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Graham's coherence and significance depend upon the history of modern evangelical revivalism in the U.S. That history began with Charles Grandison Finney, who created a new American form of religious revival, a highly organized, popular spectacle. (He later gave up his career as an evangelist to become president of Oberlin College in 1851.) The tradition was carried on by Dwight Lyman Moody, William Ashley Sunday and Graham, the disciple of Moody rather than of Billy Sunday. Moody, in Finney's wake, invented Graham's methods and organizing principles: advance men, advertising, aggressive publicity campaigns, and a staff of specialists (prayer leaders, singers, counselors, ushers). Graham perfected Moody's transformation of revivalism into mass popular entertainment, superbly executed in the New York City crusade of 1957, with triumphant performances at Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden.
Politics could have been the destructive element for Graham, since he started his rise in the age of Eisenhower and for a time was a fervent red hunter, an admirer of Senator Joe McCarthy and an overall basher of the left, as here in a radio broadcast of 1953: "While nobody likes a watchdog, and for that reason many investigation committees are unpopular, I thank God for men who, in the face of public denouncement and ridicule, go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle and from that vantage point try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known--communism."
That is now a period piece, but I think it is important to keep it on the record. Graham, a slow but sure learner, moved with the spirit of the age, and in the 1980s he became a preacher of world peace, urging reconciliation with Russia and China, where his wife Ruth, the daughter of missionaries, was born. Angry Fundamentalists turned against him, a move that became an anti-Graham passion when he rejected the program of the Christian right: "I don't think Jesus or the Apostles took sides in the political arenas of their day." The break between Graham and the Christian right became absolute when he denounced the violence of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue. "The tactics," Graham declared, "ought to be prayer and discussion."
Though Graham has never, to my knowledge, spoken out on behalf of the poor, it seems legitimate to conclude that his almost exclusive emphasis upon soul saving is his passionate center, even his authentic obsession. And there, whatever his inadequacies of intellect or of spiritual discernment, Graham has ministered to a particular American need: the public testimony of faith. He is the recognized leader of what continues to call itself American evangelical Protestantism, and his life and activities have sustained the self-respect of that vast entity. If there is an indigenous American religion--and I think there is, quite distinct from European Protestantism--then Graham remains its prime emblem.