When Billy Graham Peered Into the Nation’s Soul

These excerpts from A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America are published with permission from Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. Author Brook Wilensky-Lanford will discuss the book at 6 p.m. on June 3 at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. 

“I do not believe that any man—that any man can solve the problems of life without Jesus Christ!” declared Billy Graham, the tall, 30-year-old preacher with a square jaw, high-swept blond hair, and a sharp suit. On September 25, 1949, he had just begun his Los Angeles Crusade, which took place in a gigantic revival tent at the corner of Washington Street and Hill Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles. Above the stage hung a painted sign that read “MY LIFE FOR CHRIST.” 

As he spoke, Graham lowered one clenched fist down in front of his face, punching the air, punctuating his words. “There are tremendous marital problems. … There are physical problems. … There are financial problems!” For more emphasis, he swung both his long arms at once. “There are problems of sin and habit that cannot be solved outside the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

During his time in Los Angeles, Billy Graham would preach this message on this stage 57 straight times, every weeknight at 7:30 and twice on Sundays. Graham liked to say that with this revival, he had defied the skeptics. His Los Angeles stay had originally been scheduled to last three weeks; it had lasted eight. Some had said he would never draw 50,000 people; he had drawn 350,000 all told. The tent, which was nicknamed the “canvas cathedral,” was the largest revival tent ever erected in the United States by far.

Every night, Graham would look out at the audience under the tent and ask: “Have you trusted Christ Jesus as Savior?” This question was an invitation. Anyone who had not yet trusted Christ as their Savior could step forward and do so, then and there. Known as an “altar call,” this invitation had been a common feature of revivals from Cane Ridge to Dwight Moody to Azusa Street and beyond. 

As a choir came onstage to sing, people stood up from their folding chairs, made their way to the center aisle, and then walked down to the stage, the other 11,000 audience members cheering them on. When they reached the stage, Graham or another member of his team would speak to each “inquirer,” guiding them toward “making a decision for Christ.”

Although true conversion, Graham taught, could only be effected by God himself, he gave every one of them a “decision card” that they could carry with them as a reminder of Christ’s saving power. In the course of the Los Angeles Crusade, approximately 3,000 people took this step.

Revivals like this had taken place for years in the conservative Christian world—the same world that had been presumed defeated in the 1925 Scopes trial. Graham, born in 1918 in Charlotte, had made his own “decision for Christ” at a tent revival led by Mordecai Ham, a fiery Baptist temperance advocate. Graham attended three conservative Christian colleges: Bob Jones College, Florida Bible Institute, and Wheaton College in Illinois.

During the war, Graham wanted to train to be a chaplain, but the military initially deemed him too underweight for service. During the extension period that he was granted in order to gain weight, Graham was offered a position with the newly formed Youth For Christ ministry, and since the end of the war seemed in sight anyway, he joined YFC instead and traveled the country spreading the Christian gospel to young people.

Graham and the Youth For Christ movement had even drawn the attention of media mogul William Randolph Hearst. In 1945, Hearst had urged the editors of all the newspapers he owned nationwide to continually promote Youth For Christ as a “very general,” even “neutral” movement.

“It will be,” Hearst declared, “one of the most valuable influences in overcoming juvenile delinquency.” Young people who had made their “decision for Christ,” thought Hearst, would inevitably make better decisions all around.

Hearst saw Graham as an emissary of wholesome, all-American Protestant Christianity, the kind that Americans would need to lean on as they fought twin, godless evils: first, fascism, and now, in the beginnings of the Cold War, communism.

Huge Crowds at the Canvas Cathedral

What was new about Billy Graham’s Los Angeles Crusade was the size of his audience. Thousands streamed nightly into the massive tent itself and overflowed beyond its walls; thousands more heard about the crusade through the radio, newspapers, and magazines. Local and national reporters flocked to the Crusade, especially when beloved radio host Stuart Hamblen told his listeners that he had found Jesus at the Canvas Cathedral. 

Other celebrities followed, and everyone’s attention with them. Louis Zamperini, who had famously survived 47 days on a life raft during World War II, maintained that his conversion to Christ at the crusade helped heal his recurring nightmares. Graham’s enormous tent also changed the life of Jim Vaus, a mobster associated with Mickey Cohen, who became a minister instead.

The young, handsome preacher from North Carolina was moving into the national spotlight. So when Graham looked out into the audience in 1949 and asked, “Have you trusted Christ as your Savior?” he seemed to be peering directly into the soul of the entire nation and challenging it to redeem itself.

Graham’s Los Angeles Crusade also represented a larger shift happening in the conservative Christian world. Fundamentalist Christian leaders had grown frustrated with the national lobbying clout of the Federal Council of Churches. This was considered the “default” Protestant religious group in national politics, representing denominations like the Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, which were generally called “mainline.” 

