Geraldine Doogue | February 28, 2009

THE Go-Between, the novel by J.P. Hartley, begins with the famous line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” How true this seemed, watching a recent Sunday night’s Compass program on ABC television.

It reflected on the remarkable Billy Graham crusade that swept up Australian hearts and souls in 1959. Nothing quite like it had been seen before or since. World Youth Days are probably the nearest approximation in terms of being huge efforts to mobilise mass interest in religious participation, beyond the usual constituency.

Yet Graham’s first return visit, nine years later in 1968, was vastly less eventful. The contradictory experience of the same brilliant preacher in the same cities offers one of the most eloquent summaries possible of changing Australian codes during those critical years. In that short time there was a fundamental shift in attitudes towards authority figures, determining one’s own aspirations irrespective of family tradition, and notions of manners.

Part of a series of specials to mark Compass’s 21st anniversary on air, the Graham profile provided a perfect vehicle to fulfil part of the program brief: to explore Australia’s religious past, to look at the forces that have shaped our beliefs and values, to chart the degree of change and humanise it.

From the vantage point of 2009, the images of the dashing American evangelist and the crowds that flocked to see him look very foreign. But those flickering black-and-white images of the crusade are fascinating, even mesmerising.

It’s worth teasing out some of the elements of this fascination.

Simple nostalgia plays a part, alongside the sheer foreignness of those times. Here are our parents or younger selves, so much part of another Australia, yet so “just yesterday”.

There is something innately charming about the ordinary folk who came in droves to see the charismatic preacher: men in their dark suits and hats, women wearing frocks, hats and gloves, girls with their plaits and bobbysocks, clean-cut lads with short-back-and-sides haircuts, all in a conscious effort to look their best.

Graham, now in his early 90s, came here at the height of his powers and popularity, a representative of the victorious US, our new best friend since the fall of Singapore, the master of the modern universe. With his movie-star looks and sonorous voice, he was a highly appealing character: if anything, a little too perfect.

As one of the female interviewees who went to see him says in the program: “Our hearts were fluttering for Billy Graham. He was such a sexy looking man. Most of the ministers we’d had were just very plain, everyday, older men. And here was this young man, a beautiful man telling us all these wonderful things. It was a revelation, it was just a revelation.”

Graham came here just before that tsunami of change. He arrived in Australia on February 12, 1959, to begin his Southern Cross Crusade. It lasted almost four months, and he visited Melbourne, Launceston, Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth.

At a series of rallies, more than three million Australians came to hear his powerful oratory. Millions more listened to him on radio. On Sunday, March 15 that year, he drew the biggest ever crowd to the Melbourne Cricket Ground: 143,000 people. They packed the stands and the playing field. On May 10 in Sydney the numbers were even greater, as 150,000 people came to a simultaneous double meeting at the Sydney Cricket Ground and adjoining showground.

The climax of his rallies was a call for people to come forward and pledge their lives to Christ. Across the country, 130,000 people responded to the call and “accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my own personal saviour”. One of them was Sydney’s present Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen, who confirmed in the Compass program that Australia at that time had a very different social and religious landscape. It was a place of conformity and conservative social values where almost 90 per cent of the population identified themselves asChristian.

“In the 1950s it was a time when the churches were full. The Sunday schools were huge. There were Sunday schools of a thousand or more. And there was a real connection between the church and the parish,” he says.

But Australia and the world were on the cusp of momentous change. The grave threat of Cold War and nuclear weapons and fears about the emerging rebellious youth culture had prompted Australian Protestant leaders to bring Graham here. Before his arrival there was a grassroots marketing effort to ensure his words wouldn’t fall on stony ground.

This is a key feature of the subsequent success and cannot be underestimated. It prompts thoughts about the challenge of mobilising such a co-ordinated exercise today. Would there be sufficient enthusiasm among existing followers for such fastidious seeking out and then follow-up of others? Even the term “lapsed”, part of the target group who’d strayed from the right path, seems positively quaint. In these days of risk analysis and duty-of-care concerns, would the sheer complexity prove overwhelming?

In fact, the religious organisation behind Graham was probably Australia’s first experience of professional, systematic mass marketing, of the sort that came to characterise the later 20th century.

Another interviewee in the Compass program, historian Judith Smart, then eight years old, was among those who went to hear Graham. She experienced first-hand the fears of the older generation that ensured their support for the powerful American preacher.

“The coming of rock’n’roll concerts was something quite different that made older people scared of what the effects were going to be on younger people,” she says. “There were fears of juvenile delinquency. There was a great concern to try to make sure young people didn’t develop bad habits and move in the wrong direction.”

But in conservative Christian eyes, these fears proved well founded during the next 10years. In fact, any dispassionate overview of the Billy Graham phenomenon must concede that while his preaching made a deep impact on some people, he failed to have a broad or lasting effect.

The progressive forces of change in the 1960s swept all before them. The contraceptive pill came on the market in 1961 and the sexual revolution was here to stay. (Bob Santamaria always emphasised in interviews with me that this was a key tipping point in the post-war world, and not one he liked.) The Beatles, and a steady stream of other rock bands, came and went. The free love, drugs and anarchy sensibility of Woodstock ruled, offering vivid imagery on TV. At the sharp end, young Australian men were being conscripted to fight in Vietnam, sparking the anti-war movement dominated by university students.

The second time around, in 1968, the promotion for Graham’s visit was more haphazard. By the late 1960s Australia had experienced the start of a social revolution. The Vietnam War seen every night on TV had taken the gloss off the American masters of the universe. His crusade didn’t have the same buzz and drew much smaller crowds.

Smart explains the new mood of the times: “Students were not then as receptive to somebody like Billy Graham as they had been before. They saw him as the enemy, as a defender, an apologist for US imperialism. US imperialism was the new enemy. And Billy Graham could no longer be seen as somebody who would save Australians and save society from the evils of Americanisation. In fact he was seen as being complicit (in) it.”

The statistics on Christian affiliation and practice in this country reveal a steady decline from the 1950s to the present, and show that the Graham crusade did not have a marked effect on Christian belief. In the 1961 census, 88.3 per cent of Australians described themselves as Christian, and by 1971 this had fallen to 86.2 per cent. In the most recent census in 2006, the number was 64 per cent.

Jensen remains an enthusiastic supporter of the man who brought him to a personal commitment to Christ. He is sanguine about the long-term impact of Graham in Australia: “Yes, our churches had a terrible shock in the 1960s and went through a great revolution. And they were challenged very profoundly, and that challenge continues. But without the Graham crusades, I think our churches would be in a far worse place than they are now.”

Smart is probably more realistic about Graham’s impact: “Attendances at church went up for a short period of time. But it’s also certainly the case that during the 1960s and ’70s we see the beginning of a long-term decline in church attendance and in Sunday school attendance. So I feel we have to say that in the long term, and by that I mean after about two or three years, the effects of the Graham crusade were almost non-existent.”

To my mind, our times resemble ’50s Australia more than the ’60s and ’70s, though oddly enough I sense more optimism and less caution then. Our ’50s forebears were still seared by the Depression, yet they had won the war. We can’t be nearly so sure of exactly what lies ahead. But I’m pretty sure, no one like Graham will appear to seduce usagain.

Geraldine Doogue presents Compass, focusing on religion and ethics, on ABC1 on Sundays. Tomorrow at 9.25pm, the program features writer Blanche d’Alpuget, Uniting Church minister Bill Crews, actor Jacki Weaver, author and science educator Karl Kruszelnicki, anthropologist and indigenous-rights activist Marcia Langton and environmentalist Ian Lowe.

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