Just be sure to read to the end. If you don\u2019t, you\u2019ll completely miss the point.<\/span><\/p>\n At first, no one noticed him slip through the folds of the tent and step onto the <\/span>sawdust-covered floor<\/span><\/a>. Now 47 years old, the man his friends once called Slim had started to grow paunchy; his boyishly blond hair was fading to gray and thinning. In Los Angeles for airline business, that Sunday morning had \u2014 as usual \u2014 not found him in church. Yet in the afternoon he found himself walking downtown, to the corner of Washington and Hill. As he lingered in the back, he wasn\u2019t even sure what brought him there. Slim told himself he was simply curious: the so-called \u201ccrusade\u201d had been all over the Hearst newspapers. (Hearst: the same man who had once offered him half a million dollars to star in his own biopic.) Perhaps he just wanted to be anonymous for once: not the most famous man in the world, but just one of six thousand faces turned towards the stage, where <\/span>Billy Graham was preaching on Psalm 2<\/span><\/a>: \u201cWhy do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Fire and brimstone weren\u2019t to the newcomer\u2019s taste. Words like \u201ciniquity\u201d and \u201crepentance\u201d made Slim feel like a child again, sitting in gray flannel in the front pew of a small town church, a political prop for his father\u2019s congressional campaign. But as the sermon turned to current events, he perked up. \u201cRussia has the bomb,\u201d warned Graham, \u201cand judgment is just around the corner unless we have a revival and listen to God the Holy Ghost!\u201d True enough, a week before, Pres. Truman had admitted that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its own atomic weapon. And just that morning, headlines announced that Mao and his Communists had taken power in China. Slim knew that his old warnings were being proven true: the real threat was Stalin after all.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n He listened more attentively, tuning out the whispers of recognition from a few of his neighbors \u2014\u00a0ignoring the accusing glances from a few more. \u201cJudgment is coming,\u201d Graham continued. \u201cWe\u2019re no better than Sodom and Gomorrah. We don\u2019t deserve to be spared any more than they were.\u201d But the message didn\u2019t sink in until the preacher turned his sights on other threats:<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Scientists pretending that they had all the answers. Slim nodded gravely. Political parties doing the same. He nodded again. Marriages going cold and spouses threatening divorce. And now tears welled up in the weathered corners of his blue eyes.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll never have peace,\u201d concluded Graham, \u201cuntil we have Jesus in our hearts\u2026 Do you want to know Christ?\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Before he knew it, Slim was raising his hand and walking down the main aisle.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n And so, on October 2, 1949, Charles A. Lindbergh made a decision for Christ.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Only he didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n As far as I know, Charles Lindbergh never attended a Billy Graham crusade, let alone the one in Los Angeles that made the evangelist as famous as Lindbergh and resulted in the conversions of celebrities<\/a> like radio host Stuart Hamblen, gangster Jim Vaus, and runner\u00a0Louis Zamperini<\/a>, who had competed in the same Olympics that Lindbergh attended as Hermann G\u00f6ring\u2019s guest. And, in any case, Lindbergh never converted to Christianity. So why would I consider starting a biography of Charles Lindbergh with something that never happened in the life of Charles Lindbergh?<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s my favorite example of John\u2019s affinity for counterfactual analysis, which he discussed in one of the Oxford lectures published in 2004<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>as <\/span>The Landscape of History<\/span><\/i><\/a>. If it sounds foolish to imagine how the past \u201cmight have gone,\u201d remember that history is a science whose researchers always conduct thought experiments in the laboratories of their own imaginations. And to understand what<\/span> did happen, we sometimes need to contemplate what might<\/span> have happened: it helps us discern causes and effects, and underscores the contingent nature of history.<\/span><\/p>\n So if we start by considering how Charles Lindbergh <\/span>might <\/span><\/i>have converted to Christianity, we might start to understand better why he didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n I do think Lindbergh went through a kind of spiritual conversion, about five years before Graham\u2019s crusade in Los Angeles. In fact, that\u2019s where I ended\u00a0up starting my book: with Lindbergh buying a copy of the New Testament just before deploying to the South Pacific, where he secretly flew fifty combat missions and shot down one Japanese plane. His experience of World War II <\/span>did <\/span><\/i>deepen Lindbergh\u2019s antipathy to Soviet atheism and Western materialism alike. It <\/span>did <\/span><\/i>make him rethink a youthful faith in scientific inquiry guiding technological progress. It <\/span>did <\/span><\/i>disabuse him of most utopian ambitions of early aviation. And it <\/span>did <\/span><\/i>coincide with his first intensive reading of the Christian Bible, with the result that Jesus was the most-quoted figure in the short book Lindbergh published the year before Graham\u2019s crusade, <\/span>Of Flight and Life<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u00a0<\/span>didn\u2019t<\/span><\/i> make Lindbergh a Christian. He admired Jesus as nothing less or more than the \u201cgreat moral teacher\u201d that C.S. Lewis had just argued was impossible, since Jesus\u2019 claims of divinity made him either <\/span>a lunatic, liar, or Lord<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n By the time he published <\/span>The Spirit of St. Louis <\/span><\/i>in 1953, Lindbergh had decided that it was impossible to remain an agnostic, let alone an atheist. But the God he described in an article a year later was intangible and incomprehensible, detached and disinterested in human choices. \u201cThere is a vast difference in knowing there <\/span>is <\/span><\/i>a God,\u201d exclaimed one dismayed evangelical reader, \u201cand having a personal relationship with him through faith in Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Actually, I\u2019ll go farther: it\u2019s the twist that they <\/span>want<\/span><\/i> to have happened. In a year when rates of religious adherence in America have fallen <\/span>to historic lows<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and churches are rethinking their outreach to \u201creligious nones,\u201d I wonder if Christian readers will feel a bit deflated to read the story of a spiritual seeker who reads the Bible, befriends Christians, and yet never embraces their religion.<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/a>First, as a tribute to one of my doctoral advisors. In his 2005 history of <\/span>The Cold War<\/span><\/i><\/a>, John Gaddis began the second chapter with a harrowing account of the Korean War escalating to the point of nuclear weapons being dropped everywhere from Vladivostok to Hamburg. \u201c[A]nd so, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, it might have gone,\u201d John concluded, then started a new paragraph: \u201cBut it didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/168\/2021\/04\/9780802876218-3-199x300.jpg\")
<\/a>The only intense personal relationships Lindbergh began in the late 1950s were his secret affairs<\/a> with three German women. But that disgruntled Christian\u2019s letter reminds me of the final reason I thought about starting with the fiction of Lindbergh making a decision for Christ: it\u2019s the twist most Christian readers expect to happen at some point in a biography written by a Christian writer and published by a Christian publisher.<\/span><\/p>\n