Word: grahame
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Apologize, Billy!" While Evangelist Graham was still on the high seas, the British press warmed up the oven to give him a good roasting. The whole crusade seemed to editors to be U.S. anti-Socialist propaganda or a moneymaking racket, or both. Sneered the Daily Mirror: "America occasionally tells her friends what to do. Tomorrow an American arrives in Britain to tell us what to think and what to believe. God's Own Country has always run a brisk export line in evangelists. They come in all shapes and sizes . . . We've had kids like seven-year...
Most provocative was the discovery by a Daily Herald columnist of a 1954 calendar issued by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ascribing Britain's troubles to socialism in the following, flat terms: "And, when the war ended, a sense of frustration and disillusionment gripped England, and what Hitler's bombs could not do, socialism with its accompanying evils shortly accomplished." The Laborite Herald ran the story under the headline, APOLOGIZE, BILLY−OR STAY AWAY! Laborite M.P. Geoffrey de Freitas announced that he would ask a question in the House about why Graham was allowed to come...
...Billy Graham did apologize. The offending copy, a pressagent explained, was meant to read "secularism" for "socialism" ; the wrong version had been used. Billy went down to the House of Commons and apologized personally to Laborite De Freitas, who ended by calling him "a sincere Christian." But his most dramatic job of fence-mending was a press conference he held the day after he arrived...
...launched into a rapid-fire sermon. In the last five years, he said, "we have seen the greatest religious wave in our history sweep the U.S. Arthur Godfrey now talks about religion on television." By the time he wound up, with George Beverly Shea, a member of the Graham team, singing his own composition, I'd Rather Have Jesus Than Anything Else, most of the knife-thoughts had been washed out of the newsmen. A woman reporter found him completely disarming. "He seems to have the sincerity, ingenuousness, the sort of simple charm that is the greatest fun about...
...Retreat from Christianity." However the Graham crusade turns out, everyone seems to agree that Britain is standing in the need of prayer. Church membership is between 5 and 15% of the population, as opposed to 59% in the U.S. Easter Sunday attendance in Anglican Churches fell from 2,261,857 in 1930 to 1,859,008 in 1950. Clergymen are as hard to recruit as churchgoers; though the Church of England needs at least 600 new deacons each year, only 380 are expected in 1954. A recent survey by the magazine Picture Post found only ten in one group...