LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      Billy Graham's New South

      IN JUNE 2005, an elderly Billy Graham returned to New York City, five decades after a foundational moment in his evangelistic career, when he had led a crusade that stretched on for four months in that most secular of American locales. This time, stricken with prostate cancer and symptoms of Parkinson's disease, among other health problems, and reliant on a special lectern that allowed him to sit while preaching, the white-haired Graham held only three services during what was billed as his final domestic crusade. Most of the 230,000-plus attendees knew what to expect from this evangelistic lion in winter. Many elements of Graham's services had remained largely unchanged since the 1950s: the bass-baritone of soloist George Beverley Shea, the volunteer choir and ushers drawn from area churches, the climactic and solemn moment of invitation, and—of course—the presence of celebrities and politicians on the crusade platform. The highest-profile guests in Flushing Meadows were Hillary and Bill Clinton, who feted the evangelist. Standing with Graham at the pulpit, the former president said his admiration for the evangelist had its origins in an integrated Graham rally he had attended as a child in Little Rock, Arkansas. Clinton elaborated on that 1959 service in an interview with the New Yorker: “When he gave the call—amid all the civil-rights trouble, to see blacks and whites coming down the aisle together at the football stadium, which is the scene, of course, of our great football rivalries and all that meant to people in Arkansas—it was an amazing, amazing thing. If you weren't there, and if you're not a southerner, and if you didn't live through it, it's hard to explain. It made an enormous impression on me.”¹

      As journalists filed datelines that read like obituaries, Graham's status as the grandfather of modern American evangelicalism seemed to set him above the ebb and flow of history. The 2005 New York crusade coverage was a commentary on both the grace of time and the thoroughly mainstream status of Graham's brand of Christianity at the start of the twenty-first century. In the decades following the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate, Graham had softened his tone and had impressed former critics by embracing nuclear disarmament and criticizing the Christian Right. He also benefited from an irenic demeanor that grew more convincing with age. His refusal to cast stones in the culture wars, as numerous commentators observed, stood

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