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The 1937 Oxford Conference "Church, Community, and State" of the Life and Work movement brought together many representatives of the ecumenical community. In the shadow of Nazism, it addressed the churches with words of hope and courage regarding social witness. Its concerns -- war, racism and economic strife – have proved enduring, and many of its declarations were surprisingly modern. The conference formed an ecumenical consensus for a common social witness that has remained durable in the face of more recent motifs: revolutionary. change, liberation and the nuclear threat.

John C. Bennett is one of the few Oxford Conference participants who is still living. Then a young seminary Professor of theology, he had a considerable role in the conference's preparation and was a secretary of one of its sections. Looking back over the conference and Christian Social thought since then, Bennett regards the Oxford Conference as a milestone in. the church's development concerning its social mission. Recently I discussed with Bennett the conference's implications for the church today.

"The Oxford Conference absorbed some of the most important theological changes since the 1925 conference of Life and Work in Stockholm," Bennett said. "It responded to important theological developments associated with Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was the major American voice at the conference in terms of theological thought, and his speech had a tremendous impact. While his theology was far removed from Barth's, who did not attend, his ideas reflected, to a considerable extent, the theological changes that had taken place in Europe since Stockholm

"Second, Oxford faced the new problems created by the National Socialist regime in Germany: problems of church and state; church and race; and, by anticipation, church and war.

"Third, Oxford faced the continuing dilemmas of the universal church existing in the world and took a step in clarifying Christian thinking about war and its diagnosis of the degrees of international anarchy.

"For instance, the church and war report recognized that there is no one Christian position on the subject. Second, it gave pacifism a surer status in the mainline churches. It described war in terms that would put a heavy burden of proof on any claim that a particular war is justified. For example, the conference said: 'War involves compulsory enmity, diabolical outrage against human personality, and a wanton distortion of the truth. War is a particular demonstration of the power of sin in the world and a defiance of the righteousness of God as revealed in Jesus Christ and him crucified’ Yet the conference accepted the idea that criteria exist by which some wars can be regarded as just: to defend international law, or to vindicate 'an essential Christian principle' such as the defense of 'victims of wanton aggression.' We did not emphasize then, as we would now, the idea that the escalation of the destructiveness of the means used, as in the case of nuclear war, would make a war unjust. In this respect ours is a different world.

"Fourth, Oxford projected an ethic for the economic order -- without discussing revolutionary changes -- that is still relevant to Christian thinking in the industrial democracies. In fact, the normative elements of the American Catholic bishops' recent letter on the economy are very similar to the conference's report. Ideas about property and equality, poverty and unemployment, and the whole challenge to a prevailing view of what I call 'the almost moral self-sufficiency' of the free-enterprise system are similar in both documents. Interestingly, it seems we haven't moved so far from Oxford on those positions in the industrialized democracies."

"I noted that much has been written on the church's relationship to the state, at least as far back as Constantine, but little has concerned economic ethics. Bennett agreed in part, saying, "Traditionally, much thought has focused on the possession and use of property, on usury, and on a just wage or price, but the industrial revolution got ahead of the churches. They were not ready to deal with the forms of injustice that it created until late in the 19th century. The American Social Gospel and parallels in Britain, France, the Scandinavian countries, and in the Roman Catholic Church since Pope Leo XIII's famous social encyclical Rerum Novarum, began a new stage of Christian economic ethics, strongly reflected by the 1925 Stockholm Conference. The Oxford Conference gathered these threads together very well in the light of current theological criticism."

Bennett told me that the conference, while ecumenical, lacked a broad constituency. He said that only 30 people from the Third World, many of whom were missionaries from the West, attended. Because of Hitler's restrictions, no one represented the major German churches. The conference consisted chiefly of Anglo-Saxon North American and European delegates, and only 19 women attended. There were no Catholic observers, but 26 Orthodox were there. It was a limited group. Oxford did not represent the whole world, however, because of parallel ecumenical conferences held in the late 1930s.

Meeting in 1937, the conference took place in the context of militant nationalism-in Germany, Italy, Spain. I asked Bennett how the gathering responded to this increasingly tense atmosphere.

"While frequently criticizing totalitarianism, which was connected with nationalism and racism, it did not mention particular nations, except in the letter to the Christians in Germany. The Geneva headquarters of the Life and Work Institute pressured the conference not to identify itself closely with any one particular section of the German church. But in fact the delegates did ally themselves with the Confessing Church associated with Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Obviously, the prospect of war was very much on the delegates' minds, and no one saw a prospect of improvement in the German situation. "

The Oxford Conference is well known for the phrase: "Let the church be the church," a central issue at the meeting. Church freedom or the freedom of the church from narrow cultural norms, Bennett explained, was understood in a new light..

"Not only was Oxford for many a more significant embodiment of the universal church than they had previously experienced, but it also confronted them with both theological and ethical thinking about the church, which transcends nations. Not used in a triumphalist sense, the admonition was an emphasis on the church's freedom from the power of states and the pressures of the culture. It called upon the church to be true to itself as it was understood at Oxford."

The conference seemed more concerned about the church's present social mission than it was about uniting churches doctrinally and organically. Bennett indicated that this emphasis was created partly by the division of labor between the Faith and Order and the Life and Work movements. (Faith and Order had its own conference in Edinburgh that same summer.)

"The Faith and Order movement had paid special attention to those areas of doctrine involving the ministry, apostolic succession and the sacraments, which were primary obstacles to full organic union and Christian unity. Oxford did not deal with Faith and Order issues of that time. Since then, Faith and Order has broadened its concerns and under the World Council of Churches has had common projects with Church and Society."

I asked Bennett if prewar optimistic Americans clashed with pessimistic Europeans at the conference. He was careful to point out that the British stood in between their American and continental colleagues. For example, he noted, "I remember Archbishop William Temple telling me about his first meeting with Reinhold Niebuhr. He said, 'You are the man who's been troubling me. 'The whole British approach was based much more on continuities of church and society that was that of continental Christians. On the other hand, the British had a greater sense of tradition and more theological sophistication than did the Americans. But at Oxford the Americans did not strongly resist some of the influences which came from Emil Brunner and the other Europeans. For instance, the economic order report presented a very un-American view of the economy, yet the Americans barely protested."

