Billy Graham
Gifted, sincere preacher and astute salesman whose evangelical crusades persuaded millions to dedicate themselves to Christ
BILLY GRAHAM, the American evangelist who has died aged 99, probably preached to more people than any other individual in history; over the course of nearly 60 years he called upon more than 210 million in live audiences and countless millions more through television and radio to “accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour”.
Raised in the American Presbyterian revivalist tradition that placed utmost importance on the single act of standing up and “coming forward” to be saved, Graham took his evangelical mission from trailer parks and country churches in the American South to the cathedrals, stadiums and public squares of more than 185 countries and territories. Over the years around four million people were persuaded to dedicate themselves to Christ.
Graham transcended the Calvinism of his upbringing to appeal to people of all denominations, from Baptists to Roman Catholics. His theology consisted of a shortlist of straightforward affirmations: each person is sinful before God, but can be saved through faith in Jesus Christ and his death on the Cross.
“In Heaven at this moment there is a great sign that says ‘Welcome’,” he told his audiences. “A sign on the Cross and an empty tomb. Welcome if you will return to God. Whatever religious background you have, whatever your ethnic background, whatever your language. Whatever. You get up and come.” There was no room for sectarian quibbles. Indeed, Graham himself freely admitted that he was no intellectual and had little time for modern Biblical scholarship.
But Graham was much more than simply a gifted preacher, he was an astute salesman and he owed his success, and that of the evangelical organisation he founded in 1950, to attention to detail, meticulous preparation and the unashamed use of the latest Madison Avenue advertising techniques.
Graham saw mass evangelism as a process which starts a long time before a campaign. His missions were heralded by massive poster campaigns and were preceded by complex training programmes for interested local pastors, and for lay church members to act as “counsellors” for those who came forward (the “inquirers”) at his invitation.
The Billy Graham rally followed a tried and trusted formula. It would begin with a warm-up routine by one of his colleagues, followed by Gospel songs. Graham would then begin low-key with a few jokes, usually fluffing a punch line or two to show what an ordinary fellow he was. Then he would gradually change gear as he began to analyse what was wrong with a world that had turned its face from God.
In the early years of his ministry he spoke with such volume and rapidity that journalists referred to him as “God’s machine gun”; in later years his style became more homespun and conversational. The gestures, though, remained the same – the clenched fist, the pointing finger, the slashing arms, the fists thumping down on to the Bible in fury as he declared that his words should be heeded not because they were his but because “the Bible says”.
Tall, good-looking and squarejawed, with flowing, lightbrown hair, piercing blue eyes and a warm smile, Graham had a magnetically powerful stage presence. As he invited his audience to “come forward”, a few people, some weeping, would begin to make their way through the seated audience to the front, then more and more would join them. After a brief homily from Graham, they would be asked to give their details to one of the trained counsellors, presented with a copy of St John’s Gospel and sent on their way. Their details would then be passed on to local churches, whose pastors would call on the new recruit and try to reinforce their commitment.
The cornerstone of Graham’s theology was his belief that the Bible was God’s actual word and his literalism required him to reject evolution and accept Adam and Eve as historical figures. Ministers undergoing Graham’s training programmes were advised to suppress any doubts they might have. “People want to be told authoritatively that this is so, not to be given pro and con argument,” he said. “Belief exhilarates people. Doubt depresses them.”
His belief in the reality of Heaven and Hell could sometimes be astonishingly concrete. “Heaven,” he informed one rally “is 1,600 miles high – as much as if you put Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany and half of Russia in one place.” He told another rapt audience: “We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us and we’ll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible.” Hell was depicted in similarly vivid terms, its inmates begging for mercy and regretting the times they had passed up a chance to “come forward”.
Graham excited powerful reactions from all sides. During the 1970s, when he claimed that Communism was the Devil’s work, Pravda denounced him as a CIA agent; but when, on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1982, he seemed to suggest that the Orthodox Church there was more free from state control than the Church of England, he was accused in the West of being a Communist stooge.
