Billy Graham: No one introduced more people to Christ since St. Paul
No one brought more people to Christ since St. Paul
Graham’s message did not rely on the caricatured notion of fire and brimstone... Instead, he was spiritually aspirational, urging his millions of listeners, viewers and readers to come to Jesus just as they were.
Billy Graham, who died Wednesday at 99, brought more people to Jesus than anyone since St. Paul trudged the Roman roads around the Mediterranean Sea in the first century.
However, as impressive as Graham’s accomplishments were in evangelizing around the world, he made an equally important contribution to those outside of his own conservative Protestant tradition, rooted historically in the rural and small-town South and the Midwestern heartland.
By reaching out to Catholics, Jews and those outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, Graham changed the image of what an evangelist is. His matinee-idol appearance, with his golden mane of hair helped, of course, as did the fact that he preached with good grammar and only a faint trace of a Southern accent. Likewise the much-repeated story, perhaps apocryphal, of William Randolph Hearst’s order to his media empire to “puff Graham” at the start of the young evangelist’s seminal Los Angeles crusade.
But it was the content of his message outside of his crusades, and his optimistic mien, that rescued the marginalized view of what an evangelist is from the novel and movie “Elmer Gantry.” Graham was the opposite of the sweaty, uneducated, money-grubbing, womanizing, tent-show revivalist created and immortalized by Sinclair Lewis and Burt Lancaster.
Graham’s message did not rely on the caricatured notion of fire and brimstone, one that offered sinners theological “fire insurance” to keep them out of the depths of hell. Instead, he was spiritually aspirational, urging his millions of listeners, viewers and readers to come to Jesus just as they
were, to help them achieve salvation, but also to become better people in their daily lives after they were saved.
It is no surprise that Billy Graham’s rise roughly coincided with the rise of the “New South,” what has since become the suburban Sunbelt. Graham was raised outside Charlotte, N.C., a city that epitomized the emerging Sunbelt, where it seemed there were about as many banks and financial institutions as there were houses of worship.
Early in his evangelical career, Graham realized that for his brand of Christianity to be viable to a worldwide audience (and market), it would have to break the shackles of racism that had chained the South for hundreds of years. To be sure, Graham did not participate in civil-rights marches, much less go to jail for his beliefs, but he made his views plain over time. This incremental approach, while not placing him in American Christianity’s prophetic minority, had the benefit of bringing many of his fellow white Southerners with him, demonstrating through his actions and implicit in his message, that things would have to change for those who wanted to think of themselves as Christians.
Graham and Nelson Mandela were born in the same year, and Graham corresponded with the South African leader for decades while he was in prison.
“Graham refused to preach in apartheid South Africa for 20 years until the government, in 1973, gave permission for a mixed-race gathering,” according to Tami Hultman, co-founder of AllAfrica.com. “Before that, across the border in Victoria Falls in what was then Rhodesia, Graham declared the apartheid must end.”
In the 1980s, when televangelism scandals rocked the nation, it was Billy Graham’s unblemished reputation that kept many fundamentalist Christians from despair.
Graham was not without his faults, as many have documented, and he acknowledged. He grew too comfortable and too close to those in power, especially Richard Nixon. And his pricey wardrobe also drew criticism. It is instructive, if not entirely fair, to compare Billy Graham to his son and chosen heir, Franklin. For all his considerable organizational gifts, Franklin’s message from the pulpit has a darker hue than his father’s. And, where the father did his best to reach out to non-Christians, the son has been quick to denounce Muslims and Hindus, referring to the latter as “pagans.”
So, Christians and non-Christians alike can be grateful for Billy Graham’s life and work, to join with his family, friends, supporters and admirers by saying, “Well done, thy good and faithful servant.”