A prominent American layperson at Oxford was John Foster Dulles. He participated in the international order section, called the Universal Church and the World of Nations. Bennett told me that the conference's critical approach to social thought changed Dulles. "He became interested in the church again. His father was a minister and theologian, so Dulles came out of the church. But I don't think he was very active in it until after the Oxford Conference. He was deeply impressed by the difference between a religious and a secular international conference, by the greater possibility at the former of generating truly international understanding.

"But Dulles changed in the 1950s. I once read a thesis that quite correctly shows that the Dulles of the '40s, who was head of the Federal Council of Churches' Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, was different from the Dulles of the '50s as U.S. secretary of state. He was not particularly anticommunist in the '40s, but about 1950 he became preoccupied with the cold war. When the Soviet Union got a nuclear bomb, Dulles shared the widespread fear of the results. I worked with him quite closely during the '40s, and his commission was well balanced, having a good many pacifists and liberals on it. His leadership at that time was generally accepted by the commission..

Reinhold Niebuhr was the other American at Oxford who proved to be very influential in politics. But his stance on communism, as Bennett pointed out, was quite different from Dulles's. "Niebuhr thought communism was idolatrous religion," Bennett noted. He often suggested that the communists of the late '30s and '40s, because they had this commitment to communism as a kind of religion, were even more dangerous than the fascists. It was in 1953 that Niebuhr published his strongest statement against communism. His stroke came in 1952, and after that he did not have the strength to develop a new systematic position. But he did give many signals that his mind was changing, beginning as early as 1958. And later, he opposed the U.S.'s Cuba policy, our China policy, and the Vietnam war, and he even changed his mind on his own earlier anticommunist rhetoric. He did not have the opportunity to develop a position that was as strongly and indeed as polemically expressed as had ben his anticommunist position of the ‘40s and early ‘50s.

"Neoconservatives are dead wrong in claiming that Niebuhr's anticommunist stance defines 'Christian realism.' Great changes have taken place in international communism and even in Soviet communism. Nuclear war is a much greater threat to freedom today -- as well as to existence. Realists must take account of these new situations. I think that neo-conservatives are also wrong about economic issues. Niebuhr did reject socialism,

but I doubt if he would have shared their celebration of capitalism or their tendency to see free enterprise as almost morally self-sufficient. I do not want to attribute ideas to Niebuhr, but I think that he would be as horrified as I am by the combination of wealth and poverty under American capitalism. While Niebuhr never advocated any scheme that imposes complete equality, he thought of justice as being under the criticism of equality.

Much Christian thought, on both the Catholic and Protestant sides, has been devoted to a theocratic ideal. But the Oxford Conference moved away from this pattern of thought.

"It saw clearly the contrast between the state, with its coercive power, and the church-and the importance of the freedom of the church against the state, especially where the state tries to control it," Bennett said. "Nor was there any emphasis on a dualistic interpretation of the 'two realms' doctrine, for which the Kingdom of God is irrelevant to the political order. The delegates were against identifying any political order with the Kingdom of God, but they left room for seeing signs of the Kingdom, even partial embodiments of it, in history. In studying the conference in a fresh way, I realize how important it was that they put community before state in the title. The totalitarian state does not distinguish between the community and the state.

"In a democracy, Caesar is the people, expressed in all kinds of different ways politically. And the people who are members of the church are, in a way, also members of Caesar. As Christian citizens, they cannot separate their ethics altogether' from their responsibility as citizens. However, they may be driven sometimes to emphasize the lesser evil so much that their decision may become remote from the Christian ethic, even though they don't intend that result. "

It has been 50 years since the Oxford Conference. I asked Bennett how it has personally shaped his life and thought. "It is part of the background for what many of us think now, for it has entered into the background rather than being a source of new ideas today. For a person .who enters into it now', it is partly out of a historical interest. But things we take as self-evident today were not self-evident then. The conference formed my mind."

The young woman said that she urgently needed to see me. No, she was not having difficulty in my religion course. The problem was more serious. She explained through tears that she had just broken up with her fiance, and since I purportedly knew something about fundamentalism, she hoped that I might be able to offer a word or two of advice.

Her story was familiar. Like millions of American Christians, she had grown up in a fundamentalist church where she had come to believe that the Lord would soon take his saints back to heaven in a glorious event known as the Rapture. This occurrence would be followed by the Great Tribulation, seven years of increasingly violent conflicts and natural calamities. At the end of the Great Tribulation the scriptural armies of Gog and Magog -- which everyone knew to be the Soviet Union and China -- would attack the comparatively defenseless state of Israel. But just then, when all seemed lost, the Lord of Hosts would return to slay the forces of Gog and Magog in the most fearsome struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon. Thereupon Satan would be bound, the Jews would acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Messiah, and Christ would establish a kingdom of righteousness on earth for a thousand years. At the end of the millennium the Lord would separate the saved from the lost, giving the saved everlasting dominion over the new heavens and the new earth, and casting the lost into the Lake of Fire to burn forever.

It was all standard fundamentalist fare, a set of ideas commonly known as Darbyite premillennialism (after an architect of the scheme, John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British Plymouth Brethren preacher.) So why the tears? Why the break up? Because the young woman had just discovered that her fiance had the details all wrong. Though he was a firmly committed premillennialist like herself, he believed that the Lord would take his saints from the earth after the Great Tribulation, not before it. In the parlance of the fundamentalist subculture, he was a "post-trib pre-mill," while she was a "pre-trib pre-mill."

Given that I too had been reared in the fundamentalist subculture, where the vocabulary of the Rapture and of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was as familiar as Cheerios and the St. Louis Cardinals, I could readily understand the gravity of the young woman's concerns. I could also understand her fear that most of her college friends would consider the dilemma rather silly. From my perspective, the latter problem was more serious. The pain of a broken romance would pass, but the studied disinterest of the elite culture of the university -- which was also the elite culture of the New York Times, of the secular media, and of the Washington Inner Beltway -- was, it seemed clear enough, here to stay.

