Billy Graham, 99, Dies; Pastor Filled Stadiums and
Counseled Presidents
New York Times
By Laurie Goodstein
February 21, 2018
The Rev. Billy Graham, a North Carolina farmer’s son who
preached to millions in stadium events he called crusades, becoming a pastor to
presidents and the nation’s best-known Christian evangelist for more than 60
years, died on Wednesday at his home. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by Jeremy Blume, a spokesman for
the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Mr. Graham had dealt with a number of illnesses in his
last years, including prostate cancer, hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the
brain) and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Graham spread his influence across the country and
around the world through a combination of religious conviction, commanding
stage presence and shrewd use of radio, television and advanced communication
technologies.
A central achievement was his encouraging evangelical
Protestants to regain the social influence they had once wielded, reversing a
retreat from public life that had begun when their efforts to challenge
evolution theory were defeated in the Scopes trial in 1925.
But in his later years, Mr. Graham kept his distance from
the evangelical political movement he had helped engender, refusing to endorse
candidates and avoiding the volatile issues dear to religious conservatives.
“If I get on these other subjects, it divides the
audience on an issue that is not the issue I’m promoting,” he said in an
interview at his home in North Carolina in 2005 while preparing for his last
American crusade, in New York City. “I’m just promoting the Gospel.”
Mr. Graham took the role of evangelist to a new level,
lifting it from the sawdust floors of canvas tents in small-town America to the
podiums of packed stadiums in the world’s major cities. He wrote some 30 books
and was among the first to use new communication technologies for religious
purposes. During his “global crusade” from Puerto Rico in 1995, his sermons
were translated simultaneously into 48 languages and transmitted to 185
countries by satellite.
Mr. Graham’s standing as a religious leader was unusual:
Unlike the pope or the Dalai Lama, he spoke for neither a particular church
(though he was a Southern Baptist) nor a particular people.
At times, he seemed to fill the role of national
clergyman. He read from Scripture at President Richard M. Nixon’s funeral in
California in 1994, offered prayers at a service in the National Cathedral for
victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and, despite his failing
health, traveled to New Orleans in 2006 to preach to survivors of Hurricane
Katrina.
His reach was global, and he was welcomed even by
repressive leaders like Kim Il-sung of North Korea, who invited him to preach
in Pyongyang’s officially sanctioned churches.
In his younger days, Mr. Graham became a role model for
aspiring evangelists, prompting countless young men to copy his cadences, his
gestures and even the way he combed his wavy blond hair.
He was not without critics. Early in his career, some
mainline Protestant leaders and theologians accused him of preaching a
simplistic message of personal salvation that ignored the complexities of
societal problems like racism and poverty. Later, critics said he had shown
political naïveté in maintaining a close public association with Nixon long
after Nixon had been implicated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in.
Mr. Graham’s image was tainted in 2002 with the release
of audiotapes that Nixon had secretly recorded in the White House three decades
earlier. The two men were heard agreeing that liberal Jews controlled the media
and were responsible for pornography.
“A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine,” Mr. Graham
said at one point on the tapes. “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.”
Mr. Graham issued a written apology and met with Jewish
leaders. In the interview in 2005, he said of the conversation with Nixon: “I
didn’t remember it, I still don’t remember it, but it was there. I guess I was
sort of caught up in the conversation somehow.”
In the last few decades, a new generation of evangelists,
including Mr. Graham’s elder son, Franklin Graham, began developing their own
followings. In November 1995, on his 77th birthday, Mr. Graham named Franklin
to succeed him as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. His
daughter Anne Graham Lotz and his grandsons Will Graham and William Graham
Tullian Tchividjian are also in ministry.
Franklin Graham has drawn criticism since the Sept. 11
attacks for denigrating Islam. His father, however, retained the respect of
vast numbers of Americans, enough to earn him dozens of appearances on Gallup’s
annual list of the world’s 10 most admired men and women.
With a warm, courtly manner that was readily apparent
both to stadium crowds and to those who met him face to face, Mr. Graham could
be a riveting presence. At 6-foot-2, with a handsomely rugged profile fit for
Hollywood westerns, he would hold his Bible aloft and declare that Scripture
offered “the answer to every human longing.”
Mr. Graham drew his essential message from the mainstream
of evangelical Protestant belief. Repent of your sins, he told his listeners,
accept Jesus as your Savior and be born again. In a typical exhortation, he
declared: “Are you frustrated, bewildered, dejected, breaking under the strains
of life? Then listen for a moment to me: Say yes to the Savior tonight, and in
a moment you will know such comfort as you have never known. It comes to you
quickly, as swiftly as I snap my fingers, just like that.”
Mr. Graham always closed by asking his listeners to “come
forward” and commit to a life of Christian faith. When they did so, his
well-oiled organization would match new believers with nearby churches. Many
thousands of people say they were first brought to church by a Billy Graham
crusade.
At the dedication of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte,
N.C., in June 2007, former President Bill Clinton said of Mr. Graham, “When he
prays with you in the Oval Office or upstairs in the White House, you feel like
he is praying for you, not the president.”
