A Real Miracle for 34th Street

The well-known Miracle on 34th Street was the imagined suspension, in the interests of the Christmas spirit, of the famous rivalry between Gimbels and Macy’s, New York’s biggest department stores. It provided the theme for a movie and book, and later for a Broadway musical, Here’s Love. Last month the Christian spirit was bringing about a more authentic miracle in the heart of the Manhattan shopping district. A 50-year-old Billy Graham was preaching not only God’s love but also his truth and justice to a crowd of 20,000 each night in the new Madison Square Garden.

“Jesus came the first time as the gentle Saviour,” Graham said. “Next time he comes as the judge of all the earth.”

At the close of each service, about 1,000 persons were responding to the evangelist’s invitation to commitment. Among them was a 31-year-old sandwich-shop waiter of Latin background who had left the Roman Catholic Church years ago. He came to the crusade at the invitation of a Christian boss—and found Christ as Saviour.

A Lutheran girl from New Jersey (she told her counselor she was 13½) who stepped forward to receive Christ said she had never realized that God loved her personally. She had known only that he loved the world as a whole.

Then there was the unemployed presser with the African haircut. He said he was a Baptist but never went to church any more. He had come forward, he explained, to show his determination to begin a closer walk with the Saviour he had met years ago.

Many of the others who responded to Graham’s message he never saw and perhaps in this life never will. They were members of the vast television audience that stretched from Minneapolis to Miami. An hour’s portion of each service was put on color videotape and aired later the same evening in seventeen major metropolitan areas.

To counsel those responding to the televised preaching, the Graham organization rented Box 8000 in New York’s Grand Central Station post office and turned it into a huge clearing house for spiritual problems. Thousands of letters were pouring in.

Graham and emcee Cliff Barrows also appealed to the television audience to help pay for the air time, $50,000 a night. The ten-day New York crusade itself had a budget of $850,000, according to Graham. The biggest expense was the $25,000-a-night rental of the airconditioned Garden, a relatively luxurious arena perched atop the new Penn Central railroad station.

At the half-way point in the crusade, sour notes seemed to be well in the background. A few ministers complained to the press that the crusade held little prospect of adding numbers to their congregation. A mini-skirted smirking teen-ager stalked out of the counseling room in unbelief. She said she had belonged to a prestigious Manhattan congregation but had thrown her faith overboard, adding that she doubted that her minister really believed what he preached. The minister was among those who told a reporter that Graham’s sixteen-week crusade in New York in 1957 had had no effect upon his church.

The evangelist often acknowledges that many a seed of gospel truth falls on stony ground. But much of the miracle of Manhattan was that the seed could even be sown in such profusion. The city is so preoccupied with present social problems that few of its citizens ever seem to take thought of tomorrow.

“God commands all men everywhere to repent,” Graham said. “Nothing else counts in this life or the life to come unless you have obeyed that one great command: Repent!”

The evangelist was nonetheless sensitive to social issues. He preached on great biblical themes such as the cross, the blood, and judgment. But in each forty-minute sermon he made reference to rebellious youth and racial tensions. “Man without God is a violent man,” he emphasized.

Graham went out of his way to recognize the concerns of black people. Three of his musical soloists were blacks. Three black associate evangelists were on hand. Numerous black churches participated in the crusade, and among the crusade executive members was Dr. M. L. Wilson, a local pastor who is Chairman of the Board of the National Committee of Black Churchmen.

Religious News Service estimated that Negroes made up one-fifth of the opening-night audience. During that service the evangelist declared forcefully that “there is no superior race.… Black is beautiful, white is beautiful, yellow is beautiful, red is beautiful, if Christ is in the heart!”

Mid-June had found New York a bit uneasy. The stock market dipped to new lows for the year. Political conservatives won both the Democratic and Republican mayoral primaries by pledging restoration of law and order. The crusade began on a muggy weekend, but the humidity eventually gave way to a cool spell that cleared the air.

Sidelights of the crusade included a school of evangelism for seminary students from all over the country. The under-25 crowd gathered after each service in a “coffeehouse” nearby to hear folk and rock music with biblical lyrics.

Note:CHRISTIANITY TODAYwill carry more news coverage of the New York crusade in the next issue.

Speaking To The Issues

Here are salient excerpts from Billy Graham’s sermons in his June 13–22 crusade at New York’s Madison Square Garden:

On death:

“I don’t think anyone knows how to live unless he knows how to die.”

