and pilgrimages traveled with Billy Graham and crossed the national boundaries between the different organizing committees. Organized prayer turned into a dynamic form of transnational communication that tied different crusade audiences together and became the cornerstone of Graham’s international ministry.

Selling Religion

The chapter shows how Billy Graham’s crusades played an important role in shaping a new relationship between religious life, consumerism, and business culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Graham’s American revival meetings were run with businesslike efficiency, supported by the local business communities, and embedded in vast marketing and media campaigns. Graham himself embodied modern consumer culture and middle-class aspiration. This chapter explores how British and German church leaders and ordinary Christians experienced, discussed, and critiqued a more consumer- and business-oriented faith. While evangelicals and lay Christians in particular were willing to adopt a more businesslike attitude and consumer-oriented rhetoric through their transnational interactions with the Billy Graham team, the majority of church officials in Germany and the United Kingdom defended their more critical stance toward an embrace of consumer capitalism, thus leaving untapped an important source in the battle against secularization.

An Evangelical is Anyone who Likes Billy Graham: Defining Evangelicalism with Carl Henry and Networks of Trust

The founding editors of Christianity Today spent more than a year planning the launch of their magazine. Carl F. H. Henry, L. Nelson Bell, and J. Marcellus Kik believed Christianity Today could “plant the flag” for evangelicalism. To do that, though, the editors had to decide what evangelicalism was. They had to decide where the lines were, who was in and who was out, which issues mattered and which did not. One key criterion, they decided, was whether or not someone liked evangelist Billy Graham. Historian George Marsden later offered this as a tongue-in-cheek definition of evangelicalism. More seriously, religious historians have used David Bebbington's quadrilateral definition, which says the basis of evangelicalism is conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism. This article argues that Bebbington's definition is ahistorical, vague, and deeply unhelpful. Marsden's joking definition, on the other hand, is quite useful, as it directs historians to attend to actual relationships, historical affinities, and real-world conversations. Based on new archival research, this article tells the story of the launch of evangelicalism's “flagship” magazine, shows how evangelicalism's lines were drawn in 1956, and makes the case that evangelicalism is best understood as a discourse community which is structured by its communication networks.

Epilogue

In the mid-twentieth century leading scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr or David Riesman wrote off conservative evangelical education as fading. William McLoughlin also saw the new revival movements as ephemeral. Billy Graham and Carl Henry had ambitions to start a major university around 1960 but did not have the resources. Wheaton College in Illinois, the leading ex-fundamentalist college, began to rise academically despite the anti-intellectualism of its tradition. Calvin College had been an ideologically isolated Reformed school but by the 1960s had produced leading Christian philosophers. Intervarsity Christian Fellowship helped raise consciousness regarding strong scholarship, and by 2000 the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities had grown to over one hundred schools with well-trained faculties. Like-minded Christian scholars founded their own academic societies. Baylor University became an intentionally Christian research university. Evangelical Protestant and Catholic scholars often cooperated. Despite many challenges, distinctly Christian scholars could hold their own in twenty-first-century academia.

Bless You for Charlie Brown

Schulz was always a Christian artist, but beginning in the late 1950s he started being more overt about his faith. After attending a 1957 Billy Graham Crusade meeting in New York City, Schulz was convinced that he needed to say more about Christianity in his work. Linus became the vehicle for discussing faith and theology. During this period, Peanuts began to appear in Christian sermons across denominations. It was even the subject of a bestselling book on Christian theology in 1965. The culmination of this personal mission was the success of the first Peanuts television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which sought to combat rising commercialism by recentering the Nativity in the public celebration of the holiday.

Book Review: Grant Wacker. One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham

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Faith abroad: how religion shapes Trump administration’s foreign policy

Religion has always been an important factor in American foreign policy. From the ‘holy wars’ against the Indians in the pre-independence period to the ‘crusade’ against Iraq in 2003, faith and religion have shaped the policies of American administrations in all periods. As Bonnell observed in 1971, ‘without a single exception. . .all presidents have publicly avowed their trust in God’. And even if the president was not a religious individual before moving to the White House, Billy Graham noted, they all ‘left the presidency with a very deep religious faith’. The same can be applied to Donald Trump whose presidency witnessed important domestic and foreign policy decisions that can be linked to religious motives. This is especially clear when one takes into consideration that around three-fourth of evangelicals and born-again Christians voted for him in the elections and Trump’s statement before the House elections that ‘nobody’s done more for Christians and evangelicals’ than him. This study will analyze the religious characteristics of Donald Trump and the members of his foreign policy team, such as Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, and how their religious identity affected the foreign policy decisions of the Trump administration.