Abstract
Billy Graham appeared on the cover of Time. magazine for the first time on October 24, 1954. Inside, readers found an article on the preacher’s revival meetings, youthful looks, and middle-class lifestyle. It described Graham’s passion for golf, his use of high-tech equipment while preaching, and the rustic, eight-room house in Montreat, North Carolina, where his wife, Ruth, raised their four children.1 A year later, Life. magazine ran a photo essay on the Grahams.2 It showed the husband playing golf, walking the dog, and sitting at the family table, where the mother of the house served dinner. Graham’s public persona and his very ministry were bound up in the American middle-class lifestyle of the 1950s that he and his family embodied.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Billy Graham and his crusades: David Aikman, Billy Graham: His Life and Influence.(Nashville, TN, 2007)
William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story. (New York, 1991)
William McLoughlin, Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age. (New York, 1960).
William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. (Chicago, 1978).
Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. (New York and London, 2004).
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism., trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, 2002).
Jonathan B. Imber, ed., Markets, Morals, and Religion. (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007).
Stewart Davensport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860. (Chicago, 2008)
Mark Noll, ed., God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860. (Oxford, 2002).
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. (New York, 1993), 213.
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy., 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005).
Carl L. Bankston, “Rationality, Choice, and the Religious Economy: Individual and Collective Rationality in Supply and Demand,” Review of Religious Research. 45, no. 2 (2003): 155–71.
Detlef Pollack, “Introduction: Religious Change in Modern Societies—Perspectives Offered by the Sociology of Religion,” in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies,.ed. Detelef Pollack and Daniel V. A. Olson (New York and London, 2008), 1–22, especially 12.
Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture.(New York and Oxford, 1994).
John Giggie, “Refining Religion: Consumerism and African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1917,” in Dixie Emporium: Consumerism, Tourism, and Memory in the American South., ed. Anthony Stanonis (Athens, GA, 2008), 137–74.
David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. (New York and Oxford, 2004).
William G. McLaughlin, Billy Sunday was His Real Name. (Chicago, 1955), 40.
David Morgan, “Protestant Visual Culture and the Challenges of Urban America during the Progressive Era,” in Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture., ed. John M. Giggie and Diane Winston (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 37–56.
Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997).
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. (Princeton, NJ, 2001).
Dennis Voskuil, Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success. (Grand Rapids, 1983)
James Penner, Goliath: The Life of Robert Schuller.(New York, 1992).
Steward M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark, eds., Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture. (New York, 2002)
Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture.(Chicago and London, 2004).
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. (Wheeling, IL, 2009), 180–263.
James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994).
David Steigerwald, “All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought,” Journal of American History. 93, no. 2 (2006): 385–403.
The cultural atmosphere of the 1950s revival is summed up by Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 13–46.
Wyston H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. (London, 1956).
Billy Graham, Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham. (New York, 1997).
Curtis Mitchell, God in the Garden: The Amazing Story of Billy Grahams First New York Crusade. (1957; repr., Charlotte, NC, 2005).
Judith Smart makes this point in “The Evangelist as Star: The Billy Graham Crusades in Australia, 1959,” Journal of Popular Culture. 33, no. 1 (1999): 167.
Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang, “Decisions for Christ: Billy Graham in New York,” in Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society., ed. Maurice R. Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and David M. White (Glencoe, IL, 1960), 416.
That is the dominant verdict in Michael Long, ed., The Legacy of Billy Graham: Critical Reflections on America’s Greatest Evangelist. (Louisville, KY, and London, 2008).
Robert Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America. (Lexington, KY: 1995).
James B. Twitchell, Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from Your Heart into Your Face. (New York, 2007), 154.
Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West. (Malden, 2007).
Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 The German Historical Institute
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Balbier, U.A. (2012). “God’s Own Consumers”: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism, and Consumption in the United States during the 1950s. In: Berghoff, H., Spiekermann, U. (eds) Decoding Modern Consumer Societies. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013002_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013002_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29729-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01300-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)