Televangelist pioneer who preached to millions
“He followed his own advice, and made sure never to be alone in a room with a woman who was not his wife”
Billy Graham 1918-2018
Charismatic, ruggedly handsome and transparently sincere, Billy Graham, who has died aged 99, was the world’s most famous evangelical preacher. A spiritual adviser to successive US presidents, he spent his entire adult life spreading the Christian message. On tours he called “crusades”, he preached to an estimated 215 million people in more than 185 countries, said The New York Times, and reached hundreds of millions more via television, video and film. Holding his Bible aloft, he would explain that scripture offered the “answer to every human longing”, before urging congregants to “come forward” to accept Christ into their lives. Thousands did so, and would then be matched to local churches: as a religious leader, Graham was unusual in being affiliated to no particular denomination, although he was himself a Southern Baptist. “I just preach the gospel,” he would say.
Born into a Presbyterian family in 1918, and brought up on a dairy farm in North Carolina, Graham made his own commitment to Christ aged 16, in front of a fire-and-brimstone evangelist named Mordecai Ham. He recalled feeling no emotion then: he just knew that he was “saved”. It was when he was walking on a golf course, while a student in Florida, that he heard his calling. “I got down on my knees at the edge of one of the greens,” he recalled in his memoir. “Then I prostrated myself on the dewy turf. ‘O God,’ I sobbed, ‘if you want me to serve you, I will.’” From Florida, he went to Wheaton College, Illinois, where he met his future wife, Ruth, the daughter of a missionary surgeon. He was ordained in 1939, and in 1943, he became pastor of a tiny basement church in a Chicago suburb. He was also invited to take over a Sunday evening religious slot on a local radio station – which gave him an early lesson in the power of mass media, and televangelism, something he would exploit to the full in his ministry. He was a powerful orator and a natural salesman. In fact, as a young man, he briefly was a salesman, going door to door with brushes. “Selling those brushes became a cause to me,” he said. “The money became secondary. I felt that every family ought to have Fuller brushes as a matter of principle.”
He began touring the US in the early 1940s – visiting 47 states in 1945 alone – but it was in 1949 that he came to national attention, when he erected a 6,000-seat “canvas cathedral” on an empty lot in Los Angeles for a two-month “tent crusade”. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon, heard him speak – and was struck, if not by his Christian message, then by his magnetism and his fiery denunciations of communism. (In his early years, Graham spoke so loudly, and at such a rapid rate, he was dubbed God’s Machine Gun.) From his hilltop mansion at San Simeon, Hearst is said to have issued a simple edict to the editors of his many newspapers: “Puff Graham.” The effect was extraordinary. “Suddenly, what a clergyman was saying was in the headlines everywhere,” Graham recalled. In 1954, he took his global mission to London. He wasn’t sure how well his brand of evangelism would be received in Britain, but he attracted 12,000 people to Trafalgar Square (the largest crowd there since VE Day) and 120,000 to his closing rally, at Wembley Stadium. He met the Queen and later preached at her private chapel at Windsor. It was at one of his later crusades to the UK that Cliff Richard made his public commitment to Christianity, in 1966. “Are you frustrated, bewildered, dejected, breaking under the strains of life,” Graham would typically ask the crowd. “Then listen for a moment to me. Say yes to the saviour tonight and in a moment you will know such comfort as you have never known.”
In the 1950s, Graham was credited with helping to bring down race barriers in churches in America, by refusing to preach to segregated congregations. He was friendly with Martin Luther King – he once bailed him out of jail – although they fell out over King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam. There were those who felt that Graham was too keen on hobnobbing with the powerful: he made much of his relationship with the Queen; he met Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street, and was on intimate terms with John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, the Clintons and both the Presidents Bush. (George W. Bush said that it was on a walk with Graham that he decided to quit boozing and start taking life seriously.) The only president who “failed to fall for the Graham charm”, said The Daily Telegraph, was Harry Truman, who called him a “counterfeit” and a “publicity seeker”. The former was harsh: he was never hit by any of the financial or sexual scandals that have plagued other evangelical preachers. He drew a salary equivalent to that of a well-paid local minister, and his Evangelistic Association’s books were open. As for sex, he followed his own advice, and was never alone in a room with a woman who was not his wife. In so far as he sought publicity (which was a lot), he claimed to be doing it for God.
Like most conservative preachers of his generation, he regarded homosexual relationships as “sinful”, but rarely preached on that issue, or others that often exercise conservatives (gun control, abortion, etc.). “If I get on to [those kind of] subjects,” he once said, “it divides the audience on an issue that is not the issue I’m promoting.” However, in 1993 he suggested that Aids might be a “judgement” from God. He recanted, and apologised, two weeks later. He was also criticised for failing to distance himself from Nixon after Watergate, and his image was further damaged in 2002, when recordings emerged of him agreeing with Nixon that Jews controlled the media and were responsible for pornography. Graham – who had publicly called for reconciliation between Christians and Jews – claimed not to remember the conversation, said he must have got carried away and issued a written apology. Some liberal Christians deplored his lack of intellectual rigour, and felt his message was simplistic and his vision naive (he believed Heaven was a literal place), while on the conservative wing he was considered too liberal (The Rev Ian Paisley was so incensed by the overtures Graham made to the Catholic Church, he wrote a whole book about it).
In his final years, Graham retreated to the North Carolina home where he and Ruth (who died in 2007) had raised their five children. He lived quietly, but still received the occasional VIP visitor, said The Times: Barack Obama came in 2010. Latterly in poor health, he had round-the-clock care, always from two nurses – “for accountability purposes”, one of his grandsons explained.