He has prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease, a broken hip and pelvic bone. He calls it a crusade simply to mount the podium. But 86-year-old Billy Graham led a three-day crusade at Flushing Meadows in Queens, 48 years after his first New York City crusade in Madison Square Garden. He said, as he has been saying for all those years, “Prepare to meet your God,” and “God loves you.” The admonition, and the promise.

When he first came to New York, Graham’s brand of Protestantism seemed beleaguered in an ocean of Catholics and Jews. It is still a minority, but it is a lively one, including many Africans, Koreans, and Chinese. Surely it is the end of the line, or near it, for Graham. But not for revivalism. As Garry Wills wrote in Under God, “Nothing has been more stable in our history, nothing less budgeable, than religious belief and practice. Religion does not shift or waver; the attention of its observers does…. Revival is, like respiration, the condition of its life.”