As the guns stopped firing in the Pacific, and the millions who could travel left behind those who would never travel again, crowding onto the available means of transport back to their homes, the world turned to the problem of post-war reconstruction. Politicians, economists and denominational churchmen imagined external forms for a new age of cooperation and peace. For both traditional evangelicals and their younger successors, however, the prospect of a new age of merely human effort was greeted with ambivalence. The growing problems with the institutional church meant to them a growing commitment to the ‘church invisible’. Speaking just before the outbreak of the Second World War, nineteenth-century holiness icon Catherine Booth-Clibborn had taken her respectable Sydney audience to task: ‘How can you expect to bring peace when you ignore the Prince of Peace?’ Her successors (such as Billy Graham) would focus on change through inner experiences of grace, which motivated redemptive effort in the world. The promises of corporate cooperation appeared to have collapsed in the secular ruin of the League of Nations and its religious equivalents (such as the Interchurch World Movement).

For Graham and his contemporaries, the post-war world was an ambivalent place. The war was over, the antichrists had been conquered, but Jesus had not yet returned, despite the prophetic ‘fig tree’ seeming to blossom in the establishment of the state of Israel. Faced with a global challenge in the context of a universal struggle, they wanted ‘to do something really big for God’ before Christ's expected return. ‘Oh, Lord – let me do something,’ Billy Graham implored his Saviour in 1948. ‘Trust me just to do something for you before you come.’ The evangelical message was the same – Christ, the Word and energetic effort. But how should that effort be spent in the face of Russian apostasy and the threat of creeping Communism? In the shadow of the D-Day heroes, techniques had to change in order to restore to evangelicals something of their former effectiveness. Graham would be the best-known, but not a unique, representative of this activism which expressed itself in evangelical ‘crusades’ ranging from small-scale local revivals to global campaigns like the Assemblies of God's ‘Global Conquest’ (commenced in 1959).