Billy Graham's revivals make him the most well-known evangelical in america (1 gen 1947 anni – 31 dic 1969 anni)

Descrizione:

While the Beats looked for meaning in rebellion, other Americans sought to affirm their religious faith. In an age of anxiety about nuclear annihilation and the rise of communism, which denied the existence of God, church membership jumped from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 70 percent in 1960. Much of the growth was in evangelical Protestant denominations, which emphasized human redemption from sin through the teachings, and attributed words, of Jesus Christ. Evangelical churches benefitted from a remarkable wave of new preachers. The youthful Reverend Billy Graham made brilliant use of television, radio, and advertising in spreading his message. Hundreds of thousands of Americans attended revivals — styled as “crusades” — which established Graham as the nation’s leading evangelical. His 1957 revival at Madison Square Garden in New York lasted for more than three months.


Charismatic and inspiring, Billy Graham brought Christian conversion to hundreds of thousands of Americans in the 1940s and 1950s, preaching to large crowds such as this one in Columbia, South Carolina. He also migrated onto the radio and television airwaves, using technology to reach even wider audiences. Graham used the Cold War to sharpen his message, telling Americans that “godless communism” was an inferior system and that democracy in America required belief in God and a constant struggle against “sin.”


Rather than clashing with the new middle-class consumer ethic, the religious reawakening accommodated materialism. Graham and his contemporaries told Americans that so long as they lived moral lives, they deserved the material blessings of modern life. The fire-and-brimstone of previous American “awakenings” gave way to a therapeutic idea of faith. No one was more influential in this regard than the minister and author Norman Vincent Peale, whose best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) positioned religion as a balm for life’s trials and tribulations, rather than a choice between heaven and hell. Peale taught that with faith in God and “positive thinking,” anyone could overcome obstacles and become a success.

The postwar wave of evangelists were not all sunshine — they defined Americans as a righteous people at war with communist atheism. The contrast between communist “atheism” and American religiosity permeated much of the rhetoric of the Cold War. In sentencing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death in 1951, Judge Irving Kaufman criticized their “devoting themselves to the Russian ideology of denial of God.” Catholics, Protestants, and Jews came together in an influential ecumenical movement that downplayed doctrinal differences to promote an abstract religiosity. The phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and U.S. coins carried the words “In God We Trust” after 1956. These initiatives would look distinctly moderate in comparison with the politicized evangelism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

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