In June, Americans were all over London, that much publicized “swinging city”: tourists, tennis fans at Wimbledon, Cassius Clay, Hugh Hefner unveiling yet another Playboy Club, and as the head of the British Safety Council observed, “two American savers of souls,” Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe at Any Speed, and Billy Graham.
Evangelist Graham far outdrew the competition, speaking to more than 900,000 persons, his largest audience ever for a month of meetings. The crusade was also his longest since Philadelphia in 1961. The meetings at Earls Court, Britain’s biggest hall, put the career total of persons responding to Graham’s altar calls past one million.
The Greater London Crusade was a bench mark for at least one other reason—Graham used television as never before. Three services were recorded in color for telecast later this year in America. Big-screen theater-type TV accommodated overflow crowds in the main arena and simultaneous services in ten cities across Britain. Graham is now talking about a “national crusade” in America, using closed-circuit TV.
Supporters and skeptics alike will now maintain close scrutiny of the 40,000 persons who registered decisions for Christ. About a tenth of these responded to the appeal at the closing service July 2 in Wembley Stadium, England’s largest outdoor arena. Under a near-cloudless evening sky, they filed silently onto the tarpaulin-covered turf track where dogs had raced twenty-four hours earlier. In all, some 86,000 got into Wembley.
Surveying the dramatic throng, the purple-cloaked Lord Bishop of Coventry, Dr. Cuthbert Bardsley, inserted some commentary before his benediction. He said Graham “brought new life to our nation when we greatly needed it.” While critics say Graham doesn’t “preach a social message,” the bishop predicted thousands of reformed individuals would go forth from the crusade to help reform society.
Some considered the crusade as a holding action, merely reinforcing the faithful. Although a large part of the audience was churchgoers, figures on the “inquirers” tell a different story. Counselors’ cards show a third have no church connection at all, while another third have church membership but no regular participation.
Another significant fact: Two-thirds of the inquirers are under 25. This is in marked contrast to the three-month Harringay crusade in 1954, where those going forward were predominantly middle-aged. A magazine ad on Graham’s behalf seemed to capture the mood: “Make religion a real live switched-on thing.”
London will also be remembered for the stark silence as the inquirers responded. After thorough discussion, Graham’s team decided to eliminate the usual choir song of penitence, chiefly to counter criticism that an emotional spell was cast. Once the change was made, new critics popped up, claiming the shuffling of thousands of feet was just as hypnotic.
The spell of silence was interrupted three nights, twice by individual protesters and, on the final Tuesday, by a dozen youths chanting, “Save souls in Viet Nam.” As they were hustled out of the hall strewing leaflets, the sober converts filed past. The next night, antiwar demonstrators reportedly planned to interrupt Graham’s sermon every five minutes. But that day the United States bombed near the centers of Hanoi and Haiphong, and protests centered on the American embassy instead.
Another night, a gang of war critics planned to go forward and tie up as many counselors as possible in political arguments, but few went through with the plan. Before another service, a telephone crank threatened to bomb the counseling room.
Graham’s refusal to preach on international politics also caused criticism from clergymen. There was a string of other complaints: Graham shouldn’t “seek publicity,” should mention the sacraments, should be more intellectual, should take a parish in an underprivileged area. A common reservation was voiced by the Archbishop of York, a distinguished Graham supporter: “We may not like all the methods he uses.…”
But Congregationalist analyst Cecil Northcott says theology, not methods, was the basic issue. The week after the crusade closed, Northcott contended in the Church Times (Anglican) that the £1 million (nearly three million dollars) spent on Graham activities in 1954 and 1966 would have been better used to found and endow a “National Institute of Mission” for “ecumenical study” of evangelism, free of Graham’s “biblicism and servitude to the printed word.”
Amid all the Protestant complaints, Roman Catholic writer-editor Michael de la Bedoyere praised Graham for getting down to the essentials of the faith, asked prayers for his success, and said, “We may yet see him as ‘Saint Billy’!”
The Graham team took a turnabout look at the churches in a special meeting for clergymen. Lane Adams said that “the average church expects more maturity from crusade inquirers than veteran members” but should remember they are “spiritual infants.” Graham appealed for more basic, uncomplicated gospel preaching.
