WELL-EARNED VICTORY LAP:

A last crusade in a career that reshaped American religion (Harry Bruinius, 6/24/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

"Finally, the Big One," blared a headline in 1957, when a dashing young evangelist named Billy Graham was poised to launch his first crusade in the largest and, by reputation, most wicked city in the nation. "Save New York!"

The buzz surrounding this famous itinerant preacher's foray into Manhattan was at times more pulp than truly epic, but that crusade still stands as one of the most momentous events in American religious history. It not only marked the first time a preacher reached a significant audience through television, but it also helped establish him as the leading spiritual figure in the country, a pivotal player in the reemergence of US evangelical Protestantism.

Now, this weekend, as he prepares for his perhaps final crusade, the Rev. Billy Graham returns to "the big one," New York City, at the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

The octogenarian evangelist, dealing with several ailments, has proclaimed it almost certain that he will not preach in such a public venue again. If true, this Sunday will mark the end of a career that, spanning six decades, has made Mr. Graham one of the best-respected public figures in the nation's history.

It's a fact not without irony, since Graham came of age when evangelists were seen more as Elmer Gantry figures - traveling hucksters, hypocrites out to make a buck. Evangelical Protestants, too, bruised after decades of battles with Darwinism, liberal Christianity, and academic critiques of the Bible, had mostly withdrawn from public life, retreating into a defensive "fundamentalism" that could only react to culture, not shape it.

Like Ronald Reagan and the Pope, he got to live in a world he helped remake for the better--a rare thing in the human experience.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 23, 2005 11:22 PM