Altar Call in Europe: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism, and the Cold-War West
ISBN: 9780197502280
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: History of Christianity;

"This book provides a transnational history of Billy Grahams revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Grahams international ministry took shape in the context of trans-Atlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the "Free World" and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Grahams revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers and Church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the UK discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the UK, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Grahams altar call in Europe, the contours of a trans-Atlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts"--

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