In the mainstream churches, some were repelled by his unquestioning fundamentalism; during a crusade in Britain in 1966, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, famously observed that what Britain needed was not Billy Graham but an intellectual and thoughtful approach to religion. On the other hand, his willingness to deal with Catholics lost him the support of some of his more fundamentalist colleagues. The late Ian Paisley even wrote a book on the subject entitled Billy Graham and the Church of Rome: A Startling Exposure.
Yet most churches came to recognise Graham as their biggest recruiting agent. A mission to Britain in 1984, for example, was followed by a surge in applications for the priesthood – mainly from lay volunteers who had been trained as counsellors – and in 1989 he was invited to tea at Lambeth Palace by Ramsey’s successor, Robert Runcie.
There was, though, a question of just how many people he really converted. In 1968, the British Evangelical Alliance published a detailed analysis of Graham’s 1966 crusade which concluded that most of the people he had “converted” were already active members of local churches and that “most of the unchurched had simply ignored the meetings and of the few who bothered to attend, only a small number had any lasting positive response”.
Graham was transparently warm, honest and sincere. Unlike many other American evangelists, there were never any rumours of immorality; no one ever suggested that he was in it for the money or that he was pretending a faith that he did not hold sincerely himself. It was, indeed, his trusting simplicity that made him so effective as a preacher and put his critics at a disadvantage.
But there was a flip side. From his days as a 21-year-old evangelist, when he billed himself as “Billy Graham, one of America’s Outstanding Young Evangelists – Dynamic messages you will never forget”, he showed a pleasure in self-promotion that was not wholly accounted for by his claim that whatever pulls in the crowds may gain souls for Jesus.
In public he would do his best to put himself down. “I know I’m just a sinner, save for the grace of God,” he would say. “And I know that some day when I’m at the judgment seat of Christ, I’m going to be embarrassed because I haven’t been all that some people think I am.” On the other hand, his mission to the world seemed to include being photographed as often as possible with heads of state and celebrities. And if an enthusiastic local pastor hailed him as “Mr Gospel – the incarnation of the teachings of Jesus Christ”, who was he to quibble? On a visit to GIS in Korea, he even signed their Bibles, prompting some to wonder whether they thought he had written it himself.
No Billy Graham sermon was complete without at least one anecdote about his dealings with the famous and powerful. “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this,” he told a throng at Wembley in 1989, “but my wife and I were invited on to the Royal Yacht Britannia to be guests along with President and Mrs Reagan.” In his memoir he claimed that the Queen, whom he also visited at Windsor and Sandringham, “has gone out of her way to be quietly supportive of our mission”.
During a crusade that preceded the 1992 presidential elections, Graham announced that he had known George Bush for 25 years and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were old friends. “He must be saving Ross Perot for another day,” remarked a journalist. Sure enough, two days later, Graham found an opportunity to mention Perot, too.
When American presidents (particularly of a Republican persuasion) needed to pray, it was Graham they called. He ministered to Eisenhower, spent the night with the Bushes before the Gulf War, and was offered an ambassadorship in Israel by Nixon. Revealingly, perhaps, Graham’s only public condemnation of Nixon after the Watergate scandal concerned the bad language in the notorious tapes. Only Harry S Truman failed to fall for the Graham charm.
In his eyes, Graham was little more than a “counterfeit” and a “publicity seeker”.
In his urge to promote himself, Graham sometimes seemed willing to sacrifice core values in the quest for a successful campaign. In Russia he back-pedalled on his previous fierce criticisms of Communism. In Romania he praised Nicolae Ceausescu for allowing “full and genuine freedom in all religious denominations”. In Israel he promised not to mention Jesus in front of a Jewish audience. In China his evangelical crusade against abortion seemed to waver. “I recognise in China they have very special problems,” he said when asked about it. “I’m going to have to do some thinking on that.”
A Billy Graham mission was not counted a success unless crowds were “record-beating”, numbering tens or even hundreds of thousands. “We know how many receive Christ,” he once declared, “we know that on our computers.”
A planned trip to Hungary was almost cancelled when Graham learnt that the government wanted him to hold only small private meetings. “If only 200 people will be there,” he said, “I just don’t see how I can do it. What shall I tell the people of America?” The parable of the one lost sheep, one critic observed, was not one he had taken to heart.