In When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Paul Boyer, a senior historian at the University of Wisconsin, and one of the best in the business, seeks to address the world of secularized academics and journalists who can scarcely imagine, let alone appreciate, the breadth and depth of popular apocalypticism in contemporary America. Whether we rely upon "hard" poll data, or sales figures of books and periodicals, or an endless stream of anecdotal evidence, Darbyite premillennialism proves to be one of the most resilient and widely held belief systems that has ever gripped the American imagination. Gallup polls attest that 62 percent of adults affirm that Jesus will literally return to earth. TV and radio preachers trumpet the details of prophecy belief over hundreds of stations and cable networks Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth sold 9 million copies within eight years of its publication in 1970. By 1990 that number had soared to 28 million. Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis, penned by Dallas Seminary president John F. Walvoord, sold nearly a million copies after its publication in 1974 and another million following the Persian Gulf crisis. Scores of magazines and newsletters such as End-Time News Digest and Prophecy-Watch International turn up in the mailboxes of the faithful every day. Houston preacher Hilton Sutton maintains a 24-hour 800 number to keep devotees updated on late-breaking developments. Merchants tell of customers who refuse $6.66 in change. I recall reading of a Washington, D.C., bookstore that was being asked to refund the cost of Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days after disappointed purchasers found that it was about plain old politics, not spine-tingling biblical prophecy.

Boyer does not rush into his subject. He devotes more than a hundred densely footnoted pages to a learned discussion of apocalypticism in the Hebrew and Christian traditions from the second century B.C. through the mid 20th century. While students may regard this leisurely stroll through two millennia of intellectual history as useful background, true believers are likely to find it more than a little disturbing. The problem is not that Boyer is ever less than respectful. Indeed, he goes out of his way to show that, given certain assumptions about the ahistorical nature of the Bible, Darbyite premillennialism arose in a natural, even logical way from the scriptural text. The problem rather is that the very act of treating prophecy belief historically at all -- that is, showing that its main features have cropped up with astonishing regularity for centuries -- undermines the assumption that lies at the heart of the system: namely, that the signs of the time are valid because they are the signs of this time and no other.

Boyer's main topic is, in any event, the efflorescence of prophecy belief in America from World War II to the early 1990s. He examines the way that apocalyptic thinking has structured popular attitudes toward nuclear war, Israel, Russia, American foreign policy, the growth of government, and whatever was regarded at the moment as the Antichrist. He focuses almost exclusively upon Darbyite prermillennialism, which might be called the main trunk of apocalyptic thinking in modern America. Other branches, such as Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and more exotic groups like (but not including) the now-infamous Branch Davidians, receive only passing attention, as do secular doomsday warnings of nuclear holocaust and environmental destruction. Yet Boyer's instincts are sound, for it was the unique version of premillennialism nurtured by Darby and brought to these shores after the Civil War that helped form the doctrinal core of virtually all fundamentalist and many evangelical churches.

. Boyer avoids -- or more precisely, explodes -- much of the conventional wisdom about prophecy believers. He challenges the widely held notion that they came solely from the ranks of the dispossessed. He allows that a majority represented the stable working and lower middle classes, but a sizable minority held upper-class positions and enjoyed advanced education. Boyer also doubts that premillennialism went hand in hand with pessimism about social reform and the outcome of history. We shall return to this matter later. Here it suffices to say that adherents typically proved themselves tireless toilers in the Lord's vineyard and viewed the end of history with anticipation, not apprehension. Most important, Boyer questions the pervasive assumption that believers were somehow abnormal-social losers, cultural misfits, psychological wrecks. He takes pains to show that in every respect except the specific matter of prophecy belief they looked and behaved remarkably like anyone else occupying a similar position in the social system. Anyone who seriously doubts that, Boyer wryly urges, need only attend a fundamentalist church picnic.

When Time Shall Be No More is so thoroughly researched and so comprehensive in scope it is difficult to imagine that any critical historian will try to retell the story for decades to come, The only real problem with this truly magnificent book is that Boyer strains to locate the significance of prophecy belief where it does not exist, or exists only inconsequentially: in the realm of secular politics. Although he never falls into the trap of claiming that prophecy belief actually brought about one or another specific policy, he insists that it established a climate of opinion that made the development of nuclear weapons, for example, or automatic support for Israel seem eminently sensible.

Yet surely the most striking feature of prophecy belief is precisely the opposite: how impotent it has been as an instrument of public policy. Consider the Reagan years, when many high-ranking officials, including the secretary of the interior, the secretary of defense, and the president himself all identified themselves as firm adherents. Nuclear holocaust did not ensue, the cold war thawed, Israel lost the ear of the president, and the U.S. government continued to spend hundreds of billions on social reconstruction. The same has been true within the sphere of religion. The confrontation between the FBI and the Branch Davidians at Waco riveted public attention precisely because that sort of thing happens so rarely. The Branch Davidians represent a wildly atypical twig on the apocalyptic tree. Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of the vast majority of prophecy believers has been the contrast between the militancy of their rhetoric and the law-abiding regularity of their daily behavior.

If, then, the tenacity of prophecy belief cannot be explained in terms of standard theories of deprivation, and if it seems to have little pay-off in the secular political realm, why does it persist at all? Indeed, why did it flourish as vigorously in 1990 as in 1890 or, for that matter, as in 1790? Though Boyer himself is more interested in tracing the impact of premillennialist beliefs than in analyzing the wellsprings that perennially fed them, his research offers numerous clues.

Emotional certainty may be the most obvious appeal. Though apocalypticism had been around for millennia, it is worth noting that Darbyism, the peculiarly rigid and florid form that arose in the late 19th century, accompanied the growth of Darwinism, biblical higher criticism, and the dawning awareness of world religions. Ever after, Darbyism served as a powerful antidote to infidelity, for it seemed to show that the Bible's predictions about future events invariably proved true. Prophecy belief afforded certainty in other ways too. Adherents could sleep easy at night, knowing exactly how things would turn out in the long run. And it allayed the fear of death. Hope for the resurrection life always had been an integral part of the Christian message. But this version of premillennialism offered a more radical promise: that the saints who were alive in Christ at the time of the Rapture would be spared the sting of death entirely.

