The Global Apocalypses of Billy Graham

On September 23, 1949, President Truman revealed that the Soviet Union had conducted a successful test of an atomic bomb. Two days later, a handsome young evangelist stepped up to the podium in a makeshift tabernacle. “I think that we are living at a time in world history when God is giving us a desperate choice, a choice of either revival or judgment,” Billy Graham blustered. “There is no alternative!” The apocalypticism Graham preached that day was a central component of his career. For Graham, apocalypticism served as the lens through which to understand the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the rise of OPEC, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Each of these events, he believed, illustrated the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and impending Armageddon.

This paper analyzes the ways in which apocalypticism functioned in the evangelicalism of Graham and his followers. Apocalypticism gave adherents secret knowledge derived from a careful reading of ancient scriptures that allowed them to make sense of the global chaos they witnessed around them, which gave them an unwavering sense of confidence and absolute authority. Rather than foster indifference or otherworldliness, evangelical apocalypticism created a very particular ideology and a very particular form of cultural engagement. It inspired in believers a sense of urgency and certainty and a vision of the world defined in absolute terms. They had no time or regard for incremental change or for gradual reform. They called for drastic and immediate solutions to the problems they saw around them. With time running out, they hoped to shake the world. Their business was that of instant redemption, of immediate transformation. In anticipating the end of the world, evangelicals like Graham paradoxically transformed it.