The Innocent British

Billy Graham wound up his six-week crusade in Glasgow last week, and the city he had picked as "the most sinful in Great Britain" was leavened by 16,236 "decisions for Christ" (pledges that may lead to conversion). More than 670,000 Glaswegians came to hear him in Kelvin Hall, and for the last nine days his voice was piped to some 700 churches, schoolhouses and town halls. Among these remote listeners, 13,422 more made decisions. Said an Irish newspaper: "Billy Graham has taken Ireland by storm and he hasn't even set foot in the country."

One listener he did not take by storm was Novelist-Playwright J. B. Priestley, who analyzed his first experience of Evangelist Graham (on TV) for the New Statesman & Nation, a journal that distrusts Heaven almost as much as it does the United States of America. Socialist-minded Observer Priestley, who in his stories has shown himself fascinated with the supernatural, found Billy just another example of the made-in-U.S.A. world that Britons are forced to live in.

Said Priestley: "Whatever our contemporary age has, America has the most of. It is the jackpot country. If we are safely bound for an earthly paradise, the Americans will be there first. If we are all going to Hell, they will also be there first . . . Now, out of America, looking like a typical clean young American who drinks his orange juice and coffee, eats his cereal and waffles . . . is the bearer of the Word. Salvation has come, as it should, from America . . . Heaven is being promised again by a figure who might easily have a five-year contract with M-G-M."

What, asks Priestley, is the reason for Billy's success? It is not Britons' hunger for religion, but their hunger for a show. "There is a vacuum that must be filled. Politics, to exist for them at all, must be a show. Patriotism is a show with an expensive regal cast . . . And now, with the arrival of the streamlined Billy Graham organization . . . religion is a show . . .

"The truth is that now the British crowd is more easily enticed and dominated by mass communications, showmanship, ballyhoo, than the American crowd is. The Americans have had a great deal more of it, and for years were far more responsive to it, but while there is in them still a strain of the gullible and hysterical, there is also the work of a powerful antibody, a strain of the skeptical, the cynical . . . But the newly arrived British bring with them into this world of mass communications, shows and ballyhoo, a certain innocence, belonging to an earlier age . . . Their minds are wide open as well as being empty."

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