"Then what are you doing here?" I wailed.

"We're rededicating our lives to Christ," they said with frightening unanimity.

A family of nine from nearby Rome, Ga., had another answer. They were farmers, and had driven the truck to the Crusade. They did not come to be saved or to be inspired. "I was saved when I was six and I can get inspiration any time I want on my knees at home," the matriarch told me tersely.

"Don't you see? He makes it all so simple," she said. "He doesn't use big words or complicated ideas. Even our minister back home--we can't tell what he's talking about anymore." She was half exasperated, half emotional.

Her son, dressed in overalls, took over: "Nobody talks to the little man anymore. But Billy Graham--he's talking to us. That's why we came. We'd drive a lot farther than this to hear a man like that."

****

The route from the suburbs to Atlanta Stadium leads past downtown Atlanta and its new, skyscraping skyline. The stocky, black Equitable Building dominates the scene, its white lights blinking out "Equitable, Equitable, Equitable" for all Crusade-goers to see.

A group of suburban Baptists, with whom I rode a chartered bus to and from the Crusade one night, liked that sight. They told me so. They liked the idea that Atlanta had progressed--taking them along with it--but they didn't like the accompanying threats. They didn't like the fact that blacks were running their school system, that a black was the front runner in the mayor's race. They didn't like the proposal for a housing project in their neighborhood, which would bring down their property value. But they were going to rededicate their lives to Christ. "There's a spiritual hunger in a city like Atlanta," the minister told me as the bus sped past a once-pastoral landscape being laid to waste by bulldozers.

They were going to listen to Graham talk about brotherhood, the problems of the poor and downtrodden, the simple virtues. It was all going to seem very equitable. Then they were going to go home and feel good about themselves. After all, they were saved.

****

Billy Graham finally flew out of Atlanta on a wing and a prayer, leaving behind more saved souls than the city deserves. I was left with a question: Did he buy his own package? Not Christianity, but did he really believe that those people had acquired religious conviction, had dedicated their lives to truth and justice--in a baseball stadium?

Or did he prefer being an image with answers for everyone--even for those who didn't want to ask questions. I wondered, too, if by now he had any control over what he was doing--if maybe the whole operation, like the problems he preached about, had gotten so complex and powerful that it acquired a force of its own, and was out of his hands.

Graham is more a figure than a man, a walking mannequin who has sold his soul to the devils of modern image-making. His reverence is wrapped in Hollywood holiness, and the whole package is better suited to a television screen or a stadium platform than a room filled with real people.

Graham's workers are homey, plodding yes-men; they do drudge work; they carry pamphlets detailing The Way; they stutter when asked questions that aren't in the pamphlets. They are the peddlers and Billy Graham is their product--a very marketable product.

Photographs of Billy Graham by Al Stephenson. Reprinted by permission of the Atlanta Journal--Constitution.