Ironically, though, prophecy belief endured precisely because it did not offer too much certainty. The sequence of events at the end of time was predetermined, to be sure, but there were multiple ways of getting from here to there, and there was just enough contingency along the way to make things interesting. The overall effect was very much like a rollercoaster: slightly scary because the riders did not know exactly how the car would twist and turn, but not scary enough to warrant despair, for they knew the outcome. It was hardly accidental, Boyer suggests, that participants often used theatrical language to describe the end-time scenario, calling it thrilling, majestic, exhilarating.

Prophecy belief offered intellectual rewards too. Outsiders might wonder about this, but Boyer makes clear that antiseptic rationality pervaded the system. The biblical text was strictly defined, there were no subtexts, and hermeneutics was more like a home repair manual than an intuitive art, a set of rules for applying textbook formulas to problematic situations. Prophecy belief seemed eminently logical because it was neither arcane nor mysterious but rooted in an authoritative document and confirmed again and again by the daily newspaper. Every proposition of the system could be laid on the table and debated up or down by any intelligent man or woman. Further, the system was both elegant and comprehensive. The simplicity that rendered it sophomoric to outsiders was the very quality that made it so compelling to insiders. And it offered an explanation for everything. There were no loose ends; every aspect of the natural and human worlds, past, present and future, could be embraced within its capacious arms

None of this meant, however, that prophecy belief was uncomplicated. Partisans worked with a jigsaw puzzle of hundreds or even thousands of biblical verses that had to be painstakingly assembled and readjusted as the world changed. Thus the system evolved in complex ways, as converts kept one foot anchored on the (seemingly) stable rock of the Bible and the other immersed in the rushing, turbulent river of current events. The possibilities were endless. Was the ten-toed colossus of Daniel's dream a prefiguration of the ten nations of the European Common Market? Was Isaiah's allusion to the "land shadowing with wings" a bow to the American eagle and the U.S. aircraft industry? Was Revelation's reference to an army of 200 million fulfilled in Chairman Mao's boast that he could field a force of exactly that number?

Outsiders might see those connections as nothing but acrobatics, a perverse determination to force a random collection of ancient Mediterranean texts to fit the six o'clock news. But for insiders there was no distance between biblical words and current events. Scripture not only portended current events but in a very real sense brought them into existence. The key point is that for true believers the connection between ancient text and modern fulfillment functioned just like any belief system that looked to the historical or natural realms for empirical confirmation. For the faithful, day after day world affairs fell into place like the clink of a lug-nut on an axle bolt. And when they did, millions stopped to remember Sunday school lessons long forgotten, and wondered.

Boyer shrewdly notes, however, that premillennialism did not take rationality (like certainty) too far. In one sense, each constituent proposition in the system could be debated up or down. But many of the crucial terms remained impenetrably vague, and there lay much of the appeal. The ambiguity of the, key symbols allowed them endlessly to stretch as events unfolded. This vagueness in the ideational superstructure paid off at the organizational level too, for it meant, among other things, that men and women with new angles of interpretation were able to jockey for dominance and rise to the top. The system was constantly renewed not only with new ideas, but also with new blood.

High among the intellectual attractions of prophecy belief was one that true partisans rarely owned up to, at least among outsiders: it was a lot of fun. We know from Edmund Gosse, Garrison Keillor and other raconteurs that many a long winter night was shortened by spirited debates in front of the fireplace over the correct interpretation of the seven seals of Revelation, or the exact number of days till the reestablishment of Christ's rule over Israel. Arguing the fine points of eschatology may not have been quite as pleasurable as dancing, but it came close.

Prophecy belief provided a secure social identity, and that was a third source of appeal . In the hurly-burly of modem life, fundamentalists knew exactly where they fit on the landscape. They were not just Christians, but Christians of a particular kind: Bible-believers or, more precisely, believers in the Inerrant-Word-of-God (preferably pronounced as one word). If prophecy belief defined a community of like-minded and socially similar folk, it also erected a ladder of status within the family. Adepts who were able to discern the inner connections among a vast array of obscure prophetic passages soon found themselves holding positions of formal and informal authority within the group.

Less happily, prophecy belief secured believers' identity by cleanly dividing the world into the saved and the lost. The former, of course, consisted of Christians pretty much like themselves. (Whether one had to affirm the Rapture in order to make the Rapture remained a hotly disputed question.) The lost, in any event, consisted of everyone else, including -- especially including -- nominal mainline Christians who claimed to believe the Bible but tried to allegorize-away its angular details. Ecumenical broadmindedness might have played well in the mainline seminaries, but prophecy adherents instinctively understated that ordinary folk preferred sturdy fences.

Social invidiousness entailed what might be called cognitive invidiousness as well, for Prophecy believers knew that they would be vindicated at the end of time. To some extent that was a matter of knowing that the economic tables would be turned when the last trumpet was sounded; the meek would have their day. But the essentially middle-class character of the movement suggests that the story may be more complex than that. It is not at all clear that well-paid service workers dreamed apocalyptic dreams because they harbored deep resentments against well-paid service managers. The more compelling attraction, one suspects, was the comfort of being proved right. Like the hypochondriac who wanted "I told you so" inscribed on his tombstone, prophecy believers relished the sweet delight of knowing that someday their vision of the end,: and theirs alone, would be fulfilled.