As a popular evangelist, Mr. Graham was by no means
unique in American history. George Whitefield in the mid-18th century, Charles
G. Finney and Dwight L. Moody in the 19th century, and Billy Sunday at the turn
of the 20th were all capable of drawing vast crowds.
But none of them combined the ambition, the talent for
organization and the reach of Mr. Graham, who had the advantages of jet travel
and electronic media to convey his message. In 2007, the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association, with 750 employees, estimated that he had preached
the Gospel to more than 215 million people in more than 185 countries and
territories since beginning his crusades in Grand Rapids, Mich., in October
1947. He reached hundreds of millions more on television, through video and in
film.
“This is not mass evangelism,” Mr. Graham liked to say,
“but personal evangelism on a mass scale.”
William Franklin Graham Jr. — Billy Frank to his family
and friends as a boy — was born near Charlotte on Nov. 7, 1918, the first of
four children of William Franklin Graham and Morrow Coffey Graham. He was
descended on both sides from pre-Revolution Scottish settlers, and both his
grandfathers were Confederate soldiers.
Though the Grahams were Reformed Presbyterians, and
though his father insisted on daily readings of the Bible, Billy Frank was an
unenthusiastic Christian. He was more interested in reading history, playing
baseball and dreaming of becoming a professional ballplayer. His worldliness,
his father thought, was mischievous and devilish.
It was the Rev. Mordecai Ham, an itinerant preacher from
Kentucky, who was credited with “saving” Billy Graham, in the autumn of 1934,
when Billy was 16. After attending Mr. Ham’s revival sessions on a Charlotte
street corner several nights in a row, Billy walked up to Mr. Ham to make a
“decision for Christ.”
“I can’t say that I felt anything spectacular,” Mr.
Graham recalled years later. “I felt very little emotion. I shed no tears. In
fact, when I saw others had tears in their eyes, I felt like a hypocrite, and
this disturbed me a little. I’m sure I had a tremendous sense of conviction:
The Lord did speak to me about certain things in my life. I’m certain of that,
but I can’t remember what they were.”
Returning home with a friend that night, Mr. Graham said,
he thought: “Now I’ve gotten saved. Now whatever I do can’t unsave me. Even if
I killed somebody, I can’t ever be unsaved now.”
After he graduated from high school in 1936, Mr. Graham
spent the summer selling Fuller brushes door to door before spending an unhappy
semester at Bob Jones College, then an unaccredited, fundamentalist school in
Cleveland, Tenn. (It is now Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C.) He then
went to another unaccredited but less restrictive institution, the Florida
Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa.
It was there, he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “Just
as I Am,” that he felt God calling him to the ministry. The call came, he said,
during a late-night walk on a golf course. “I got down on my knees at the edge
of one of the greens,” he wrote. “Then I prostrated myself on the dewy turf. ‘O
God,’ I sobbed, ‘if you want me to serve you, I will.’ ”
“All the surroundings stayed the same,” he continued. “No
sign in the heavens. No voice from above. But in my spirit I knew I had been
called to the ministry. And I knew my answer was yes.”
After graduating from the Bible Institute, Mr. Graham
went to Wheaton College in Illinois, among the nation’s most respected
evangelical colleges. At Wheaton, from which he received a degree in
anthropology in 1943, he met Ruth McCue Bell, a fellow student whose father was
Dr. L. Nelson Bell, a prominent Presbyterian missionary surgeon who had spent
many years in China.
Soon after marrying Mrs. Bell in 1943, Mr. Graham
accepted the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in Western Springs, Ill., a
Chicago suburb. (It later changed its name to the Village Church.) He imbued
his sermons with the brand of interdenominational appeal that was to be his
hallmark.
It was also in 1943 that he was invited to take over
“Songs in the Night,” a Sunday hour of sermonizing and gospel singing broadcast
by a Chicago radio station. The program introduced him to electronic evangelism.
Its principal singer, the baritone George Beverly Shea, who died in April,
would earn fame as a member of the “Billy Graham team.”
In the mid-1940s, Mr. Graham became the chief preacher
for the Youth for Christ rallies organized by the Rev. Torrey M. Johnson, a
radio evangelist, and George W. Wilson, the owner of a religious bookstore in
Minneapolis and a lay leader of the First Baptist Church there. With them, he
established the Graham Youth for Christ, which found moderate success holding
“crusades” across North America and in Britain.
Mr. Graham’s fortunes took a career-building turn in
1949, thanks in no small measure to the power of the Hearst press. He was
holding a three-week “mammoth tent crusade” in downtown Los Angeles inside a
6,000-seat “canvas cathedral” pitched on a vacant lot. The newspaper ads
proclaimed him “America’s sensational young evangelist.” But what really caught
the attention of the aged newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst was that Mr.
Graham was preaching a fiery brand of anti-Communism.
From his retreat in San Simeon, Calif., Mr. Hearst is
said to have issued a terse directive: “Puff Graham.”
“The Hearst newspapers gave me enormous publicity, and
the others soon followed,” Mr. Graham said years later. “Suddenly, what a
clergyman was saying was in the headlines everywhere, and so was the box score
of commitments to Christ each night.” Time, Newsweek and Life magazines
followed suit.
