Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple-choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum is not a sexy one, like, say, the National Museum of American History, which houses the artifacts our culture tends to prize more than the inspired word of God (Fonzie’s jacket, Seinfeld’s “puffy shirt,” etc.).
And yet my wife was blown back by a simple Billy Graham exhibit, as she read from a wall panel that he had preached to more people in live audiences than anyone in history—about 215 million in 185 countries. Her awe didn’t immediately register. Having skipped lunch, I was distracted and in search of the museum’s Manna restaurant for some fast-casual rotisserie lamb. But I managed to mutter that it was amazing he’s still with us. “He’s not dead?” she asked. “He might as well be,” I replied.
I meant no disrespect, nor was I being prophetic about what would come just two days later. I merely meant that his ilk—assuming Graham isn’t such a singular figure that he has no ilk—is no longer with us. For the “Protestant Pope,” as some called him, was that rarest of marquee preachers, one who, as the book of Micah puts it, did justly and loved mercy and walked humbly with his God.
Raised on a dairy farm, originally aspiring to play professional baseball, the rangy Tarheel with the matinee-idol looks got saved at a Charlotte tent revival in his teens, at the fire-and-brimstone-stoking hand of the sawdust evangelist Mordecai Ham. He honed his craft first as a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman, then as a reluctant guest-preacher who was so nervous his hands sweated and his knees knocked as he delivered all four of his canned sermons in eight minutes.
Practice made perfect. He spent his years at the Florida Bible Institute paddling a canoe out to a little island in a Hillsborough River swamp where he preached to the alligators and birds. “If they would not stop to listen,” Graham wrote, “there was always a congregation of cypress stumps that could neither slither nor fly away. The loudness of my preaching was in direct proportion to their unresponsiveness, so the trees got my voice at full blast.”
While none of the cypress stumps came to Jesus, an estimated 3.2 million people answered Graham’s altar call during the seven decades of his “crusades”—a name he eventually dropped so as not to repel his Islamic brothers. Unlike many TV-preachers-turned-pundits, Graham favored multiplication over division. In a 1992 crusade in Moscow, a full quarter of the 155,000 attendees came forward as he drew the net.
Graham became a veritable Zelig of the American Century. A registered Democrat who in his early days was called “the Antichrist” by hard-driving fundies who thought his ecumenism was heresy, Graham counseled, prayed, or skinny-dipped in the White House pool (with Lyndon Johnson—who else?) with every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, mostly at their behest.
He brought the Good News to everyone from pampered American suburbanites to poverty-stricken African villagers. He integrated his crusades long before Jim Crow laws were overturned, posted bail for Martin Luther King Jr., and decried apartheid in South Africa a decade before it became a cause célèbre. He talked J. C. with everyone from the gangster Mickey Cohen to the self-described “C-plus Christian” Johnny Cash, an ardent friend of Graham’s. Cash, who was forever warding off personal demons and addictions, even took to singing songs like Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me Lord?” at Graham’s crusades. A song of humble gratitude, not lamentation, it summed up Graham’s operating ethos: Why me Lord? / What have I ever done / To deserve even one / Of the pleasures I’ve known.
As Cash’s son, John Carter, put it to the singer’s biographer, Robert Hilburn: “When my father fell short, he could always reach out to Billy. Billy didn’t judge my father; he was there as his friend unconditionally. Billy would lift him up, support him, and say, ‘You can do this. Stand back up. You know who you are.’ ”
After a day or so of marinating in his obituaries, it occurred to me that the thing I appreciated most about Billy Graham was that he didn’t require you to think about Billy Graham. Unlike so many self-aggrandizing televangelists, Moral Majority grifters, and preachers-cum-ward-heelers, he left no hookers or no-tell-motel church secretaries or embezzled funds in his wake. Billy Graham never built waterslides for Jesus. He never sported hipster tattoo sleeves so he could slam shots with Justin Bieber or oozed his way across the stage preaching the prosperity gospel or became an unrepentant partisan peckerhead who’d rather add to Trump’s flock than Christ’s.
If you were a lukewarm Christian, lax in your duties, as I am (the Man in Black isn’t the only C-plus Christian), you took solace in the fact that Billy Graham was hoeing his row, taking the Great Commission more seriously than perhaps any human being ever has. (Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . ” ) He was as reliable as the sunrise, as steady as a metronome.
I never thought of Billy Graham as a meaningful minister in my life. He preached a straight salvation message, salvation being something of a gateway drug, getting new Christians into the club where they can become world-weary, long-in-the-tooth believers, debating doctrine, hashing out hermeneutics, and splitting churches in huffy snits—you know, the fun stuff. Billy Graham was a 101 course, not a deep-waters guy.
And yet when I checked in, after his death, with my spiritual lodestars, I realized that saying you’re an evangelical Christian who doesn’t plug into Billy Graham is like saying you’re a country music fan without internalizing Hank Williams. Even if Hank meant nothing to you, he probably meant everything to every singer you respect.
My current pastor, Robert Hahn, who attended Graham’s School of Evangelism, told me: “He was humble, yet he knew who he was—and without apology. He wasn’t warm, he was powerful. And because of that, he came off as genuine.”
My former pastor, Michael Easley, who went on to head the Moody Bible Institute, offered: “I’m reminded of D. L. Moody. When a woman criticized his way of doing evangelism, he responded, ‘I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.’ . . . Graham exalted in Jesus, not himself. And millions got to see and hear the authentic article.”
Then there is my mom, who holds high rank (aside from the fact that she brought me into this world), since many years ago, she led me to Christ, who, despite my doubts and lapses, I’ve generally stuck with. I don’t remember Graham occupying a particular place of prominence in our house. Though in the ’70s, as in so many other households, his televised crusades were part of the background entertainment, like The White Shadow or Welcome Back, Kotter.
On the day of his death, my mom related that Graham was never one of her go-to preachers. He wasn’t in her spiritual-growth starting lineup. Yet as she was saying this, her throat seized up and her voice choked. She couldn’t finish her thought, as if she’d realized that the North Star had just flickered out. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I assumed Billy Graham didn’t mean that much to her. I assumed wrong.
“He led so many people to the Lord,” she said. “He got the call at 16 and lived to 99. And all that time, he glorified God. What a homecoming it must have been today. What a celebration. To hear those words we all long to hear: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ ”