The evangelist’s approach to British churches came through in his nightly talks to inquirers. He said they must become active in a church even though many say “that’s the hardest thing you’ve asked me to do.” But he told them also to join one of the 6,000 Bible study groups now functioning in the London area. He urged the new Christians to take part in social service, such as visiting the sick or lonely or “making friends with someone of another race.”
A lot has happened to Great Britain and to Billy Graham since their encounter a dozen years ago. Something of an American curiosity in 1954, Billy Graham in 1966 is a world figure. He carried his biblical beliefs to luncheon with Queen Elizabeth, a charity ball to which he was invited by Princess Margaret, a breakfast meeting for 150 members of Parliament (many of whom had been debating on the floor of Commons until 7:30 A.M.), and 2,000 leaders of society and culture at a Foyles Literary Luncheon.
Graham’s sermons contained the same concise, dramatic Gospel he preaches everywhere, but these upper-crust gatherings produced some new material.
In introducing Graham at the literary luncheon, publishing magnate Lord Thomson said “the cynics are quieter than twelve years ago” because there is more crime, child cruelty, laziness, and selfishness. After being toasted with champagne, the teetotaling evangelist said that in Britain and America “there is a developing vacuum like that in prewar Germany. If it is not filled with something hopeful that will answer the ultimate problems of life, there will be trouble in the next generation.”
Graham said the life taught by Christ “never had all the taboos built up in the Victorian period.” And at the parliamentary breakfast, he called for a “new Puritanism” of “disciplined, New Testament living.” In the style of Earls Court, he said a new revival “could begin in the heart of someone here today.”
As for the crusade, Graham told a church audience to judge its results in five or ten years. (Dozens of ministers converted at Harringay were in evidence at Earls Court.)
The evangelist will return to London for two days in September to shore up new converts, on his way to a preaching mission in Poland. He has no major events scheduled over the summer.
The evangelist told an unofficial meeting at the Anglican Church Assembly July 5 that he found widespread religious interest in Britain but also “a revolt against the institution of the Church,” particularly among laboring classes. He said professionals alone cannot evangelize Britain. The laity must be mobilized, and this will require “a drastic revolution.” He said it is time for the Church to take the offensive, with “unambiguous proclamation.”
Graham labeled the “so-called radical movement” as “reactionary” because it is merely “defensive in the face of secularism, humanism, and rationalism.” He said the Church has also been defensive in morals by hesitating to denounce sin.
Billy And The British Press
One of Billy Graham’s most extraordinary achievements in Britain was making salvation into page-one news. There were hundreds of articles in stately journals and lowbrow dailies, notices of crusade trips in provincial papers, and seemingly endless letters to the editor. The treatment of Graham was rougher than anything he gets from secular journalists in the States.
The Communist Morning Star, in a huge headline, dismissed the crusade as “Sky-pie—in the new king-size, flip-top packet.” A Reading columnist said bluntly, “Go Home, Billy Graham.” In a similar vein, a Glasgow writer said that with “150 million scarlet sinners in the U. S. A.… Graham’s search for souls in London surely takes on some comic opera qualities.”
Anti-Americanism also cropped up in a letter to the Ipswich Evening Star: “It’s no use sobbing your socks off at Earls Court about your minor peccadilloes if you then go off and murder men, women, and children in Vietnam because President Johnson tells you to.”
The Mirror’s Cassandra, who is syndicated in the United States, said soberly, “Billy Graham hasn’t changed, but I think that we in Britain have—for the worse.” He considers Graham “a good, simple man who comes from a country where revivalism has a bad record.”
The Times, the “Establishment” daily, was rare in perceiving theological undertones to anti-Graham feeling within the Church. It said “few could deny the harsh truth” in much that he said.
Some reporters went into print with stories that the crusade might not be able to pay its bills. As it turned out, contributions proved to be more than enough.
Despite the barbs by columnists, Graham thanked the press from the pulpit for its objective coverage in the basic news stories and said he “felt sorry” for some reporters because “they don’t have a clue to what it’s all about.”
