Conversion, Narrowly Averted

From the Essay Club archives of 2012

On this day, over a decade ago, I kicked off the new year by launching an online writing group with friends called Essay Club. About nine people were on the list, and some of you Substack followers might even remember!

Here’s the prompt I sent on Jan. 2, 2012:

Some more background: I was living in New York City, still relatively fresh off a failed marriage, and in early-ish sobriety. A week after sending this prompt, I went on a roots quest to Asheville and Waynesville, North Carolina. My great-grandfather, Rev. Albert New, was a rector in rural North Carolina at “Grace Church in the Mountains.” He was ordained in the Church of England and had lived and worked in Sturmer, England, where he was a rector … until the organist, Dora, soon-be-to wife #2, got pregnant. So, it was either defrocked or sent to the frontier of the English Episcopalian church. Around 1914-1915, he arrived in Waynesville, where I believe he and Dora stayed until his death. (And that is how the New family arrived in America!)

I shared the essay below for the Essay Club #1 prompt. The club lasted about 9 months before we petered out. Writing is tiring! But throughout 2025, I’ll post some of these 2012 essays as I dust off old writing and create new works.

As always, I would love to hear from you in the comments — or, better, share your own conversion or mind-changer essay!

Thanks for playing, as always. 🙏

Conversion, Narrowly Averted (2012)

It seemed telling that I couldn't start the car, a rental Prius, at the Charlotte, NC, airport. It had a button that said power, but no keys. Push and play. Except its simplicity upended me.

Twenty minutes later, I finally started it with help from two Budget Rental Car associates. I decided on a whim after seeing an ad in the airport to go to the Billy Graham Library, which was only four miles away.

The eerily silent car seemed made for creeping up on the eerily well-paved driveway to the compound. The library, completed in 2006, is trying to become an evangelical tourist site. It is North Carolina's answer to Heritage USA, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's ill-fated amusement park in South Carolina. 

As I approached the security gate, a handsome, mustached Black man approached. "Welcome to the Billy Graham Library," he boomed. Praise the Lord!"

I nodded.

"Here to visit?" Uh-huh. "First time?" Yep.

"We've been waiting for you," he said, smiling directly at me. He handed me a parking pass that said, "How To Park a Soul in Heaven for Eternity" (which included a mailer to donate money).

I pulled my silent Prius into the nearly empty lot. In front of me, a perfect snapshot of the modern rural utopia. The modest brick colonial Graham homestead house on the left. To the right, a barn -- one side, the entire two stories, was a cutout of a cross -- and a dairy silo, a nod to the Graham family business. The only noise was the light Christian choral music piped around the grounds from discrete green speakers embedded with the flowers.

Volunteer hosts—all retirees—materialized to guide me to the barn. I was quickly assisted with a map and on-ramped into the hour-and-a-half-long "journey," which began with a talking cow and ended with pleading to me to "receive Christ as my savior." For the next 90 minutes, the persuasive marketing of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association did its best to convert me, first with promises, guilt, and fear, then with negotiation. 

Should I be surprised? No. The first room laid out the basics, which are repeated repeatedly in the simplest and most repetitive ways throughout the "journey." Here are the tenets:

"We live in a godless and secular society."

"Your soul is lost."

"Only Jesus Christ will lift you from the rubble of sin."

The exhibit is carefully planned to create a mythology around the minister and make a sale to the tourists. However, it lacks one thing: A real understanding of Billy Graham's own conversion. 

In under two minutes—out of the 90-minute show—an observer gets mere Cliff Notes on the young Graham's profound shift, which ultimately became the basis for modern evangelism. Indeed, we only really find out through a quote from his mother, who says that young Billy "threw his arms" around her one day after church and said he would preach Jesus. This isn't a Bohdi Tree.

Later, Billy Graham expanded on the misty mythological moment, explaining that on a moonlit night, he prayed and cried- at this very moment in the exhibit, an illustration of a half-crescent moon rose. In a different recollection, another moment came a few years later, in 1949, when he set his bible on a "stump of a tree" and "understood that the Bible was God's word. He popped a carnival tent in downtown Los Angeles a month later and had an old-fashioned revival. A star was born. Next came radio, then TV, then the crusades. Then a $10 million library and Christian theme park. 

His conversion—indeed the whole message—was painfully simple, portrayed in the simplest of primary colors. The Graham arc is: I felt, I cried, I converted. The butter knife of conversions. There seemed to be no struggle to overcome, no hardwon insights or brutal truths revealed by bottoming out. One gets the feeling that the young Graham, with his silver screen hair, blue eyes, and lantern jaw, may have looked in the mirror one day in the 1940s and had this insight: Heck, I am hot and persuasive. It might as well be me! The rural folks he was aiming for didn't need too much else. 

The fire and brimstone picked up as the exhibit wound through history. A room filled with antique TVs is all set to various Billy Graham sermons, bonmots flying left and right, and "We are in spiritual poverty!" "Jesus Christ died for you, and the least you can do is come forth publicly today and receive him." "Get supernatural help to break the chains that bind you!" 

“Getting a license without a permit”

Special attention is paid to the ladies and the non-believers. A whole room dedicated to the pretty Ruth Graham. In a video, she declares that being a mother and wife is the "best calling in the world." An interview with Woody Allen is on a loop in the next room. Woody quips with Graham about premarital sex. It's like getting a driver's license without a learner's permit, says Allen. Graham summons a manly charm offensive with Allen and practically seduces him. He silkily responds to Allen, "In God's sight, you're beautiful, Woody."

Woody can barely hold back a tear. The Graham marketing people know that if Woody falls, there is a good chance you might, too. The video cuts before Woody can respond again.

The grand finale of the exhibit is a two-room punch: In the first, there is cinema seating for a 10-minute film montage of more of the greatest Graham hits, edited throughout with images of the sun beaming through clouds. As in all rooms, the doors in this room are set automatically to open and close. In other words, you can't wander in and out on your own timeline. You must watch the whole thing.

Near the end, the film asks if you're ready to "receive salvation," and the double doors suddenly fling open to reveal a hallway of oversized white neon-lit crosses to walk through to complete your "journey." It's mesmerizing. At the end of the cross-lit hall is a mural, painted in pastels, of blondish, blue-eyed Jesus -- sort of a proto-Graham -- floating around and looking nice. Another helper emerges with a card asking for my spiritual commitment. The card offers three options, including the last one for the Woodys in the crowd: "I am not sure I have eternal life, and I need assurance."

As I emerged from the exhibit, another host offered to take me into the prayer room and receive Jesus RIGHT NOW. Leather armchairs and bibles were scattered around the prayer room. I bolted the other way and politely declared I was exiting through the gift shop—conversion, narrowly averted. 

So, what did I learn?

I'll keep the religion out of this and stick to the conversion. I have to get burned, more than once, to get to the truth. But what Graham seemed to offer was a shortcut. Push and play. Just swallow this idea, and off you go to eternal life. For me, faith doesn't work like it. It's messy, with a lot of back and forth, and is fundamentally based on my direct experiences and those of others I love.

I like my conversions like I like my cars. Hard-scrabble, tough, temperamental ones that take a few tries to turn over and ones that make a lot of rackets to change gears. A real fucking jalopy. I don't want to push a button to start a car or a car that is so silent you can't tell if it's running.

And I don't want conversions like that, either.

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PS - Scrolling back in my 2012 email, I see I had a post-mortem on this trip, where I wrote a friend (sic): “BTW, loved my prius by end of the week. But the evangelicals still couldn't get me ;) nah uh.”