Influential US evangelist Billy Graham dies at 99
WASHINGTON: Reverend Billy Graham, the influential Southern preacher who became a spiritual advisor to several US presidents and millions of Americans via their television sets, died yesterday. He was 99. The one-time backwoods minister who eventually became the world’s foremost Christian evangelist, spread a message of spiritual redemption at tent and stadium revival meetings, in a career that spanned decades.
“The GREAT Billy Graham is dead,” President Donald Trump tweeted in tribute. “There was nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A very special man.” The Southern Baptist preacher was close to the family of President George W Bush, who once said that a private meeting with Graham in 1985 helped him quit drinking. More recently he was portrayed in the Netflix drama series “The Crown” as giving counsel to the young Queen Elizabeth II as she confronted the burdens of rule.
“Billy Graham is the closest thing to a national pope that we shall ever see,” journalist Garry Wills once wrote in The Washington Post. His death was confirmed by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the religious organization headed by his son. Graham was a pioneer of “televangelism” to convert souls to Christianity as television got off the ground in the 1950s.
Born on Nov 7, 1918, he was raised as one of four children on a dairy farm in Charlotte, North Carolina. Graham had a spiritual awakening in 1934 that changed the course of his life. He subsequently attended the Florida Bible Institute, now Trinity College of Florida, and was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1939. In 1950, he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota and launched a weekly “Hour of Decision” radio program.
Adviser to US presidents
His ministry led him to preach the gospel around the country and the world. Over the course of his career, he was consulted by presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy. For a time he was Richard Nixon’s chaplain and golf partner. President George H W Bush invited him to pray at the White House in 1991 for guidance through the first long day of the Gulf War. But of all the US leaders almost all of whom have described themselves as practicing Christians - Graham found only Jimmy Carter to match him in dedication to his faith.
“Carter alone among the presidents... taught the Bible throughout his life, wrote books of religious meditations, and needed no help with Scripture or its challenges,” wrote authors Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy in a Graham biography, “The Preacher and the Presidents” published in Aug 2007. Graham also has been credited with helping hasten the end of segregation in his native south by refusing to preach to segregated audiences after 1953.