This was the same group that had taken a stance against nuclear weapons in 1945 after Hiroshima; but before that, it had worked to limit public-service radio access to representatives of its own denominations, excluding the numerous independent preachers who had large radio audiences—personalities like the Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, or Father Charles Coughlin, among many others. In 1942, a group of church leaders in Saint Louis founded the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to serve as a conservative alternative to the Federal Council of Churches and to return their preachers to the airwaves. 

Unlike conservative Christians of William Jennings Bryan’s era, the members of the NAE did not describe themselves as “fundamentalists.” They did not want to be associated with the battles of the 1920s and were keen to draw participants from a wider array of Christian groups and institutions. The word “evangelical” was a familiar one that Christians of all political stripes used to describe themselves. It was not a denomination but referred simply to the Christian duty to evangelize and to spread the word of Christ and his gospel. The leaders of the NAE wanted to demonstrate that Christians could be both modern and conservative, and in Billy Graham they had found the perfect messenger.

Graham’s increasing media profile was partly a result of an early NAE victory: overturning laws that gave free airtime only to members of the mainline denominations. Now Graham and other revivalists could share in that airtime, and Graham knew how to take expert advantage of that access: He launched his weekly Hour of Decision program, first on radio in 1950 and then on television in 1951, where it would run for the next half century. By 1954, Graham would be on the cover of Time magazine. 

Waving White Handkerchiefs 

Graham embraced his larger mission. By the time he started making national waves in 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War, he had been on six preaching tours through Europe. There, he had become attuned to the problems of the postwar world and America’s role in that world.

After the war, the Russian Soviets had been given control of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and the eastern part of Germany. To the horror of their former European and American allies, the Russians had installed communist dictatorships in all of these nations, creating what Winston Churchill had, as early as 1946, called the “Iron Curtain” across Europe. Just months before the Los Angeles Crusade launched in September 1949, the Soviet Union had created its own atomic weapons, alarmingly quickly, and performed tests of them. Graham brought these world problems home with him to the revival tent.

“All across Europe, people know that time is running out. Now that Russia has the atomic bomb, the world is in an armament race driving us to destruction.”

The reason Graham saw Soviet atomic power as an even greater threat than American atomic power was that it was held in the hands of a regime that professed no faith in God. The communist Soviet Union revered Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and forced its citizens to do so as well, pushing the centuries-old Russian Orthodox Church out of the center of Soviet life. And Russia was not the only world power that had taken this dangerous direction toward communism. In China, General Mao Tse-tung had come to power in 1949; and in Korea, a former ally, United States troops would soon be called to maintain the boundary between the democratic South and communist North. For Graham, the growth of global communism was both a political and religious emergency. 

Graham told the crowd, “Our responsibility rests heavily on our shoulders.” The responsibility, that is, to encourage everyone in the world to trust Christ as savior, before atomic destruction. 

On the final night of the Los Angeles Crusade, the audience under the tent waved white handkerchiefs in the air by way of sad farewell. “The revival that started here won’t end with the folding of this tent,” Graham assured the crowd and the nation. The revival would spread, with more and more Americans proclaiming their faith in Christ, and more and more Americans going to church.

Like revivalists before him, Graham was less interested in expanding the power of a particular Christian denomination and more interested in strengthening Christian faith across denominations.

To that end, Graham called to the massive platform of the “canvas cathedral” 450 pastors from various Los Angeles churches and urged the audience members to bring their newfound or renewed faith into their church—any church—on Sunday. The 450 pastors represented an impressive variety of American Protestant denominations. Graham’s revivals had not yet embraced the wartime “Protestant-Catholic-Jewish” alliance. For Graham, Youth For Christ, and the National Association of Evangelicals, America was Christian, Christian was Protestant, and Protestant was conservative.

Graham left Los Angeles as a celebrity, well positioned to lead a national revival, bringing the kind of Christianity that William Randolph Hearst had called “very generic” and “neutral” to the American masses, so it could act as a counterforce to communism and prevent nuclear war. 

In order to produce this Christian revival, preachers like Graham needed the biggest audiences possible; they needed to fill theaters and stadiums; they needed to convert vast numbers of people. Not long after the closing of the LA revival, two congressmen, one from North and one from South Carolina, proud of this Carolina-born American celebrity, invited Graham to join them before a much smaller audience—the president, in the White House. 

On July 14, 1950, Graham and three other evangelists—Cliff Barrows, Jerry Beavan, and Grady Wilson—met and prayed briefly with President Truman. Leaving the White House, the men were stopped by a reporter, who asked them to “recreate” the prayer. They happily did so, kneeling on the White House lawn. 

The photograph of four Southern preachers in pastel suits claiming to pray for the president apparently embarrassed Truman, for whom such religiosity was far too public. Graham later acknowledged that the photograph was a mistake, one he quickly learned from. He discovered that when dealing with very powerful figures, it was important to keep some things private.