On race:

“The Bible says there is no superior race.… Black is beautiful, white is beautiful, yellow is beautiful … if Christ is in the heart.… We’re of one blood.

… Christ can give the supernatural power to love a person of another race.”

On tolerance:

“We don’t want God telling us how we ought to live. We don’t want God laying out the road to heaven. We want to go some other way. ‘There is a way that seemed right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.’ The Bible says the road to heaven is through a narrow gate, and a narrow road, and we don’t like to be narrow. We think of ourselves as broadminded and tolerant—except in science. Suppose those men going on Apollo 11 to the moon in July have some men at the control center down in Houston, and they’re broadminded and tolerant, and they say, ‘Well, we’re way off course.’ ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘it’s all right. There are many roads that lead to the moon. Just take the one you’re on.’ But there are many people that say that about the way to heaven. Many roads! Jesus said there’s only one road, there’s only one way. He said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but by me.’ ”

On Satan:

“There is a power of evil in this world, and you cannot explain all the evil that is going on in our world today unless you understand there is a supernatural force back of it called the devil, that Jesus referred to time after time.”

On Christ’s blood:

“I’m going to heaven, and I believe I’m going by the blood. I know that’s not popular preaching. You don’t hear much about that any more. But I’ll tell you it’s all the way through the Bible. I may be the last fellow on earth who preaches it, but I’m going to preach it, because it’s the only way we’re going to get there.”

Conservative Broadcasts: A “Fair” Death?

Conservative religious broadcasting—on the way out?

Probably not; but the possibility seemed real to right-wing broadcasters in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision upholding the “fairness doctrine” of the Federal Communications Commission.

Among other things, the doctrine, which had been opposed by all major networks, requires broadcasters to give free rebuttal time to any person or group whose honesty, character, or integrity is attacked on the air.

Main target of the fairness doctrine, according to a brief prepared for the court by several ecumenical church bodies, was a far-right “fourth network,” which includes such conservative, often fundamentalist programs as Carl McIntire’s “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour,” H. L. Hunt’s “Life Line,” and Billy James Hargis’s “Christian Crusade.” And these are the groups now feeling the decision most deeply.

Fine as the word “fairness” sounds, Hargis (chief target of the court for an attack on liberal writer Fred J. Cook) contended that the FCC’s “one-edged sword” could eventually cut the arteries of all conservative broadcasting. “My experience,” he said in his Tulsa, Oklahoma, office, “is that the commission is much harder on conservatives than on liberals. Frankly, unless Congress or the people rise up, I can see an end to commercial religious broadcasting.”

“You see,” he explained, “it’s not just me it hits. It’s all fundamental—uh, I mean evangelical—radio programs and conservative commentators. And if this were carried out fully, when someone spoke against adultery, the station would have to look up the local harlot and have her speak.”

Justice Byron R. White, writing the court’s 7–0 decision, argued that the “fairness doctrine,” while creating some problems for stations, did more to encourage free speech than to hamper it. Both Hargis and the networks disagreed, however, on the grounds that the difficulty of enforcement will merely lead stations to carry fewer controversial broadcasts, so as to avoid rebuttals.

Spiritual Revolutionists: Capturing The Media

Today’s mass communications threaten to transform man into “a puppet, a receptacle, or an echo,” warned the executive director of the International Christian Broadcasters at the first Space Age Communications Conference last month. Since “the Gospel is not compatible with mediocrity,” added Abe Thiessen, Christians must gain control of mass media and “earn the right to be heard with complete confidence.”

That evangelical forces largely have failed to make use of the incredible opportunities of today’s mass media, and that time is fast running out before depraved and Communist-inspired radicals overthrow American society as we know it, were often repeated themes at the week-long conference sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ International at its 1,735-acre foothill headquarters in Southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains. Four other conferences also were in session at the sprawling Arrowhead Springs property (once a Hilton luxury hotel and health spa).

The media—especially newspapers and “the idiot box”—took it on the chin from most speakers as being the major purveyors of evil, and a prime catalyst for what they see as the crime-drug-sex-Communist-takeover syndrome of America’s sickness.

“Who controls the media?” Crusade president William R. Bright asked the 150 communicators (many from overseas) attending the gathering. His answer: Those “dedicated to overthrowing our country” deliberately planned media subversion a generation ago, while “we who are Christians have remained strangely silent.”