This brings us to the complex question of political passivity. As noted, over the years outsiders have routinely alleged that prophecy believers were "pessimistic," too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good. Boyer admits that there is some truth in this perception. Fundamentalists typically doubted the effectiveness of any large-scale efforts to reform society, and they displayed intractable hostility toward the therapy profession's ability to remake human nature. But the key and often-overlooked point here is that most prophecy believers --- Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson notwithstanding -- instinctively sensed that they were incapable of doing much in the secular political realm anyway. Lacking important political connections, not knowing which fork to use at the power luncheon, they focused their energies where they could in fact make some impact. Though Boyer himself says little about it, scholars such as Nancy Ammerman, Margaret Poloma and Robert Wuthnow have shown that fundamentalists lived their faith by setting up orphanages, running de-tox houses, maintaining inner-city day care centers. And they took the gospel of Jesus Christ as they understood it to the ends of the earth. While mainline missions dwindled to insignificance, evangelical missions, which were usually aligned with or at least sympathetic to premillennialist notions, flourished with unabated vigor. Adherents invariably saw themselves living on the cusp of history, straddling the end of the present age and the beginning of the age to come. If the day of the Lord was at hand, only the foolish would while away their time in a pool hall or by watching television. Far from being demoralizing, then, the practical effect of premillennialism was a renewed determination to do the Lord's work before it was forever too late.

How did the movement's leaders add to its appeal? This was a fourth source of strength. Boyer shows that the leaders were, contrary to stereotype, neither bumpkins nor charismatic demagogues. Rather they turned out to be men (and occasionally women) of exceptional intelligence, albeit self-educated or educated in nonhistorical disciplines. Bursting with self-confidence, they proved not the least bit intimidated by their lack of academic credentials. Indeed, fundamentalist leaders frequently gave themselves the title of "'Dr.," effectively saying that the institutions of the secular elite did not own the title, and that proven ability in the rough-and-tumble world of ordinary affairs -- putting up radio stations and running colleges in remote mission outposts -- was credential enough. Moreover, spokesmen manifested an uncanny ability to translate the tangled argot of the apocalyptic tradition into the language of the pews and the streets. They were not above larding the text with technical theological jargon when that served their purposes, but most of the time they wrote like Howard Cosell talked. If Darbyite premillennialism was a "roll your own" religion, its leaders were the masters of the trade.

Even so, Boyer's research shows that for all of their democratic, egalitarian pretensions, fundamentalist spokesmen, like countless mass religious leaders before them, also displayed a strong elitist streak. They went out of their way to flaunt whatever contacts they managed to make among secular intellectuals, newscasters and government officials. Three days a week they presented themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ. The rest of the week they functioned as heirophants, cognoscenti who alone understood the true plan of the ages. The system had been rightly discerned and handed down. Tinkering by ordinary folk was not encouraged.

Prophecy belief appealed, then, for many reasons. It afforded the emotional comfort of certainty, offered a compelling explanation of current affairs, situated its adherents on a social map, and was led by men and women of skill. The movement functioned, in short, pretty much like any other ideologically self-conscious stirring. And this leads to the central insight of Boyer's study. Prophecy belief flourished not because it was aberrant but precisely because it shared so much with other social ideologies. -This point becomes particularly clear when we consider prophecy believers' attitudes toward America and their yearning for a place in history.

One of the more remarkable intellectual revolutions of the 20th century is the shift of attitude among Americans toward the American experiment itself. From the colonial period through World War I, few doubted that this country held a special place in God's favor. This "hog-stomping baroque exuberance," as Tom Wolfe said in a different context, gave way after World War I, and especially after World War II, to deep disillusion. The litany of real or perceived ills included greed, materialism, abortion, homosexuality, adultery, drunkenness, gluttony, divorce, militant feminism, New Age religions, God-denying secular education, street crime, encroaching government, and the routinization of life. Admittedly, concerned citizens assessed those trends in different ways. Not everyone necessarily agreed that the increase in overdue library books was, as one earnest soul put it, a sure sign of the times. But there could be little doubt that many thoughtful men and women of all political and religious persuasions worried about the kind of world they were bequeathing to their children.

If prophecy believers shared with many others a diagnosis of the problems America faced, they also shared a prescription for the future. It is hard to see how the vision of the coming kingdom of God outlined by one theorist commonly associated with the political right differed all that much from the goals of left-leaning, free-thinking secularists:

Where was the difference? The final phrase offered some hints, to be sure. But whether supernatural agency, affirmed as a line item in the creed, so to speak, was all that crucial in the way that the two groups actually lived their lives, day by day, may well be questioned.

This brings us finally to the most important commonality: the desire of almost -all humans, or at least those in the modern West, to think that their lives counted in some larger scheme of things. Admittedly, a few tough-minded souls -- usually academics -- were able to face their own extinction with equanimity, knowing full well that the traces they left in the culture would be erased within a generation or two at best. But not many. Poll data suggested that on the whole modem Americans were no more preparedto face the prospect of a godless universe than their medieval ancestors. Nor were they prepared to believe that their individual lives bore no more import than the life of a desert flower, exquisite for a time but soon extinguished. When the atomic age dawned Bible thumpers everywhere related it to ancient biblical prophecies of great noise and fervent heat to come at the end of time. And, Boyer wryly notes, so did President Harry Truman in the privacy of his diary.

Nonetheless, it is important to draw distinctions between things that really differ. Prophecy belief remains an important part of evangelical Christianity in America, but it is not the whole story. The folks who gather each Sunday in the small rural United Methodist church my family and I attend seem little concerned with the details of Darbyite premillennialism. I suspect that few could identify the scheme in a line-up of competing theological systems. Yet I also believe that, if asked, virtually all would affirm that the Lord alone will bring history to a close, one way or another, sooner or later. They remain quietly confident that the God of ages past is also the God of ages future. That may not be good enough for hard-core prophecy buffs who have the end-times all spelled out in lurid detail, but it is more than good enough for millions of other evangelical Christians. They understand, as the young woman who knocked on my office door did not, that simple faithfulness counts too.

A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story.

By William Martin. Morrow, 735 pp., $25.00.

Someone has quipped that an evangelical can be defined as anyone who really likes Billy Graham. If so, there are a lot of evangelicals out there. The number of people who have seen him in person or on television, or heard him on the radio, or read his newspaper column or monthly magazine or one of his books, staggers the imagination. Nearly 40 years ago 100,000 souls jammed Yankee Stadium in 105-degree heat for the closing night of Graham's New York crusade. That 12-week endeavor drew 2 million hearers, the longest-running and best attended event in the history of Madison Square Garden. The story was pretty much the same wherever he preached--Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Denver. Invariably, or almost invariably, Graham drew the largest crowds in memory.

