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‘Selling Soap and Salvation’: Billy Graham’s Consumer Rhetoric in Germany and the United States in the 1950s Uta Balbier ABSTRACT In the 1950s and 1960, the American evangelist Billy Graham held his first large revival meetings in Germany. This article explores how the German evangelical organizers and Ger- man Christians more generally related to Graham’s particular campaign style that blended mission and marketing. It uses Graham’s revival meetings in Germany to explore the multi-layered interplay between religion and consumption in West Germany in the 1950s and 60s and shows how rapidly changing economic circumstances in post-War Germany and emerging new consumption patterns also had an impact on how Germans discussed, experienced, and practiced religion. This article argues that the impact that Billy Graham had on the German religious landscape cannot be assessed solely on the basis of church membership (which only showed marginal if any increase after the revival meetings), but argues that Graham brought a signifi- cant cultural change to the German religious landscape which slowly embraced the American concept of selling and consuming faith. “I am selling the greatest product on earth, why shouldn’t it be promoted as well as soap?” (8). With this now-famous quote, given in a 1954 interview with Time magazine, evangelist Billy Graham set new standards even in the tradition- ally market-oriented rhetoric of American evangelicalism. Graham also set new standards in German Protestant discourse when he used the same line during a press conference in Düsseldorf that same summer shortly before the opening of his first German crusade, a revival meeting that would attract several thousand German Christians, non-Christians, and Christians-to-be. In his first address to German audiences, Graham noted that he had worked as a door-to-door brush salesman before becoming an evangelist. Joking about how he used to set his foot on the threshold to prevent doors from being closed in his face, he explained that the modern evangelist had to make use of the marketing methods normally employed by salesmen. After all, he explained that he and his team are just salesmen of the most important treasure existing on earth (“Dies ist die Stunde Gottes”). The same talk saw Graham using various metaphors to relate his evangelism to business and industrial production. For instance, he de- scribed his fellow twenty-five evangelists as his team and praised the team’s func- tional division of labor during the London crusade that had run for twelve weeks between March and May 1954. Graham’s market-oriented rhetoric, introduced during his 1950s and 1960s revival campaigns, did not provoke an uproar in German Protestant circles. On the contrary, after some initial resistance, the German press, many Protestant church officials, and German pietist circles displayed their openness to Graham’s way 138 Uta Balbier of discussing religion in terms of marketing, trade, and lifestyle. In the context of the rapidly evolving consumer capitalism in mid-twentieth century Germany, consumerism also increasingly influenced religious life. In recent years the histories of consumer capitalism and consumer culture have received growing scholarly attention in Germany.1 We are also seeing a fresh interest in the contemporary history of religion in Germany that is ambitiously pushing the boundaries of the traditional field of church history.2 In the study of contemporary religion in the United States, the relationship between consumer capitalism, with its deep impact on social and cultural practices, and the develop- ment of religious life has been widely explored and theorized. By contrast, neither the historiography of German consumer capitalism nor German post-war religion has given adequate attention to the complex interplay between religious practices and identities and the changing realities of consumer societies. In the United States, scholars such as Bethany Moreton, Vincent Miller, and Kathryn Lofton have explored how cultural commercialization and consumption- oriented lifestyles have changed the way people express and experience their faith as well as the ways that they search for spiritual fulfillment. These scholars have also traced the impact of consumerism on the formation of new religious identities.3 The swift rise of German consumerism in times of the Wirtschaftswunder confronted German Christians with challenges and questions similar to those fac- ing their American brethren. Although urban mass revivalism had been part of German religious life since the late nineteenth century, Graham’s revival campaigns provided the first occasions for many German Christians and observers of the religious scene to engage with a new form of openly and programmati- cally market- and consumption-oriented religiosity (Moore). This essay aims to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of German economic pros- perity, the clear commitment to a capitalistic social order in the Western part of the country, and the proliferation of consumer practices on the German religious landscape. It also seeks to contribute to the transnationalization of U.S. religious history and American Studies more generally. Considering Graham’s efforts in Germany separately from his U.S. efforts will enable us to gain deeper insights into the global attractiveness of his mission.4 A particular concern this paper will address is how Graham’s style contrib- uted to the transformation of a German pietist milieux. German Protestant- ism, of course, has a long native tradition of pietist and revivalist movements within the various regional churches, which after World War II became the Landeskirchen of the newly formed states.5 Alongside these Landeskirchen existed the ‘free churches,’ such as the German Baptist, Methodist, and Pen- 1 See Berghoff and Spiekermann; Haupt and Torp; and Siegrist, Kaelble, and Kocka. 2 See Grossbölting; Bösch and Hölscher. 3 The adaptability of this concept in the European context is discussed and broadly dis- missed in Boeve. 4 Graham’s success has often been explored in the context of his particular attractiveness in the realm of U.S. culture, as done in Wacker, but this approach falls short in explaining Gra- ham’s attractiveness abroad. 5 See Gäbler; Geldbach; and Voigt. ‘Selling Soap and Salvation’ 139 tecostal. These were all conversion-centered, shared the biblical and mission- ary orientation of the Lutheran and Reformed pietists, and frequently collabo- rated with their pietist brethren in ecumenical endeavors. The most important of these ecumenical efforts was the Deutsche Evangelische Allianz, which emerged from the international Evangelical Alliance, founded in 1846.6 Begin- ning with the Erweckungsbewegungen (revival movements) of the nineteenth century, these German pietist and free churches entertained close relationships with the world of Anglo-American evangelicalism and were influenced by the developments of new types of revivalism and evangelization methods (e. g. tent evangelization, holiness camps) in the Atlantic world. In fact, the German holiness movement (Gemeinschaftsbewegung), which re-energized German pietism in the late nineteenth century, started as a religious import from Britain and the United States. In general, however, the wholesale ‘Anglicization’ of these pietist milieux was always resisted. Instead German churches maintained and fostered their own confessional identities. This resistance turned to national- istic isolationism during the world wars, and only in the post-war period did these groups open up again to international influence. Especially American evangelicalism, like American culture as a whole, seemed to promise liberation from problematic traditions and the possibility of reinventing oneself through what Winfried Fluck terms “self-Americanization.” For German pietists and free church groups, this transformation involved a redefinition from pious evangelische Christen—in the older, more comprehensive sense of the word meaning Protestant Christians—to evangelikale Christen as an adaption of the American concept of evangelical Christian. ‘Evangelical Christian’ as a concept implied a continuing commitment to a conservative, bibliocentric theology and conversionism, and it also connoted a self-confident, open-minded attitude toward the modern world and middle-class culture. As I will argue, this shift to an evangelical identity was intimately connected to an endorsement of Gra- ham’s market- and consumer-oriented interpretation of the Protestant faith.7 In what follows, I first introduce Graham’s particular liaison with the rise of consumerism and then discuss the first encounters between German audiences, press, and church officials and Graham’s campaigns and their distinctive style in the 1950s. In the final part, I outline how German evangelicals’ self-concep- tion changed due to their interactions with Graham and his team after Graham’s three-week 1960s campaigns in Berlin, Hamburg, and Essen. 6 For the history of the Alliance, see Beyreuther; Schirrmacher and Jung. 7 Graham’s importance role in the formation of a German ‘evangelical movement’ has been acknowledged, but so far the specific appeal of his market- and consumer-oriented style has been largely overlooked. See Schirrmacher and Jung, 38-39; and especially the detailed account of Graham’s visit to Germany in Bauer, 201-221. 140 Uta Balbier Billy Graham and the Business of Evangelicalism Billy Graham held his first revival meeting in Los Angeles

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