Mellowing Magic

His blond hair is graying and, at 50, Billy Graham tells his audiences that he is "on the sunset side now." His right index finger still slices the air magisterially, and his resonant voice has lost little of its oratorical control. The Bible still hangs open in his big left hand as he moves back from the lectern, then up to it again. The message is as sternly fundamental as ever: "God says I command you to repent." Still, something was missing last week as Graham crusaded in Manhattan's new Madison Square Garden. Time and repetition have mellowed the fervor and intensity with which America's most successful evangelist once virtually pried sinners out of their seats to come forward and give themselves to Christ.

In the twelve years since Graham last crusaded in New York, he has become more than ever a national institution. His evangelical enterprises, including Decision magazine (circ. 3,500,000), run on a budget of more than $15 million a year. Over the years, he has preached in person to more than 40 million people, and persuaded some 1,200,000 to declare their spiritual conversion to Christ. Last January, he offered a prayer at President Nixon's inaugural, and he prepared for the New York crusade in Nixon's Key Biscayne home. He has even won the friendship and support of Catholic prelates who once cautioned their flocks against attending his crusades. When Graham returned to New York for his second crusade, he thus had every reason to believe that he would attract more people than ever before.

Saturation TV. Wisely, the evangelist did not try to compete with his own grueling performance of 1957, when he preached for 16 weeks straight, lost 30 pounds, and set an all-time attendance record (2,397,400) for the old Madison Square Garden. Instead, convinced that "TV is the only way to reach the non-churched," Graham and his team settled for a far smaller in-person crowd (some 200,000) during a ten-day crusade and concentrated on saturation TV coverage: one-hour condensations of the proceedings each night on 17 eastern television stations. He even used closed-circuit color TV inside the Garden to bring the proceedings to overflow crowds. Remarkably enough, a higher proportion of these listeners came forward to make "decisions for Christ" than in the Garden proper.

Either way, audiences saw a man whose magic is perhaps beginning to recede into his method. Part of the trouble may be that he is rusty; Graham himself complained that the ten days in the Garden, however demanding, hardly gave him time to warm up. And part of the trouble may be that he is reaching too far for sophistication. One embarrassing slip suggested how scholarly allusions can misfire. When he mentioned "that great German philosopher, Goethe," Graham mispronounced his name to rhyme with growth.

One Blood. The topical touches were more successful when Graham stuck to familiar areas. In his traditional appeal to young people, he tried to be even more sympathetic than usual. He confessed amiably to one audience that his wife Ruth--who teaches Sunday school to hippie-esque students near their Montreat, N.C., home--had tried unsuccessfully to get him to grow a beard. As an innovation, the crusade sponsored an auditorium-sized psychedelic "coffeehouse" in a building a block from the Garden. There, longhaired groups blared "spiritual" rock, minishifted girls sang on a platform, and listeners sipped soft drinks and talked with some of Graham's 1,000 counsellors about religion.

The most obvious new. emphasis was on racial equality, an important point to an audience at least 25% nonwhite. "We're one blood," Billy told his crowds passionately. "If we have dark skin, it's because God made us that way. Let's accept it and be proud of it! Black is beautiful, white is beautiful, yellow is beautiful--when Christ is present." To those who came forward to accept Christ at Graham's call (between 800 and 1,000 each night), Billy's charge included a similar theme: "Go to a person of another race and make friends with him." To what extent such efforts will succeed remains to be seen. "I no longer feel I can change the world," Graham admitted last week. Nevertheless, he is clearly still trying.

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