Overseas Graham's appeal proved even greater. Three years before the New York meetings, Graham attracted 185,000 faithful in a driving rain to Wembley Stadium, topping the crowd at the 1948 Olympics and marking the largest religious gathering in British history. Five years later he obliterated attendance records at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, including those set there by the 1956 Olympics. The closing service of Graham's 1973 Seoul crusade drew 1,120,000 seekers (a count made possible by a painted grid on the ground). That figure still stands as the largest religious gathering in history. But numbers of even that magnitude shrink to insignificance with the advent of satellite-link television. The quarter million who packed Rio's Maracana Soccer Stadium in 1974 were overshadowed by the additional 50 million who watched the live TV broadcast, personally arranged by Brazil's president. Graham dwarfed that figure in Hong Kong in 1990 when, on his 72nd birthday, he addressed 100 million viewers through a live-link network strung across the Asian continent-almost certainly the largest aggregation of souls ever to hear about Jesus Christ.

Attendance figures of that sort might be difficult to swallow if they were not backed up by other kinds of evidence of Graham's prominence. But they are. Graham's magazine, Decision, shows up each month in 2 million mailboxes in 163 countries, making it the most widely distributed religious periodical in the world. The headquarters of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) in Minneapolis receives 145,000 letters per week, twice that number per day during the quarterly TV broadcasts. Like letters to Santa Claus, some bear only two words of address: "Billy Graham." The evangelist has nabbed a spot on the Gallup Poll's Ten Most Admired Men list more often than anyone--32 times in 40 years. When he opened a crusade in his home town of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the fall of 1971, schoolchildren, government workers and store clerks got a holiday, as the governor of the state, U.S. senators from North and South Carolina and the secretary of the treasury showed up to pay tribute. In a 1978 Ladies Home Journal survey, under the category "achievements in religion," Graham outstripped everyone except God. Later Graham was listed by Life magazine as one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century (the only other religious figure being Graham's perennial critic, Reinhold Niebuhr). Possibly the most telling index of Graham's status is, however, a letter in the Nixon Archives in which one woman wrote the president to see if he could get her an appointment with Billy Graham. Little wonder that the London Evening News affectionately dubbed him "Charles Atlas with a Halo."

If those marks of approval are not enough to establish Graham's standing as the most lionized religious figure of modem history, the bitterness and persistence of the hostility he has provoked surely is. Back in the 1930s when he was first learning his craft by holding forth on the street corners of Tampa, Florida, he found that outdoor preaching was a hard dollar. It often meant putting up with sneering spectators or worse, as when he was slugged by an irate tavern-keeper who saw his business floating away. Opposition has dogged Graham's career. As late as 1978, long after his status as a virtual demigod had been established in most parts of the Western world, hecklers in Scandinavia hurled rotten fruit, cream pies and garbage.

Yet physical punishment of that sort was minor compared to the verbal abuse he endured year in, year out. Journalist Garry Wills once described Graham's friendship with Nixon as an "alliance of moral dwarves." Graham was invited onto TV talk shows, then charged with being "psychologically sick" and telling "sanctified lies" to hoodwink the gullible. Liberal church people knew a rat when they smelled one. A CHRISTIAN CENTURY writer panned him for not having a "glimmer of a notion about what is really going on in the world," while another CENTURY pundit termed his prayer at Nixon's inauguration a "raucous harangue." In Uppsala a Lutheran seminary put out a booklet assailing Graham's ministry as "spiritual rape." Back in New York, Union Seminary's Reinhold Niebuhr denounced Graham's sermons as simplistic and the thousands of conversions that putatively followed them as shallow and meaningless. When Graham sought an audience with Niebuhr to discuss their common goals, Niebuhr refused.

The most venomous criticism came not from the left, however, but from the right. Once Graham made it clear that he would work with anyone who would work with him, liberal, Catholic or otherwise, hard-core fundamentalists coiled up and struck without mercy or discrimination. Bob Jones--founder of the college Graham first attended declared that Graham had done "more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man." When Jones died, Bob. Jr., dispatched a note to Graham warning that he would not be welcome at the funeral.

With a pedigree like that, there is little wonder that Graham has been the subject of thousands of articles and several full-dress biographies. Some, such as John Pollock's Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World, were breathless descriptions of the "gee whiz, ain’t he the greatest?" variety. Others, such as Marshall Frady's Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness, dripped with condescension. Now comes Rice University sociologist William Martin. His volume may not be the Mother of All Biographies, but it is hard to imagine any scholar tackling the subject for at least another decade. Two and one-half years in the writing, this massive, densely packed volume reflects scores of interviews with Graham and his associates, plus a sedulous reading of thousands of pages of archival materials.

Martin's account is beautifully limned, often painfully funny, sometimes nothing short of inspired. Though Graham authorized the biography, neither he nor anyone else in the BGEA exercised editorial control. Martin tells us that he considers fairness the cardinal virtue of a scholar. If that is the criterion for sainthood, Martin should be canonized. He strains to give Graham the benefit of the doubt but also makes clear that he possesses feet of clay. Or to borrow a line Martin applies to Lyndon

Johnson, Graham emerges as a "flawed but titanic figure," all the more admirable because of the reality of his faults.

Martin does not mount a tightly focused argument, but three large themes do weave in and out of the story. One is the "cozy symbiosis" between church and state that marked Graham's career from the beginning. Martin marshals incontestable evidence that for the better part of four decades the top echelons of the U.S. government--and a good many foreign governments too, for that matter--were never more than a phone call away. As far back as 1952, when Graham was still breaking in his white-buck evangelist's shoes, House Speaker Sam Rayburn persuaded Congress to permit him to conduct the first ever worship service on the Capitol steps. So it went year after year. Though Graham's ties to the political establishment became less cozy in the 1980s (more on that later), he never wholly disappeared from the corridors of secular power. His presence in the White House on the night of January 16, 1991, seemed to legitimate, if not sanctify, Bush's decision to bomb Baghdad.

