HEY, THEY DON'T HAVE HORNS EITHER!:

Rattling the cage: God bless America (Larry Derfner, Jun. 30, 2005, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Looking over the news coverage of last weekend's Billy Graham crusade, which drew nearly 250,000 evangelical Christians in New York, I was thinking: Good for them. Seeing the ecstasy on their faces in the photos, I was happy for them.

Growing up in urban, liberal America in the Sixties and Seventies, I took a distinctly different attitude toward the evangelical movement. Like other liberals, Jewish and gentile, I assumed that evangelical Christians were either stupid or rotten, or both. They didn't like Jews and they despised blacks. They hated everything I loved, and vice versa.

But the photos from the Graham crusade showed at least one way in which the movement has changed from a liberal's nightmare to a liberal's dream: The faces were no longer only white, but white, black, brown, yellow and maybe a couple of other hues that got lost in the crowd. Graham's sermons and the rest of the program were translated for the audience into 13 languages.

These were not the power-mad, reactionary Republican leaders in Congress, or the fearsome lobbyists for Christian fundamentalist power, or the hate-mongers of radical Right media. No, those quarter-million congregants on the grass at Flushing Meadows were regular Americans with an emotional, spiritual need.

Leticia Mateo, a 32-year-old university administrator from New Jersey, described to The New York Times her experience of the crusade.
"It's like an opening in your heart. You feel like you're behind bars and someone has given you the key to get out," she said.

How can anyone not root for such people?

AMERICAN SOCIETY has changed dramatically in the two decades since I left. The "Bible Belt" used to be confined to the south and parts of the Midwest; now it's really the whole country except the coastal cities, and the turnout for Graham in Queens was a reminder that even urban, "blue-state" America is touched with the spirit.