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"We're getting ready for the big push. Five or six of us plan to go to Europe in March. . . . We hope to go to Scandinavia and Germany and maybe Russia. Next fall we're going to Australia and New Zealand, and in a year to China and Japan."
This global mission will come under the aegis of Evangelist Johnson's own newly formed offshoot, Youth for Christ International, which already boasts a payroll of 18 employes, including six field men whose salaries average $2,500 a year.
According to Torrey Johnson, President Truman, after a Y.F.C. rally in Olympia, Wash., said: "This is what I hoped would happen in America." But not all Americans are so sure. Some view with alarm the pious trumpeting of the Hearst press on Y.F.C.'s behalf, also the support of rightish. rabble-rousing "nationalists" like Gerald L. K. Smith. Of this kind of criticism, Torrey Johnson says: "Maybe he [Hearst] saw a million people across the country were going to Y.F.C. rallies every week and he decided to get in on the selling end. I've never gotten a dime from him and we've never met. . . . We don't want anything to do with [Gerald L. K. Smith] or anyone with a political ax to grind. Y.F.C. is a 100% religious movement."
Criticism of Y.F.C. has been religious as well as political. Associate Editor Harold E. Fey of the Christian Century has scathingly compared its "milky abstractions" with the "solid meat" of the great evangelists in the American religious tradition: in Youth for Christ rallies "a great deal is said about salvation, but nobody attempts to define it."