Graham's links with a succession of American presidents is particularly revealing. He never managed to gain a beachhead with Truman, and his relationships with Kennedy and Carter could be described as politely cool. But for all the others, there is substantial evidence that he really did function as unofficial chaplain and close friend. Journalists have fixed upon Graham's intimate ties with Nixon, which is understandable, for the record proves that their locker-room camaraderie was real. Yet Martin suggests that it was Johnson, not Nixon, who really won Graham's heart. Graham knew that Johnson was no saint, but mutual respect for the extraordinary talent each possessed and a common commitment to Jesus Christ bonded the two leviathans in a friendship that was as deep and as genuine as either man ever knew.

There is considerable irony in Graham's insistence, especially before Nixon's debacle, that his ministry transcended politics. He seems never to have grasped that perennial hobnobbing with presidents and secretaries of state telegraphed approval of current policies, or that he could not credibly declare that there was no American he admired more than Nixon and then insist on his impartiality in the next election. One Graham associate may have said it best when he confided to Martin, "Billy still has no idea of how badly Nixon snookered him."

Still, there is another side to the story. Though Martin clearly is troubled by the incongruities, if not outright disingenuousness, of Graham's track record in those matters, he also makes it clear that more often than not Graham was the hunted, not the hunter. High politicos went out of their way to have their photos taken with Graham, knowing all too well that his benign presence was worth a good ten or 20 points in the approval ratings. On the whole, one is hard-pressed to find examples of other leaders, religious or otherwise, who did a better job of managing access to so much power, especially when it presented itself as the power to do good.

A second persistent theme of the biography is the extraordinary affinity between Graham's personality and ideals on one hand and American middle-class values on the other. Though Martin does not suggest, with Fray, that Graham served as little more than a "parable of American righteousness," he does propose that the man and the message fit the spirit of the age and the culture with uncanny precision. At the most obvious level, the sociological one, it is clear that when Graham spoke, middle America heard itself. Martin's descriptions of the folk who showed up at Graham's crusades always circle back to the same set of adjectives: solid, hard-working, neighborly, patriotic, family-respecting, God-fearing. Among those folk, Martin deadpans, he found few who looked like they were accustomed to sipping Chablis at the Boston Pops, and fewer still who looked like they were headed for a Bruins slugfest to raise a little hell. The same was true of Graham himself, who in dress, diction and demeanor never rose much above his constituency. You could almost smell the aroma of Mom's apple pie in everything he said. Scan the platform, scan the crowd, Martin suggests: everyone would fit in with the Dothan, Alabama, Lion's Club--the very middle of the middle class.

Besides representing middling social status, Graham has exemplified other aspects of America's image of itself. Whether the folks of middle America actually measured up to their own ideals is beside the point. Graham did it for them. He knew, first of all, how to keep his sexual and financial affairs in order. Investigative snoops never managed to turn up a hint of impropriety on either front. Graham's relation to money was particularly note-worthy. In 1950 he put himself on an annual salary, pegged at the level of a successful urban pastor. In 1991 that sum was $80,000. That figure shrinks to insignificance when measured against the $70 million in small change that annually flows into the BGEA coffers, or the additional millions that his books, weekly newspaper column and speaking engagements bring in each year. It dwindles even more when ranked against the multimillion-dollar offers Graham regularly turned down over the years to star in TV shows or run for political office.

The crusades epitomized middle America's penchant for rational forethought. Early on, Graham figured out that revivals had to be worked up as well as prayed down. His now-famous 1949 Los Angeles crusade, where William Randolph Hearst supposedly "discovered" and presented him to the nation like an evangelical debutante, was in fact a meticulously orchestrated event, accompanied by a storm of handbills, billboards and full-page newspaper ads heralding "America's Sensational Young Evangelist"--accompanied of course by a "Dazzling Array of Gospel Talent." The BGEA, incorporated in 1950, quickly established itself as the best-oiled and smoothest-running advance-planning machine in the business. The arrangements that went into the 1986 District of Columbia crusade were typical of the big rallies of the later years: 500,000 personal invitations issued, 400,000 packets of material mailed to area homes, thousands of prayer groups meeting regularly for months ahead, 4,000 workers trained to counsel with "inquirers," another thousand prepared for follow-up work. Though spit-and-polish advance men from the BGEA handled the technical arrangements, some 1,750 pastors from 79 denominations in the capital region cooperated throughout.

Rational forethought meant predictability. Moms and dads wondering whether they wanted to cope with the crusade throngs at least could be confident that the kids would not be subjected to a tirade against Roman Catholics or a harangue about American foreign policy. They knew what to expect: George Beverly Shea crooning "How Great Thou Art," a converted athlete assuring them that "Coach Jesus" would never cut them from the gospel squad, a born-again starlet promising that the biggest thrill was to see one's name not in marquee lights but in the Lamb's Book of Life. Then Graham's sermon, fueled by incessant pacing, stabbing gestures and machine-gun delivery--clocked by frantic stenographers at 240 words per minute. The sermon would begin with a gaggle of jokes as homegrown as the crops he used to raise on his father's farm. Hitting his stride, Graham would proceed to tick off a list of the world's problems (with none too much attention to getting the facts exactly straight). Soon he would come forcefully to the point: Christ and Christ alone offered the only lasting solution to those problems. Martin perceptively suggests that Graham's crusades resembled a huge homecoming reunion, cheerfully undoctrinal, warmly reassuring. All that was lacking, he might well have added, was the Chevrolet theme song, "Listen to the Heartbeat of America."

Arguably, Norman Rockwell's middle America found its fullest expression--sociologically, culturally, perhaps even theologically--in post-World War II evangelicalism, sometimes called the New Evangelicalism. In that respect too Graham symbolized an era and a culture. Martin intimates that it was Graham, above all, who midwifed evangelicalism into existence in the 1950s, giving it a genial identity separate from the sulfuric fulminations of the fundamentalists. He played a leading role in developing the nation's two most influential evangelical seminaries, Fuller in California and Gordon-Conwell in Massachusetts. Discerning that there were numerous evangelicals within the mainline denominations for whom the CHRISTIAN CENTURY did not speak, Graham played a pivotal role in launching the rival Christianity Today as a forum for moderately conservative thought on religious and political affairs. The latter soon became (and remains) the most widely read serious religious periodical in the U.S. More important, perhaps, Graham orchestrated the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966, the International Congress on Evangelism in Lausanne in 1974, and the International Congress on Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983 and 1986. Those conferences, which cost the BGEA tens of millions of dollars, galvanized evangelicalism as a worldwide phenomenon with a voice comparable to the Vatican and the left-leaning World Council of Churches.

