Billy & Babylon

"We dread the prospect," says the current issue of the Protestant fortnightly Christianity and Crisis. The prospect: Evangelist Billy Graham's next crusade in Manhattan, scheduled for some time in 1957. Christianity and Crisis, edited by Theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett, gives its reasons:

"Billy Graham is a personable, modest and appealing young man who has wedded considerable dramatic and demagogic gifts with a rather obscurantist version of the Christian faith. His message is not completely irrelevant to the broader social issues of the day, but it approaches irrelevance . . .

"If Billy Graham were coming only to warm the hearts of the faithful and to effect a few genuine 'conversions' among those whose lives are confused and disorganized and who are sorely in need of a confrontation with the living God as revealed in Christ, we would not feel apprehensive about Billy Graham. But he comes with a well-organized team of publicity experts who will use all their talents and his to 'put him across' on radio and television and all the organs of mass communications.

"He will constantly present the 'Christian message' to an entire metropolitan center. This is of course a Babylon, whose 'sins' invite the denunciations of any 'prophet.' But the question is whether the prophet is able to discern the real sins of such a Babylon, or to appreciate the virtues of such a vast conglomerate community in which all peoples and racial stocks live in comparative brotherhood . . .

"The embarrassment of a Graham campaign will be heightened by the fact that the Protestant people are very much in a minority in this Babylon. The Catholics and Jews outnumber the Protestants, and there are, besides, a great number of secularized Jews and gentiles, who have some vague connection with a traditional faith but who cannot simply be put into the category of the 'godless' who must be reclaimed . . . Not only will Graham's 'message' be unable to reach these people at any significant point . . . but the Graham revival will actually accentuate every prejudice which the modern 'enlightened,' but morally sensitive, man may have against religion . . .

"Billy Graham will get a few thousand 'decision' cards signed. There will be a great hullabaloo on radio and television. And the church will again sink into 'innocuous desuetude,' from which it hoped Billy would rescue it. Haven't the Protestant leaders of the city thought of these hazards? Or have they decided that a little publicity and organized evangelistic effort is such a great boon, that the price of presenting Christianity as a series of simple answers to complex questions is a good bargain?"

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