Billy Graham and Postwar Evangelicalism

In 1947 Carl Henry published a short book with the title The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Its first chapter is headed “The Evaporation of Fundamentalist Humanitarianism” (Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, ch. 1, pp. 15–16). Henry charged that in fundamentalist hands the gospel, once a “world-changing message”, had been narrowed to a “world-resisting” one (Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, ch. 2, p. 30). On the movement he was criticising see the Fundamentals and the Modernist Controversy.

In August 1949 the evangelist Billy Graham was at a conference centre in the mountains outside Los Angeles. By his own account, written seven years later, he had been troubled by doubts about the Bible. He knelt before an open Bible and told God that he accepted it by faith as his word, reserving judgment on what he could not understand. Within six weeks the campaign in Los Angeles began. There, he wrote, he stopped trying to prove that the Bible was true and found himself saying over and over, “The Bible says” (Graham, Biblical Authority in Evangelism (1956) A word of confession; Preaching from the Bible).

The campaign opened on 25 September 1949 in a tent at the corner of Washington and Hill streets. It was sponsored by a committee of local businessmen, Christ for Greater Los Angeles, which had held such campaigns since 1944. It was to have ended on 16 October. From about 24 October the Hearst newspapers gave it prominent coverage; the Billy Graham Center Archives record the story that William Randolph Hearst told his editors to “puff Graham” as something he “is supposed to have” said. Articles in Time and Life followed in November (Billy Graham Center Archives, Into the Big Tent, Select chronology). When the meetings closed on 20 November there had been seventy-two services. The Archives estimate that 350,000 people attended, and count 3,000 who made a first decision to accept Christ (Billy Graham Center Archives, Into the Big Tent, Statistics). Graham himself connected the response with the authority of the Bible in his preaching: a crusade planned for three weeks, he wrote, lengthened into eight (Graham, Biblical Authority in Evangelism (1956) A word of confession; Preaching from the Bible).

The Wheaton College archives, which hold the correspondence, trace the magazine Christianity Today to discussions in 1954 between Graham and his father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell; Henry was its first editor (Wheaton College Archives, Finding ‘A Clear Voice’ (2021)). Its opening editorial, on 15 October 1956, said that evangelical Christianity needed “a clear voice”, that theological liberalism had failed, and that the magazine would apply the biblical revelation to the social crisis of the day, which “Fundamentalism has often failed to do” (Christianity Today, Why ‘Christianity Today’? (1956)).