Mr. Graham began taking his “Crusade for Christ” on the
road. In 1957, he drew more than two million people to a series of rallies,
extended to 16 weeks, at Madison Square Garden in New York. The crusades became
international: One, in West Germany, was televised live in 10 other European
countries. In 1966, he preached to nearly one million people in London.
As Mr. Graham’s popularity grew, so did his stature with
Christian critics who had dismissed his interpretation of Scripture as overly
literal. (He told his audiences, for example, that heaven was a physical place,
though not necessarily in this solar system.)
Early on, he abandoned the practice, common among
Southern fundamentalists, of speaking only before racially segregated
audiences. He refused to “preach Jim Crow,” as he put it, and in the turbulent
1960s made several “visits of racial conciliation” to the South.
Mr. Graham pledged to local church sponsors that all
donations would be used for crusade expenses, with any excess going to his
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. His own compensation, he said, would be
limited to his expenses plus “the salary of a fairly well-paid local minister,”
or about $50,000 in 1980 (the equivalent of about $142,000 today). The
association’s books were always open to inspection.
By maintaining fiscal integrity and personal probity — he
stuck to his rule never to be alone with a woman other than his wife — Mr.
Graham kept himself untarnished by the kind of sex and money scandals that
brought down evangelists and religious broadcasters like Jim Bakker and Jimmy
Swaggart in the 1980s.
The Grahams lived on a 200-acre mountain retreat in
Montreat, N.C. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham, died in 2007. He is survived by his
sons, the Rev. William Franklin III and the Rev. Nelson Graham, known as Ned;
three daughters, Virginia Tchividjian (known as Gigi), Anne Graham Lotz and
Ruth Graham McIntyre; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Recognizing his influence, presidents made a point of
seeking friendly relations with Mr. Graham; Lyndon B. Johnson did so
assiduously. Mr. Graham was a frequent guest of Ronald Reagan, and in January
1991, George H. W. Bush invited him to spend the night at the White House the
day before American-led forces began bombing Iraq. Mr. Clinton asked Mr. Graham
to offer prayers at his inauguration in 1993.
President George W. Bush said that it had been after a
walk with Mr. Graham at the Bush family’s compound in Kennebunkport, Me., that
Mr. Bush, as a younger man, decided to become more serious about his faith and
quit drinking. President Obama visited Mr. Graham at his North Carolina home in
2010.
Of the presidents, Mr. Graham was most closely associated
with Nixon. The two had met in the late 1940s, when Nixon was a senator from
California. As vice president, Nixon addressed a capacity crowd at Yankee
Stadium for the closing meeting of Mr. Graham’s New York crusade in 1957.
In the 1960 presidential campaign, Mr. Graham, a
registered Democrat, was strongly sympathetic to Nixon, a Republican, and
offered him campaign advice. He went on to endorse Nixon in the 1968
presidential race and allowed that endorsement to be used in television
commercials. He gave the invocation at Nixon’s 1969 inauguration and came to be
described as Nixon’s unofficial White House chaplain.
Mr. Graham said he had been “innocently unaware” of the
storm gathering over Watergate. But when the extent of the scandal became known
— disclosures of the break-in and the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by the
White House — Mr. Graham tended to look the other way, his critics said.
In 1982, Mr. Graham displeased the Reagan administration
when, after a visit to the Soviet Union, he spoke in favor of universal nuclear
disarmament. He also visited Russian churches, and his comment that he had seen
no evidence of religious repression by the Soviet authorities created a furor
among conservative church members in the United States.
It was during this period, in his sixth decade as an
evangelist, that Mr. Graham and his organization experimented with new
technologies. In 1986, in Paris, he used direct satellite transmissions to
carry his sermons to about 30 other French cities. With his crusade in San
Juan, P.R., in 1995, he expanded his satellite reach more than sixfold.
Mr. Graham also broke ground by going to places where
religious activity was officially restricted, including China and North Korea.
The first of his 30 books was “Peace With God,” published in 1953; his last was
“Nearing Home,” in 2011.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, with more than
1,000 employees around the world, continues to organize crusades. It also
produces Mr. Graham’s “Hour of Decision” global radio program and prime-time
television specials, trains thousands of evangelists and missionaries, and
publishes Decision magazine. A rapid-response team deploys chaplains to
disaster areas.
Why it all came about remained a puzzle to Mr. Graham. In
his autobiography, he wrote: “I have often said that the first thing I am going
to do when I get to Heaven is ask: ‘Why me, Lord? Why did You choose a farmboy
from North Carolina to preach to so many people, to have such a wonderful team
of associates, and to have a part in what You were doing in the latter half of
the 20th century?’ ”
“I have thought about that question a great deal,” he
added, “but I know also that only God knows the answer.”
GRAHAM, Billy (William
Franklin Graham Jr.)
Born: 11/7/2018,
Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.A.
Died: 2/21/2018,
Montreat, North Carolina, U.S.A.
Billy Graham’s
westerns – actor:
Mr. Texas – 1951 [himself]
The Ride – 1997 (voice on the radio)
