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Day 33. November 20, 2006
Movement 3. Jesus Christs
Lecture 15. Jesus in Depression and War, 1914-1945 (Part 4)
Lecture 16. Jesus in the Age of Conformity: The Fifties (Part 1)
Increasingly in the 1920s and 1930s God and Jesus were commodified in American culture along with everything else. By the 1950s, belief itself had become the commodity without which American government and the American way of life could make no sense. Sensible belief was simply sincere, deeply felt, religious, and in conformity with the American Way of Life emphasizing domesticity, heterosexuality, individualism, manifest destiny, democracy, and especially capitalism. In this context, Billy Graham rose to prominence preaching a salvation as easy as accepting Jesus as one's personal savior.