The third major theme of the book is hard to snag in a word or two. For lack of a better term it might be called the transforming power of a second chance. Graham himself presents a classic example of the way that a man can mature and, in the process, come to see things in a dramatically new and enriched way. Back in the 1950s (to crib a line Martin Marty used about someone else), Graham saw communists everywhere he looked, and he looked everywhere. One prominent newspaper aptly dubbed him "Communism's Public Enemy Number One." Although the young Graham refused to countenance segregated seating in his crusades (often at the price of sullen resistance from white supporters), he seems to have expended equal energy urging civil rights protesters to go slow--giving credence to Reinhold Niebuhr's charge that he expected Christians to give up peccadillos like smoking and cussing overnight, but overcoming racism might understandably take a while. The same pattern defined Graham's reaction to Vietnam and other pressing issues of the day: grudging recognition that the American barque may have suffered a crack or two, but confidence that on the whole it was seaworthy.

By the early 1980s the secular and religious press had awakened to the fact that somewhere along the way a Christian statesman had emerged from the cocoon of southern evangelicalism. This change came to the media's attention at a conference on nuclear weapons that Graham attended in Moscow in 1982. He knew that the meeting was little more than a communist propaganda ploy, but he also sensed that the threat of a nuclear holocaust was so grave he had to take a stand for disarmament, despite resistance from the Reagan administration and steel-tipped invectives from the Religious Right. Graham's courage in that situation betokened a deepening and broadening of perspective that had been in the making for well over a decade. He had come to articulate progressive views on homelessness, capital punishment and the government's role in eradicating poverty. Eschewing American triumphalism, he sought to hold himself as accountable to Christians in India as in Indiana. Some activists, particularly in civil rights, still upbraided him for fecklessness. But in the view of most observers--from Dan Rather to the bestowers of the Templeton Award–the Reverend Mr. Graham had become the Reverend Dr. Graham, a forceful voice for world peace, social justice and ecological sanity.

The same broadening was evident in the content of Graham's preaching. Imprecations about the yawning jaws of hell gave way to a more pastoral concern with loneliness, meaningless and the fear of death. For those perennial griefs there was of course only one lasting solution: a life-transforming commitment to Jesus Christ. Though Graham never softened that fundamental insistence, in the late 1970s and 1980s the outer layers of the message changed significantly. He tempered his views on the automatic damnation of non-Christians, spoke less of satanic forces in human affairs, avoided the technicalities of premillennialist theology, talked positively of the charismatic movement and urged more compassion and less pontificating on the subjects of divorce and wayward adolescents. He distanced himself from the Religious Right, having learned the hard way that the preacher and the politician dance together at their own peril.

All those changes seem to have stemmed from a deeper transformation in personality and temperament. Not that Graham ever had been ungracious or immodest. Indeed, from the 1940s onward, journalists invariably commented on his warmth and humility. Even those who disliked his message usually came away, as one initially hostile British interviewer did, admitting that the bloke obviously was a saint. The deep-seated transformation that Martin describes had to do rather with a certain largeness of spirit less evident in the earlier years. "In groups which in my ignorant piousness I formerly 'frowned upon,’" Graham confessed, "I have found men so dedicated to Christ and so in love with the truth that I have felt unworthy to be in their presence." Though he made few if any explicit concessions to theological liberalism, he came to believe that his task was not to denounce anyone, but only and always to proclaim a redeeming message of salvation. What an unbelieving world most needs to see in the church, he added in a telling postscript, was a unanimity not of doctrine but of love. That new breadth of outlook may have stemmed from Graham's increasingly frequent contacts with impoverished and embattled Christians in the Third World and behind the iron curtain. Or it may be the kind of wisdom one expects from a man who has been blessed with sufficient years to see his large brood of grandchildren grow to responsible adulthood. Whatever the source, it is difficult to think of any modern world leader who manifested more striking earmarks of political and spiritual growth.

As Graham’s half-century world ministry draws to a close, what does it all amount to? What are the results of hundreds of crusades launched and millions of dollars spent? Martin the sociologist is surprisingly diffident at this point. He describes the quantitative studies that have been devoted to answering this question, but admits that the results are confusing and seem to depend to an inordinate degree upon the assumptions of the investigator. At least one thing is clear: the majority of the hundreds of thousands of inquirers who came forward over the years were not first-time converts but rededicators. Martin rightly brushes aside any suggestion that a rededication of one's life to Christ was any less momentous than a first-time conversion. Those persons were effectively saying, "I am now ready to assume the responsibility of living as a Christian."

Still, the question remains: How long did those commitments last? How many of those rededications took deep root and withstood the hectoring gales of life's winter seasons? Again, the arithmetic is almost impossible to figure. When two prepubescent boys toss their hats in the air as they skip across the stadium field on their way to the inquiry room, Martin dryly notes, it is evident that not every conversion flows from the "deepest well-springs of heart or mind." But Graham always knew that. And it may well be that here, as in most affairs that truly matter, the sociologists' spreadsheets are beside the point. When the computers are shut down and the lights turned off, the letters--the millions of letters that made their way to "Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota"--remain. What those missals indisputably attest is that Graham helped ordinary men and women find new water in wells that had long since run dry.

"I am still a man in process," Graham recently told Martin. Though what he said was true, it may have been more true than he realized. Graham's own pilgrimage toward a profounder understanding of the Christian faith is living proof of what it means to enjoy a second chance, to be given an opportunity to take another look and rethink one's deepest commitments--and maybe even redo the rest of one's life. That may be a poor man's definition of divine grace, but it is also what the Billy Graham story is ultimately all about.