‘America’s Pastor’ reached millions
Graham championed evangelicalism
MONTREAT, N.C. — The Rev. Billy Graham, the magnetic preacher who became a singular force in postwar American religious life, a confidant of presidents and the most widely heard Christian evangelist in history, died Wednesday at 99.
“America’s Pastor,” as he was dubbed, had suffered from cancer, pneumonia and other ailments, and died at his home in North Carolina.
More than anyone else, Graham built evangelicalism into a force that rivaled liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the U.S.
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.”
Graham reached multitudes around the globe through public appearances and his pioneering use of prime-time telecasts, network radio, daily newspaper columns, evangelistic films and satellite TV hookups.
By his final crusade in 2005 in New York City, he had preached in person to more than 210 million people worldwide.
He was a counselor to U.S. presidents of both parties from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. When the Billy Graham Museum and Library was dedicated in 2007 in Charlotte, N.C., George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton attended.
Born Nov. 7, 1918, on his family’s dairy farm near Charlotte, Graham came from a fundamentalist background. But he came to reject that view for a more ecumenical approach.
After high school, he enrolled at the fundamentalist Bob Jones College but found it stifling and transferred to Florida Bible Institute in Tampa.
Graham went on to study at Wheaton College, a prominent Christian liberal arts school in Illinois, where he met fellow student Ruth Bell, who had been raised in China where her father had been a Presbyterian medical missionary.
The two married in 1943, and he planned to become an Army chaplain. But by the time he could start the training program, World War II was nearly over.
Instead, he took a job organizing meetings in the U.S. and Europe with Youth for Christ, a group he helped found.
A 1949 Los Angeles revival turned Graham into evangelism’s rising star.
Over the next decade, his huge crusades in England and New York catapulted him to international celebrity.
Three years later, he held a crusade in New York’s Madison Square Garden, capped off with a rally in Times Square that packed Broadway with more than 100,000 people.
Graham ended racially segregated seating at his Southern crusades in 1953, a year before the Supreme Court’s school integration ruling, and long refused to visit South Africa.
He was on the road for months at a time, leaving Ruth at their mountainside home in Montreat to raise their five children: Franklin, Virginia (“Gigi”), Anne, Ruth and Nelson (“Ned”).
Anne Graham Lotz said her mother was effectively “a single parent.” She died in 2007 at age 87.
Graham will be buried beside his wife at the Billy Graham Museum and Library. There was no immediate word on funeral arrangements.
“I have been asked, ‘What is the secret?’” Graham had said of his preaching. “… The secret of my work is God. I would be nothing without him.”