Billy Graham’s transatlantic brand

Uta A. Balbier’s ambitious book chronicles how evangelist Billy Graham became a transatlantic household name—one recognizable in the capitals of the United States, Britain, and Ger­many—on his way to becoming a global phenomenon. That journey began before any of Graham’s landmark American crusades. Before his breakout campaign in Los Angeles in 1949, there was his Youth for Christ mission to London in 1946. Before his 1957 New York City crusade, there were Harringay-London and Berlin in 1954, both of which informed how Graham would tackle New York. With this transatlantic focus, Balbier charts how the quintessential American evangelist gained lessons and influence through an international ministry that forged “one evangelical Western community.”

Placing Graham in this international context, Balbier argues, highlights the connections, not the disjuncture, between the revival of Christianity in the United States and in Britain and Germany in the mid-1950s. Across these nations, “Graham stepped into religious landscapes already committed to reform and evangelism” in a histori­cal moment framed by secularization, Cold War anticommunism, rising consumerism, and technological advance. Facing these common forces tied Chris­tians together, and Graham’s “big tent” evangelism formed them into a transatlantic, ecumenical “imagined community.” As Balbier writes, they had become “members of the Billy Graham family.”

The Billy Graham family navigated sacred, secular, and consumer capitalism through a middle-class religious faith and lifestyle epitomized and legitimated by the US evangelist. Food and drink—including the iconic Coca-Cola—satiated physical hunger in preparation for a message that would feed a spiritual one. Corporate sponsorship and endorsement from business leaders furthered the symmetry of a market-based society and Graham’s quip that “we are salesmen of the most important treasure on earth.” The mass campaigns, modern marketing techniques, and use of television and radio mainstreamed this brand of evangelicalism while simultaneously securing the Graham brand across continents. This point is driven home by Balbier’s quotation of Graham’s public relations manager Jerry Beavan, who compared the evangelist to the recognizability of a Cadillac: “Billy is like a Cadillac. We don’t have to explain.”