Safari for Souls: Billy Graham, US Evangelicalism and the Cold War in Africa

Uta Balbier is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century US History and Tutorial Fellow of St. Anne’s College and Deputy Director of the RAI. Her research focuses on how American religions are shaped by – and in turn refract – America’s engagement with the world. In her most recent monograph Altar Call in Europe: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism, and the Cold-War West, she traces the transnational connections between the revival meetings that the evangelist Billy Graham held in London, Berlin and New York in the 1950s. She shows how those revival meetings provided lively forums for ministers, politicians and ordinary Christians to imagine and experience the future of faith, the role of religion in the Cold War, and the intersections between faith and consumer culture in new ways. Her future research will examine the encounters and relationships between American, British, and Nigerian evangelical and Pentecostal Christians at the time of decolonisation to explore the extent to which changing Imperial power relations and increasing national ambitions have both shaped and been shaped by religious ideals and practices. She is currently serving as the Chair of HOTCUS (Historians of the Twentieth Century US).

This session will be chaired by Professor Kendrick Oliver (University of Southampton).