Yet sometimes Graham seemed to question this triumphalist statistical litany. “It seemed we’ve gotten caught up in numbers,” he once remarked. “We have so many polls that give different figures about how many go to church and synagogue, how many are saved and so on. When I ask people to come forward and a thousand people respond, I know in my heart they are not all converted.”
William Franklin Graham was born, the eldest of four children, on November 7 1918, in Charlotte, North Carolina. His parents were descendants of Scottish Presbyterian pioneers who believed in hard work, clean living, the Bible and the birch. Each day before school, young Billy would get up before dawn to help milk the family cows. On the day that prohibition was repealed in 1933, his father made Billy and his sister drink beer until they were sick.
His conversion took place in September 1934 when, as a teenage schoolboy and aspiring baseball player, he went to hear the famous fire-and-brimstone preacher Mordecai Ham, who was conducting a series of revivalist meetings in the area. Billy had gone in a resistant mood, angry with Ham for claiming that fornication was rampant among the students at Central High in Charlotte. But the atmosphere of the service created a powerful impression, and when the preacher one evening pointed in Billy’s direction and said: “You’re a sinner!” Billy’s destiny was sealed.
When he went forward and committed himself to Christ, he was utterly calm. “I had no emotion,” he recalled. “I saw a lady next to me weeping and I thought to myself, well, it’s not real with me because I had no tears over it. It was just a simple declaration that I wanted Christ in my heart. That was the beginning of a whole new pattern of life.” When he returned home, he told his mother: “I’m saved, mother. I got saved.” His mother cried a little and said: “Son, I’m so glad for what you did tonight.”
The summer after leaving high school, Graham worked as a door-to-door brush salesman and discovered a talent for promotion. “Selling those brushes became a cause to me,” he recalled. “I was dedicated to it, and the money became secondary. I felt that everybody ought to have Fuller brushes as a matter of principle.” By the end of the summer he had sold more brushes than any other salesman in the Carolinas.
After high school, Graham enrolled in Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina), but was not happy there. Never very academic, his classwork was a shambles and he could not keep up with the course. Convinced by now that his future lay in spreading the word of God, Graham enrolled instead at the Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College in Florida).
There, he began to hone his powers of oratory, practising sermons aloud in old sheds or in a canoe in the middle of a lake, and paying particular attention to gestures and facial expressions. As he gained experience and skill, country churches that relied on young men from the institute began to invite him to speak.
Ordained in 1939 by a church in the Southern Baptist Convention, in 1940 Graham won a scholarship to Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading undergraduate institution in evangelism. There he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries to China, who herself wanted to evangelise in Tibet. Graham sought to convince her that the highest role a woman could fulfil was that of wife and mother, and soon persuaded her that God wanted them to marry. They did so in 1943.
Even at this early stage Graham was revealing his extraordinary qualities as an orator, preaching to packed congregations at the United Gospel Tabernacle, Wheaton. In 1943, he was invited to join Youth for Christ International, a group of vigorous young evangelists working with other churches to stage revivalist meetings. He also began to make radio and television appearances and became an evangelist on one of Chicago’s most popular religious radio shows, Songs in the Night. During 1945, he visited 47 states, logging at least 135,000 miles and receiving United Airlines’ designation as its top civilian passenger.
In 1946 he and a group of colleagues paid a visit to Britain, speaking at more than 360 meetings with extended campaigns in Manchester, Belfast, Birmingham and London. Initially many local clergy were reluctant to cooperate with “America’s surplus saints”, and in Birmingham the city council was at first persuaded to withdraw permission for Graham to use the civic auditorium.
But when he spoke to his critics directly, their resistance melted. “This fine, lithe, burning torch of a man made me love him and his God,” one previously vocal critic explained. The city council reversed its decision and the 2,500-seat auditorium was packed for several nights in what the local press described as “the greatest spiritual revival the city has experienced in a generation”.
Always alert to the dangers of straying from the path of righteousness, in 1948 on a mission to Modesto, California, Graham gathered his tiny retinue together to draw up a set of rules designed to inoculate them against temptation. Each agreed never to be alone with a woman other than his wife; they also pledged clean finances and honest statistics.