In a well received session, U. S. Armed Forces Information Agency director John Broger presented a multi-media study of how electronic circuitry, pop posters, rock music and the underground press involve—and subtly influence—youth, and wedge the generations further apart.

Significantly, the conference was said to be the first to bring together Christian communicators representing radio, TV, literature, films, tapes, and computers to share technology and ideas. During the week they saw a prototype-showing of a “breakthrough” said to rival the development of the long-playing record, CBS-Motorola’s Electronic Video Recording. This compact TV “transmitter” can be plugged in to any TV set and used to play video tapes through the set.

The EVR (cost: $795 for the player) will be on the market next July, with a color model available a year later. The device was touted as having far greater appeal to the younger, TV-oriented generation than films and slide presentations—a claim doubted, however, by some conferees.

Even in this marvelous electronic age, the usual technical difficulties—such as a burned-out projector bulb and mike failures—jinxed some sessions. But the presentations showed imagination and reflected Crusade’s urgent desire to communicate the Gospel to this secular age by all possible means. A Bright idea for Crusade’s expanding horizons includes training young men and women to hold key media posts and “claim them for Christ.”

“If our world is to be changed,” he told an approving audience, “it will largely be through a reversal of the kind of material fed to the public, especially students.… We need a revolution of love rather than hate or destruction.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Movies And The Moral Flux

America’s movie industry began last year to regulate itself with a voluntary rating system. Family-type films are so marked, as are more racy, lusty movies. That way everyone knows what to expect beforehand.

But under the code violence, sex, and strong language have bombarded moviegoers as never before in American history. The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (NCOMP) recently protested that almost one-third of the 111 films it has reviewed since January 1 have grossly exploited sex and violence. Only one-fourth, it said, have been fit for family viewing—and just one-tenth were “recommended” for general viewing.

NCOMP director Patrick J. Sullivan said he had not “lost faith” with the decision of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to regulate itself rather than face governmental censorship. But he questioned whether movie evaluators were handling classifications properly.

What makes this reaction significant is that the NCOMP (along with the National Council of Churches) took pains last October to endorse publicly the self-regulatory system by which all movies are rated G (general audience), M (mature audience), R (restricted), or X (no one under 16 allowed). “We’ll not make a definite evaluation yet,” Sullivan said, “but if parents are concerned about current film fare, statistics suggest that their complaint is amply justified.”

Two questions arise. Have the codes increased the amount of sin on the screens? How are these movie ratings actually established?

To the first question, MPAA code administrator Eugene G. Dougherty, in a CHRISTIANITY TODAY interview, answered a quick and loud “No!” Admitting that a “few unscrupulous, fastbuck operators on the fringe” may try to exploit the code “for short-term gain,” he heatedly maintained that the majority of movie-makers actually moderate their films in order to secure more generally-acceptable ratings.

How then did he account for the explosion of sex and profanity on the screen? “America is in a state of incredible flux,” he said. “Let’s stop kidding ourselves. When the whole world tuned in to a guy orbiting the moon hears him use profanity, when a religious magazine like Commonweal uses sex-related four-letter words, when all our major newspapers use these words, you can expect a reflection of this in the movies.

“We didn’t invent war, hippies, or the mini-skirt, but we make movies about them. If anything we’re behind the times.”

On the question of how movies are rated, Dougherty explained that two or more members of the MPAA’s code commission view each film submitted to it (90 per cent of America’s theaters now accept only MPAA-rated films) and give it a rating. These members include two former film-producers, a former religion editor of the Los Angeles Times, a mother with a Ph.D. in psychology, and a lawyer whose specialty is obscenity law.

Asked why there were no ministers on the board, the administrator cited divisions within America’s religious communities. “If we were to put a fundamentalist on the board, we’d really have trouble,” he said. “And if we put on a man like the author of Are You Running with Me, Jesus? (Episcopalian Malcolm Boyd), we’d really be in hot water.” The raters do, however, consult periodically with the NCOMP’s Sullivan, as well as with leaders of the National Council of Churches’ Broadcasting and Film Commission.

Dougherty was quick to add that this consulting did not mean that the MPAA intended to follow all the suggestions. “They don’t run us,” he said. “In fact, the Catholic standards are changing so rapidly that they themselves often seem inconsistent.”

JAMES HUFFMAN

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