At the height of his influence in the 1960s and ’70s, Billy Graham was a man about whom nearly every adult in America had an opinion. He was everywhere—his weeklong evangelistic “crusades” packed stadiums around the globe; innumerable books and articles carried his byline; his face appeared on the covers of the newsweeklies. The Graham media empire included a magazine, a radio show, and a television program.
America’s most famous preacher died on February 21 at the age of 99. Younger Americans who don’t remember the crusades and his other public addresses may wonder how on earth an “evangelist”—the word itself sounds obsolete—could have achieved such vast renown in a secularized country. That it isn’t quite so secularized as it might be is in large measure the work of Billy Graham.
In the late 1930s, Graham, who’d grown up outside Charlotte, North Carolina, was a student at a tiny Bible college in Florida. He practiced preaching alone in front of mirrors and standing atop tree stumps in the forest. Soon he was preaching in large churches, so captivating were his oratory and his message. By 1944, he had his own radio program in Chicago. In the fall of 1947, he held his first independent “revival”—several nights of preaching meant to draw the unbelieving to Christ and Christians to greater faithfulness. Before one of those revivals in Los Angeles in 1949, the media magnate William Randolph Hearst decreed that reporters at the Los Angeles Examiner should “puff Graham.” So began the evangelist’s rapid rise to American sainthood.
Nobody watching old clips of Graham would attribute his success to media puffery. He was uncommonly handsome, spoke with a lovely baritone lilt, and moved with a gentlemanly grace. His whole persona projected sincerity. For six decades, Graham lay under the scrutiny of a skeptical media—as early as 1957 the liberal Christian Century magazine hired an investigative reporter to find evidence of financial or other improprieties—but he was never credibly accused of either personal or financial misconduct. In 1994, he was discovered to have spoken disparagingly of Jews to Richard Nixon, but it’s clear from the transcript that his animus was against moral permissivists rather than Jews as Jews and that he was mainly guilty of trying too hard not to disagree with the president. In any case it’s difficult to call a man a racist who in the 1950s forcefully chastised Southern audiences over segregation.
The Graham crusades were often said to signify a national religious awakening. Millions came to hear a preacher preach a simple message: that man may be saved from his sins by confessing them to Jesus Christ, son of God, and placing faith exclusively in him for eternal life. That message sounded as shocking and implausible then as it does now, yet people flocked to hear it. There was power in what Billy Graham said and in the way he said it; some quality of plainspoken truth that even those who disagreed with him on important questions found appealing and persuasive. It’s impossible to see photographs of the massive crowds gathered to hear Graham speak—a packed Yankee Stadium in 1957, more than a million on an airstrip in Seoul—and conclude that it was just some fad.
But Graham’s singular achievement was not in drawing people to his meetings; it was in his challenge to the dominance of midcentury Protestant liberalism. After World War II, attendance in the American churches now known as “mainline”—the Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, Church of Christ, and Disciples of Christ denominations—was at its peak. But cultural prestige and political influence had come at the cost of confessional clarity; the mainline denominations were (as indeed they still are) more interested in keeping up with the fast-evolving morality of our popular culture than in challenging it. By the late 1950s, many Christians were realizing that there wasn’t much point in busying oneself with church if it required no special belief other than a general assent that being good is better than being bad.
Graham showed Americans that Christianity, if it was true at all, placed demands on them, and they had to respond with a yes or a no. He realized that Christian belief wasn’t worth the trouble if it involved no risk and no sacrifice. Jesus’ disciples weren’t martyred for espousing some form of elevated do-goodism; they were martyred for believing that Jesus was the eternal son of God and that he was raised from the dead, bodily and not spiritually or metaphorically, on the third day.
Graham himself was never too fastidious in his theological adherence. Conservative evangelicals criticized him for his indistinct pronouncements and for freely associating with charismatics and Catholics and anybody else who professed belief in the biblical Jesus. But it was Graham more than almost anybody else who brought the basic doctrines of Christianity back into the homes of millions of Americans.
He embodied and foreshadowed the rise of modern American evangelicalism—its strengths and its follies. Graham and his organization valued method and numbers over depth of belief. Millions made “decisions for Christ” at Graham crusades over the decades, and today’s evangelical megachurches boast enormous congregations. But it was never obvious how all those impressive numbers translated into a more definably Christian nation or a more morally upright culture.
Like the younger evangelicals he led and influenced, Graham believed that he could change American society from the top. Hence his dabbling in presidential politics and hobnobbing with successive occupants of the White House from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush. He always claimed not to be interested in elections or candidates, but his critics were right that there was something unseemly about a clergyman always hanging around the most powerful man in the world. His close friendships with Nixon and Bill Clinton damaged Graham’s reputation. When these men left the White House, so evidently the willing victims of their own base impulses, Graham looked like the ineffective spiritual adviser he had in fact been.
Anyone who stays in the public eye for half a century says too much. Graham was not a publicity hound—he turned down lucrative offers to host network television shows and star in movies. But a man who speaks all the time will say things in the absence of knowledge. In 1969, he wrote a long letter to Nixon advising the president on the best way to wind down the Vietnam War (“Use North Vietnamese defectors to bomb and invade the north. . . . Let them bomb the dikes which could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam”). After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1984, he claimed that Christians in Russia could worship largely as they pleased. In his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am, he remarked that seeing Auschwitz led him to embrace nuclear disarmament. Twice he remarked, in flat contradiction to everything he had taught for decades, that it was possible to find eternal life without ever knowing the name of Jesus Christ. One wishes he could have kept the biblical proverb more firmly in mind: “In a multitude of words there wanteth not sin.”
He was not a great or even a reliable thinker, but Billy Graham was a good and peaceable man who used his gifts to reanimate Christian belief in America at a time when it seemed in danger of mutating into an empty and derivative moralism. Today’s media and intellectual elite look back at him with barely veiled contempt. But American society has often been shaped and bettered by men who knew just one truth and who expressed it well. Billy Graham was such a man.
