Evangelical Aspirations and Cold War Realities

In 1959, Billy Graham visited the Soviet Union as a tourist. In his autobiography, he attributed his desire to conduct evangelistic services behind the Iron Curtain to visiting Lenin Stadium in Moscow and imagining it full of people listening to his sermon. “I bowed my head,” Graham wrote, “and prayed that someday God would open the door for us to preach the Gospel in Moscow and elsewhere in eastern Europe.”1 From 1959 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Graham or representatives of The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) made some nineteen trips behind the Iron Curtain. Not all were evangelistic crusades with Graham present and preaching to crowds; at best, nine of these events were such evangelistic tours. The rest varied from peace conferences to music rallies to children’s meetings to Graham receiving honorary doctorates in Poland and Hungary.2 Graham’s motives are easy to understand: he saw these trips as fulfilling his obligation to preach the gospel to all people irrespective of ethnicity or ideology. To do that behind the Iron Curtain, though, required permission from the communist governments of Eastern Europe, and that permission came with a price. Specifics varied from country to country, but one part of the negotiations required some rehabilitation of the nation’s image. It is remarkable that communist governments believed Graham could influence American public opinion and policy makers in such a way that would effect substantive change in the dynamics of the Cold War, but that did seem to be a primary consideration in granting Graham access to their people. At the same time, Graham’s focus on the opportunity to preach to the people behind the Iron Curtain seems to have led to a willingness to subordinate the consideration of the way his presence legitimated the oppressive regimes of Eastern Europe and furthered their propagandistic goals. These considerations are evident in Graham’s first two trips behind the Iron Curtain to Hungary (1977) and Poland (1978).

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