God in America: "The Soul of a Nation"

NARRATOR: In decades following World War II, America would grapple with a question as old as the nation itself, the relationship between religion and politics.

STEPHEN PROTHERO, Professor of Religion, Boston University: I think we've always had a flirtation between religion and politics in American life, from the very beginning, from even before the founding of the republic. But what you get after World War II is really a marriage between the two, where religion and politics are going to be closer and closer intertwined.

NARRATOR: During the economic and political upheavals of the 1930s and '40s, the American religious landscape had shifted. Church attendance had slowed during the years of the Great Depression. The end of World War II promised a return to normalcy. But the jubilation was short-lived. The cold war with the Soviet Union ushered in a new age of anxiety.

As it confronted communism, America would undergo a religious revival. Faith would be linked with patriotism, launching an epic struggle over the nation's political and religious identity.

STEPHEN PROTHERO: What's at stake is the religious narrative of America. How central is religion to the American story? And what is the story that integrates religion and American politics? That's very much up for grabs.

NARRATOR: In the fall of 1949, Billy Graham, a little known preacher who would become a primary engine of America's cold war religious revival, took his crusade to Los Angeles.

GRANT WACKER, Professor of Christian History, Duke University: When he went to Los Angeles, he had just come from a couple of meetings that by his own judgment were unsuccessful. He had been in Baltimore. He had been in Altoona, Pennsylvania. And these revival meetings, at best, represented mixed success. And in his own mind, he questioned his own vocation as an evangelist.

NARRATOR: In Los Angeles, Graham staged his revival in a tent in the heart of downtown, unsure how many people would come to hear his message.

Rev. BILLY GRAHAM: Now today in America, we find that people are more concerned with things than they are with the things of God! They are more concerned with pleasure, more concerned with money, more concerned with the things of life than they are the things of almighty God!

STEPHEN PROTHERO: He's looking at L.A. and he's saying, you know, this is like Sin City, right? This is the place of, you know, prostitution and the place of drunkenness and the place of fantasy in terms of Hollywood, right? And we need to turn this around.

NARRATOR: Just as the Los Angeles crusade began, came news that stunned the nation.

FRANK LAMBERT, Historian, Purdue University: Much sooner than Americans had thought possible, the Soviet Union tested successfully an atomic bomb, and now the world was on the brink of a nuclear holocaust and Americans were filled with fear. School kids had drills, getting under their desk in the event of a, of an atomic attack. People built atomic shelters. I mean, this was something that was real, and it heightened this sense that we need to turn back to God.

Rev. BILLY GRAHAM: I believe this sincerely, from the depths of my heart-

NARRATOR: In the Soviet threat, Graham found a powerful new religious message.

Rev. BILLY GRAHAM: Every time I've been to Europe, I've been more conscious than ever before that unless the Western world has an old-fashioned revival, we are done for! We cannot last! We cannot stand the tremendous strain and stress of future days in our battle with Communism unless we have a spiritual revival!

FRANK LAMBERT: He framed the cold war as a moral conflict. It is evil versus good. It is godless communism versus a God-fearing America.

Rev. BILLY GRAHAM: I believe today that the battle is between communism and Christianity! And I believe the only way that we're going to win that battle is for America to turn back to God and back to Christ and back to the Bible at this hour! We need a revival!

NARRATOR: Graham's message caught the attention of media ba