Business of Life
Larry Derfner, a blue state liberal now living in Israel writes in the Jerusalem Post, Rattling the Case, God Bless America about Billy Graham's last crusade and seeing evangelists as people.
Those quarter-million congregants on the grass at Flushing Meadows were regular Americans with an emotional, spiritual need.
Leticia Mateo, a 32-year-old university administrator from New Jersey, described to The New York Times her experience of the crusade. "It's like an opening in your heart. You feel like you're behind bars and someone has given you the key to get out," she said.
How can anyone not root for such people?
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But the point is that America's religious revival is more than just a right-wing political phenomenon. It has also brought Americans of different races and economic classes together; brought community to towns, suburbs and neighborhoods that were being atomized by modern American life, and brought recovery to millions of Americans whose lives were being destroyed by alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and the whole menu of contemporary American afflictions.
For all the irrationalism and Christian American chauvinism this religious revival has contributed to American politics, it has another side: that of an open-hearted, egalitarian social movement.
If I, a traditional blue-state liberal, think about people instead of just about politics, then the new, born-again America doesn't scare me at all. As a society, in fact, it seems more inviting and interesting than the one I left.