Iron Maiden, Billy Graham, and the Unintended Consequences of Influence

This post is about Billy Graham, but I’m going to start it with an anecdote that may not seem related, but please trust me that there’s a payoff at the end. About 30 years ago, give or take, Iron Maiden was the biggest heavy metal band going. They were internationally famous, packing arenas in countries all over the world. Every album was received better than the one before it, their songwriting became more complex, and fans were eating them up with a spoon. A strong live album appeared called Live After Death, a double-album that featured the songs from their previous studio album Powerslave, as well as fan favorites from the first four Iron Maiden albums. Anyone who was familiar with the music could hear that when they played live, they played incredibly fast, much faster than they did in the studio when recording those songs in the first place. That was 1985, and by that time, bands across North America and Europe were copying the Iron Maiden blueprint, writing songs about fantasy, legends and history, and playing *very fast.* As you can probably guess, very few of those bands were able to pierce the veil into superstardom, as the music industry is very difficult to navigate in the first place, and without the amazing talent that Iron Maiden displayed at all positions in the band from singer to drummer, these new bands would find an audience in a much smaller scale, and most often only to completists of the genre. In an interview, Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris mentioned a conversation he had with the singer, Bruce Dickinson, and said “This speed metal craze that’s going on…do you think we started it?” There’s no doubt in my mind that they started it. Which brings me to Billy Graham. Billy Graham was an evangelist who preached for decades, taking his Billy Graham crusades to every city large enough to have an auditorium. Admission was free, and he sought to bring as many followers to Jesus as he could. I never attended a crusade, as my parents weren’t very observant Catholics and it seemed like a downer of an evening, to be honest. But Billy Graham filled those auditoriums and War Memorials and hockey barns with millions upon millions of the devout, the curious, and the weary looking for answers that might have been found in Jesus Christ. I can’t be sure if they took an offering, but I imagine they wouldn’t have said no, as security and maintenance in such places wouldn’t have been free. Cut to the present day. There are mega churches throughout the country, and it seems they are predicated upon the Billy Graham crusade model, which was to pack them in because a large congregation was better than a small one. They most definitely accept donations, and you don’t build those thousand-seat temples without them. The church I attended when I was growing up had seats for a couple hundred people, and it seemed ridiculously large to me; how could you develop a personal relationship with a benevolent Creator when you would surely be lost in the crowd? I have no doubt that Reverend Graham wanted nothing more than to lead people to Jesus Christ, and for that I neither applaud nor condemn him; I don’t discuss my personal faith and acceptance of the Lord because I consider evangelism to be a sin of vanity and the least effective way of spreading the gospel. I am never so arrogant as to think that my speech will lead someone to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. I came to accept Jesus in my own way, and I don’t believe anything other than a personal realization has the ability to convert someone wholly and totally. I look at these megachurches as nothing but predators, the televangelists who bilk the gullible out of their money as snakes. I sincerely hope that Billy Graham was able to show some people the way, but I think in the long run, by laying the groundwork for charlatans, he may have done more harm than good.