Billy Graham's New York Crusade - Timeline Event

Billy Graham

05-15-1957 - 09-01-1957

Billy Graham's 16 weeks of nightly revival meetings in New York City during the summer of 1957 attracted more than two million people to Madison Square Garden. Television network ABC broadcast several nights live on primetime, with millions nationwide tuning in to watch a parade of celebrities like Martin Luther King Jr., Dale Evans, and Ethel Waters share the stage with Graham. By the end of the campaign, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association claimed that 55,000 people had made professions of faith. It was his Graham's largest crusade to that point, at least six times larger than the Los Angeles crusade in 1949. If Los Angeles had made Graham a household name, New York made him a superstar.

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Billy Graham's 16 weeks of nightly revival meetings in New York City during the summer of 1957 attracted more than two million people to Madison Square Garden. Television network ABC broadcast several nights live on primetime, with millions nationwide tuning in to watch a parade of celebrities like Martin Luther King Jr., Dale Evans, and Ethel Waters share the stage with Graham. By the end of the campaign, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association claimed that 55,000 people had made professions of faith. It was his Graham's largest crusade to that point, at least six times larger than the Los Angeles crusade in 1949. If Los Angeles had made Graham a household name, New York made him a superstar.

The size and scope of the crusade attracted critics from both left and right. Theological liberals, like Reinhold Niebuhr, then professor at NYC's Union Theological Seminary, disliked Graham's emphasis on evangelism at the expense of social work. Meanwhile, fundamentalists accused Graham of treason because he invited all Protestants in New York to help sponsor the campaign, including the mainline New York Protestant Council. Fundamentalist leaders like Bob Jones Sr. and John R. Rice could not forgive Graham for sharing a platform with liberals like Norman Vincent Peale. The New York crusade was the breaking point in the controversy between the "New Evangelicals" and fundamentalists with "What do you think of Billy Graham?" instantly becoming a litmus test for differentiating the two camps.