This so-called “Modesto Manifesto” became the blueprint for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The finances of the organisation were to be independently administered by an external board and made public. Graham and his entourage were paid salaries, with Graham never collecting more than an ordinary urban preacher might expect.
As for women, even in his seventies Graham would insist on keeping the door open when his secretary was in his office. Although he came to acknowledge the pressures on later generations of young people to indulge in sex before marriage, he remained somewhat prudish, once hazarding the opinion that “if the female bosom were completely covered, that would solve many problems in every realm of life”. On a visit to England in 1959, he was shocked to see people openly “smooching” in London’s parks.
In 1949, Graham undertook a mission to Los Angeles; scheduled for three weeks, the mission was extended to more than eight weeks, with overflow crowds filling a tent erected in the centre of town each night. His success brought him to the attention of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
In one sermon Graham had proclaimed: “When God gets ready to shake America, he might not take the PHD and the DD. God may choose a country boy. God may choose a little nobody to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day.” The speech so impressed Hearst that he fired off a memo to his editors instructing them to “Puff Graham”. Graham was catapulted to national fame.
His international standing was given a boost with a highly successful 12-week mission to Britain in 1954. An open-air meeting in Trafalgar Square drew 12,000, the largest crowd since VE day. More than 40,000 children gathered at the dog track in Harringay to hear Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (with Trigger, the “Gospel Horse”) entertain and give their testimony. A rally in Hyde Park attracted another 40,000 and despite the pouring rain two closing rallies, at White City Stadium and Wembley, drew 185,000, the largest crowds for a religious event in British history.
For much of the early part of his career, Graham seemed to make the easy connection between Christianity and American values, describing Communism as a “conspiracy by Satan” and extolling the God-blessed superiority of the American free enterprise system. During the Vietnam War he observed that “we tend to blame America too much and the Viet Cong too little”, and once described the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, as a “dangerous man” involved in “Communist advance”. He initially supported Senator Joseph Mccarthy’s hunt for Communist sympathisers, though he later distanced himself from Mccarthy’s excesses, once he understood their implications.
Graham felt no inhibitions about giving political advice, and during the 1950s he reckoned he could swing at least 16 million votes to the candidate of his choice. He pestered Truman about the need to turn back Communism in Korea, and encouraged Eisenhower to send troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school desegregation. In 1969 he submitted to Nixon a confidential plan to end the Vietnam War which involved withdrawing American troops and using North Vietnamese defectors to bomb the North.
Nixon’s disgrace, though, seemed to represent some sort of watershed for Graham and afterwards he intervened less in the political debate, although he continued to take an innocent delight in the company of the powerful. As he travelled more widely and made a series of trips behind the Iron Curtain, he began to show a more tolerant attitude to human frailty and to acknowledge differences between cultures, stressing forgiveness rather than judgment.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, meanwhile, became the most powerful religious media organisation in the world, backing up Graham’s personal mission with a media barrage. It made radio and television programmes which were syndicated to hundreds of stations around the world. A newspaper column, “My Answer”, was carried by newspapers across America with a combined circulation of more than five million readers.
From the 1950s its film organisation, World Wide Pictures, produced a stream of evangelistic films. These included such pictures as Mr Texas, the story of a harddrinking cowboy who finds Christ, and Oiltown USA, billed as “the story of the free enterprise system of America – of the development and use of God-given natural resources by men who have built a great new empire”. Souls in Conflict and Miracles in Manhattan told the fictionalised stories of converts in his Harringay and New York crusades. The reviews were terrible but thousands of people answered the “invitations” at the conclusion of the films. They also proved particularly popular with governors of prisons and other reformatory institutions.
Graham received numerous awards and honours and was regularly listed by the Gallup organisation as one of the
“10 most admired men in the world”. He wrote some 30 books, nearly all of them bestsellers. His autobiography, Just as I Am, published in 1997, appeared on three bestseller lists in one week.
During the 1990s Graham contracted Parkinson’s Disease. In 2000 he announced that he was stepping down from the ministry and as leader of his evangelical association.
His wife died in 2007. They had three daughters and two sons. His eldest son, Franklin Graham, is chief executive officer of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Billy Graham, born November 7 1918, died February 21 2018