Billy Graham's ministry is often described as a quintessentially American success story. However, by 1954, Billy Graham was bigger news in London than in Texas. Altar Call explores how Graham's encounters and perception in Europe shaped what was from the beginning on an international ministry. Graham was responsible for an unparalleled transformation of US evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century. He is also remembered as America's pastor-in-chief, having met with every US President since Harry S. Truman. But Graham's path to triumph was paved abroad. The revival meetings Graham held in London, Berlin, and New York in the 1950s provided lively fora for ministers, politicians, and ordinary Christians to imagine and experience the future of faith, the role of religion in the Cold War, and the intersections between faith and consumer culture in new ways. Graham challenged believers and religious leaders alike to re-position religion amidst the rise of consumerism, moral post-war regeneration, and cold-war tensions. At this confluence of anxieties and desires across the Atlantic, Graham's ministry revealed remarkably similar needs among the faithful and those yearning for renewal. It is the responses of Church leaders to this need, rather than inherent differences in religious sensitivities, that helps to explain the divergent paths to secularization between the US and its European allies, Germany and the UK.

About the Author
Uta A. Balbier is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at King's College London where she is teaching classes on American cultural and religious history. Before joining King's, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC.

Reviews
By presenting a sound transnational analysis of religion, participating in the continuing debate about the state of Western European Christianity in the 1950s, and deploying innovative methodologies to assess the importance of Billy Graham's visits to Europe, Uta A. Balbier's book deserves much praise. Scholars who wish to better understand the early postwar period will find Altar Call in Europe an illuminating read with its focus on the tensions (and also affinities) between consumerism and faith and the importance of Christian rhetoric in the early days of the Cold War. * Michael E. O'Sullivan, translated from H-Soz-Kult von *
This engaging history will be of significant use to anyone studying 20th-century evangelicalism. * CHOICE *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197502259
Author Uta A. Balbier
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 526g
Dimensions(mm) 244mm * 163mm * 22mm