Abstract
Billy Graham appeared on the cover of Time. magazine for the first time on October 24, 1954. Inside, readers found an article on the preacher’s revival meetings, youthful looks, and middle-class lifestyle. It described Graham’s passion for golf, his use of high-tech equipment while preaching, and the rustic, eight-room house in Montreat, North Carolina, where his wife, Ruth, raised their four children.1 A year later, Life. magazine ran a photo essay on the Grahams.2 It showed the husband playing golf, walking the dog, and sitting at the family table, where the mother of the house served dinner. Graham’s public persona and his very ministry were bound up in the American middle-class lifestyle of the 1950s that he and his family embodied.
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Notes
Billy Graham and his crusades: David Aikman, Billy Graham: His Life and Influence.(Nashville, TN, 2007)
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Balbier, U.A. (2012). “God’s Own Consumers”: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism, and Consumption in the United States during the 1950s. In: Berghoff, H., Spiekermann, U. (eds) Decoding Modern Consumer Societies. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013002_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013002_11
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