BILLY GRAHAM

BILLY GRAHAM

It was in the summer of 1957, years before the heyday of the TV evangelists, that Billy Graham took his crusade to New York, the reputed city of sin, provoking much media fanfare and many comments about the revival of religion in the USA. In a reversal of a previous trend away from religiosity, church attendance in recent years had been going up. Third-generation Americans, so it was said, were once again returning with enthusiasm to forms of worship and practices which their parents had been all too ready to abandon in their haste to become part of the mainstream. Certainly, the 56,246 “decisions for Christ” among the estimated two million who came to hear the famous evangelist in Madison Square Garden seemed to attest to the success of his three-and-a-half months’ effort.

Its advance billing practically mandated that the event be televised. And so it was. We, for our part, wanted to improve our understanding of what such decision making meant for the individuals and for the future of organized religion (Lang and Lang, 1960). About the middle of the crusade, when it was running full steam, we sent forty-three students to observe. They were to blend with the crowds while observing as best they could who was moved by Graham’s appeals, and how—by what techniques and what symbols—he made his appeal. Each student filled out a pre-observation questionnaire about his or her religious orientation, church affiliation, views on the crusade, and feelings about participating in the study. They also handed in detailed written accounts of their observations together with a personal evaluation of the experience.

Even without direct questioning, simply by noting how people looked, how they dressed, how they were seated, the way they raised their hands in response to the queries about where they had come from, and the signs on charter buses parked nearby, observers were able to establish without much difficulty that the audience was not even remotely representative of the New York City population. Observers agreed that on the day they made their observations, nearly one-half the audience definitely came from outside the city, from the ring of suburbs and exurbs within commuting distance and even

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beyond. As to the sections predominantly occupied by local residents, observers uniformly remarked on the small number of blacks and Puerto Ricans, who were living near Madison Square Garden. Lower middle class was a label that would have fitted the majority of attendees.

Some other readily accessible quantitative measures: women predominated by a ratio between five to one and eight to one. Most visible among them was the middle-aged, middle-class woman wearing her summer hat, many of whom were also carrying small bibles or other religious artifacts. And, judging by the show of hands when asked “who has been here before,” men far more than women turned out to be first-nighters. Conversations and interviews held as spot checks confirmed these observations.

Observers were also able to differentiate between the organized “flocks,” who mostly sat in the reserved sections downstairs, and the unorganized “flotsam,” mostly loners who had found their own unshepherded way into the Garden and typically found seats in the open sections upstairs. These included a fair number of “regulars.” From where they sat observers found it difficult to estimate just how many these were, because they did not stand out in any way by their appearance from the rest. Those that observers were able to engage in conversation typically disavowed any intention to heed Graham’s call to step forward; having repented long ago, a number of them explained to observers, they saw no reason to heed the call to step forward. They had come to watch others find their salvation and thereby to assure themselves that these people believed as they did themselves.

Observers did, however, agree that the proverbial middle-aged, lower-middle-class woman with her hat was much less in evidence among those who came forward in answer to Graham’s call. Now family groups (often with children), teenagers, and young adults, either in couples or alone, predominated, and there were proportionately many more men than in the audience as a whole. They consisted overwhelmingly of people attending for the first time.

We had two competing explanations for what had moved people to make a “decision for Christ.” One was predicated on the assumption that the setting in which Graham issued his appeal had breached the resistance of some who normally would have held back. Observers instructed to remain aware of and to record their own reactions to things that might even have moved them cited Graham’s

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unobtrusive entrance on the stage, his voice—soft to begin with but gradually rising, while still soothing, as he issued his invitations— the way in which, with assistance from the lighting, he managed to monopolize attention, and the care taken to control all outbursts of emotion, even religious ecstasy, or behavior that might detract from the solemnity of the scene. The setting did indeed evoke some analogies to how hypnotists work.

Alternatively, we could work with the hypothesis that most of those making their decision that night had at least been strongly disposed to do just that. First-nighters in a flock with persons who already had made their decision would be under some pressure from those who now wished to see the group of converts enlarged. Flotsam who joined them may have included some regulars—apparently people who needed time to overcome a sense of their own unworthiness or finally screwed up their courage, in a few instances by returning in the company of a partner.

The second interpretation is consistent with certain themes in Graham’s appeal. Lacking recording equipment, we were unable at the time to undertake a systematic content analysis, and must rely on the allusions in observer reports to the all too obvious effort to create

a familiar setting, to put the audience at their ease (including jokes), to keep them involved by inviting them to join in the singing and other familiar forms of worship, and to maintain a highly respectable decorum. When it came to the decisions, which Graham described as “hard,” everything in the power of the managers was done to make them as “easy” as possible. The sins explicitly mentioned by Graham were mostly nominal and vague enough to be defined however one wished. The hell-fire appeals of old-fashioned revivalism were totally lacking. No one was called upon to make a public confession and, so Graham assured his audience, it would not take very long or be the cause of any undue embarrassment.

The demographic characteristics of the audience, insofar as these could be inferred, together with the emblems people carried, also suggest a strong prior identification with Protestantism. And, looking at the subjective reactions of our own observers, we found that practicing Catholics described themselves as least “moved” by Graham’s exhortations. On the other hand, several Jewish observers had felt personally touched, but would have gone forward only, so they said, if the decision had been presented as being “for God.” (The one person who did step out recanted soon after.) In other words,

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reactions were pretty much in accord with previous religious orientations and practice, and did not represent either new commitments or changes in attitude toward religion.

What the crusade succeeded in producing is what Johnson (1971:887), in a truly ingenious experimental replication of our study, calls a “normatively prescribed ‘religious experience’ for urban individuals already socialized into this form of religious experience.” Except for the term “urban,” which may apply to the subjects in his study of the Seattle crusade, this finding accords with our inferences about the small number of converts won by Graham and the even fewer souls he wrested from the claws of the devil.

This last point could have been substantiated directly had we been able to conduct a survey of the converts or at least been given a breakdown of how frequently each of the five alternatives given on the “decision cards” were recorded by Graham’s assistants. The choices for those who stepped forward ranged from “acceptance of Christ as Saviour and Lord” and “an assurance of salvation” to “restoration,” “dedication,” and “reaffirmation of faith.” At the time, the Billy Graham organization refused to release such information; it was also too soon for a follow-up to the churches to whom “converts” were being referred. Some information published since then essentially bears out the conclusions from our own “soft” data (McLoughlin, 1960). Having risen for a decade, church attendance peaked in 1957 before beginning a slow downward glide (Gallup, 1972).