Evangelist with staggering reach
He counseled presidents and converted millions to Christianity with a message that cemented evangelism in the mainstream
Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist minister who converted millions worldwide to Christianity with his simple faith and folksy charm and counseled nearly every U.S. president since Harry Truman, died Wednesday at his home in Montreat, N.C. He was 99.
“America’s Pastor,” as he was dubbed, had suffered from cancer, pneumonia and other ailments.
Tributes to Graham poured in from major leaders, with President Donald Trump tweeting: “The GREAT Billy Graham is dead. There was nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A very special man.”
Former President Barack Obama said Graham “gave hope and guidance to generations of Americans.”
As the most dominant U.S. pastor of the second half of the 20th century, Graham lifted evangelism into the religious mainstream and used the power of his personality to unite the often fractious worldwide evangelical community.
“No one was more important in legitimizing evangelism,” said William Martin, one of Graham’s biographers. “It’s now on equal footing to mainline Protestantism and Catholicism in the U.S.”
Graham’s reach was staggering. He preached to nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories, according to figures compiled by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and was heard and seen by hundreds of millions more through television and radio, newspaper columns and the internet. Graham wrote more than two dozen books, including a 1997 best-selling autobiography, “Just as I Am.”
Before the Cold War ended, he talked his way behind the Iron Curtain to preach to millions throughout the communist world.
“From an almost hardscrabble early life in North Carolina, the precincts of small Bible colleges and Los Angeles tent revivals, he has come to be, with the pope, one of the two best-known figures in the Christian world,” said Martin Marty, a Lutheran pastor and divinity scholar.
More than 70 million copies of his sermons have been distributed worldwide. At the height of his career, he received an average of 10,000 letters a day and 8,500 written requests for speaking engagements a year. Most important to Graham, his staff estimated that during his public appearances, about 3 million people responded to his call to “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”
A registered Democrat who often seemed more comfortable in the moderate Republican camp, Graham knew 12 presidents and, in his prime, was a fixture at the White House. He spent the last weekend of the Lyndon Johnson presidency there and was the first overnight guest of Richard Nixon after he was sworn into office.
Graham attended or participated in eight presidential inaugurations, but he was also present at the White House during darker days of controversy and scandal. He stayed close to Johnson when the president’s popularity plummeted during the Vietnam War and during Watergate publicly supported his longtime friend Nixon far longer than many thought prudent. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he quickly and publicly forgave President Bill Clinton and privately counseled Clinton’s wife, Hillary, to forgive him as well.
Also close to Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Graham was one of the few people allowed to visit the former president in California after Reagan’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease. He also developed a close relationship with the Bush family, participating in the family’s annual summer retreats in Kennebunkport, Maine, starting when George H.W. Bush was vice president. It was there during meetings with Graham that George W. Bush, the president’s eldest son, started to turn his life toward Christianity.
“Laura and I are thankful for the life of Billy Graham, and we send our heartfelt condolences to the Graham family,” former President George W. Bush said.
Graham’s relationships with those in the Oval Office often helped him spread his message in places like South Africa, where he held integrated rallies, in the Soviet Union and in North Korea.
The man, his audiences and his methods evolved since the early days of evangelical crusades, when tents, sawdust and financial “love offerings” were the trademarks.
After Nixon’s election in 1968, Graham grew closer to his longtime friend, and that closeness would bring him considerable embarrassment in 2002, when tapes of a White House meeting from 1972 were released.
On the tapes, Graham was heard agreeing with Nixon that the American media were dominated by left-wing Jews. And then Graham, in his familiar North Carolina twang, went further:
“Not all the Jews but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine; they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.”
The remarks shocked Graham supporters and Jewish leaders because the preacher was seen as a staunch ally of the Jewish people. In addition to his unflagging support of Israel, Graham protested the treatment of Soviet Jews and chastised his fellow Southern Baptists for singling out Jews for conversion.
When the tapes surfaced, Graham issued a short apology, saying he didn’t remember making the comments. When the controversy continued, Graham issued another statement: “I don’t ever recall having those feelings about any group, especially the Jews, and I certainly do not have them now. My remarks did not reflect my love for the Jewish people. I humbly ask the Jewish community to reflect on my actions on behalf of Jews over the years that contradict my words in the Oval Office that day.”
Frugality and humility were byproducts of Graham’s childhood, spent on his family’s dairy farm near Charlotte, N.C. One of four children born to Morrow Coffey and William Franklin Graham, Billy Frank, as he was known to his family, was born Nov. 7, 1918, and grew up milking Holsteins and working in the fields.