Selling Religion

The chapter shows how Billy Graham’s crusades played an important role in shaping a new relationship between religious life, consumerism, and business culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Graham’s American revival meetings were run with businesslike efficiency, supported by the local business communities, and embedded in vast marketing and media campaigns. Graham himself embodied modern consumer culture and middle-class aspiration. This chapter explores how British and German church leaders and ordinary Christians experienced, discussed, and critiqued a more consumer- and business-oriented faith. While evangelicals and lay Christians in particular were willing to adopt a more businesslike attitude and consumer-oriented rhetoric through their transnational interactions with the Billy Graham team, the majority of church officials in Germany and the United Kingdom defended their more critical stance toward an embrace of consumer capitalism, thus leaving untapped an important source in the battle against secularization.