The Power And The Glory of Billy Graham
How a towheaded kid from North Carolina became God’s best salesman.
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The fact that a high proportion of inquirers list a pastor or church on their decision cards raises an issue that has been around since D. L. Moody, a nineteenth-century evangelist, began to keep track of responses to his preaching. Newspaper reporters at the revivals of the great mass evangelists, including Graham, have repeatedly noted that the “sinners” who responded to those evangelists’ persuasive entreaties have often carried well-worn Bibles and looked suspiciously like people who were not being exposed to organized religion for the first time. Only about half of Billy Graham’s inquirers—in Jackson and other Bible Belt areas, the proportion may be as low as a third—claim they are making a first-time commitment to Christ. Still, this does not mean Graham’s results are spurious or insignificant. If a substantial number of church folk whose light has begun to dim are plugged back into church systems on a high-voltage line, the crusade has performed an important function.
Any preacher with the sense to keep his theology simple and the foresight to surround himself with able associates could probably achieve moderate success. But these alone do not produce an evangelistic superstar, any more than a good piano and high-quality lessons will turn out a Horowitz. If it were otherwise, we could recall more easily the names of some of the dozens of young evangelists who have been heralded as “the next Billy Graham.” What does Graham have that makes him so appealing to so many? He is attractive, forceful, and confident, to be sure, but one would hardly describe him as colorful; in fact, he seems almost dynamically bland. He seldom turns a memorable phrase, his mind seems innocent of complexity, and his observations are thoroughly predictable. All of us know several people who are intrinsically more interesting. And yet he is undeniably one of the authentic All-American Heroes.
In accounting for Graham’s success, observers have often noted the publicity bonanzas he received from Hearst and Luce. These were crucial, certainly, but despite the enormous boost they provided, it is important to remember that Hearst and Luce were not making a random selection or engaging in creation ex nihilo. Their empires had been built on a singular genius for matching a communication medium to the receptivity of a mass audience, and in Billy Graham they saw a man who not only had that same talent, but was himself the medium.
People are drawn to Graham for his personal style and character. He is personable, charming, and, I believe, absolutely sincere. He is apparently even humble, expressing wonder at what he has done, awe at the responsibility of his position, and doubt that he is up to it. He works so hard that he has high blood pressure, can perform no heavy lifting, has thrombophlebitis and a recurring intestinal ailment, and from time to time has had to slow down because of an eye problem related to exhaustion. He leads a life of considerable personal discipline, rising early, reading five Psalms and one chapter of Proverbs, watching the Today show during breakfast, spending an hour in Bible study after breakfast, then working, jogging, writing, and closing the day with another round of devotions—the very sort of existence most evangelical Christians feel they should lead but seldom manage.
He also appeals to the people in the pews because they feel at home with him intellectually. His humor is obvious, as if gleaned from “Laughter is the Best Medicine” and “Today’s Chuckle.” He loves sentimental stories like the one about the mediocre football player who starred on the day his blind father died because “it was the first time my dad ever got to see me play.” And though he occasionally laments the fact he never took time to earn a doctorate (his PhDs are honorary), he does not pretend to be a theologian or a biblical scholar. In fact, he has openly admitted that when he suffered a period of doubt in 1949, he resolved it not by working through the problems that troubled him but by making a conscious decision not to think about them any more. “If that be intellectual suicide,” he says, “so be it.”
This simplicity pervades the literature Graham publishes and apparently reflects the concerns of his readers. A question-and-answer column in Decision magazine regularly deals with such chestnuts as why people no longer live as long as Methuselah did, where the sons of Adam and Eve got their wives, and whether the Garden of Eden can be located on a map. Thus, what one writer has said of Charles Finney, a well-known evangelist in the 1800s, may be equally true of Billy Graham: “He did not study the popular mind; he had it.”
It would be fatuous, of course, to imply that Billy Graham is the hero of all the people. Archfundamentalist Carl McIntire, outraged by what he regards as a damnable penchant for compromise, calls Graham “the greatest disappointment in the Christian world.” To liberal Christians he epitomizes a religious and, by implication, political outlook singularly inappropriate to contemporary societies. And to others who are cynical toward any who profess to live by lofty ideals or bone-weary at repeated disappointment in those they had dared trust, Billy Graham is simply not believable. In time, they are confident he will be exposed, and they will dance at his disgrace.
It would be unfair, however, to contend that Billy Graham always takes a conservative line on social problems. In the early years of his ministry, he sidestepped the racial issue, but by 1953 he insisted his crusades be completely open to all races, even in the Deep South, and refused invitations to South Africa for years. When he finally held crusades in Durban and Johannesburg in 1973, blacks constituted at least half of the audience and sat where they wanted to. At the risk of offending a sizable segment of his supporters, Graham toured Latin America in 1960 with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his organization prepared a series of spot announcements for use in the South, urging parents to “obey the law” on school integration.
The most scathing criticism leveled at Graham in recent years, of course, has been directed at his perceived role as “high priest of American civil religion” and, more specifically, as “court chaplain” to the Nixon administration. Graham’s political predilections—against militancy of most sorts, against disruptive protests, against involvement of the church in radical social action, in favor of rugged individualism and the work ethic—made it quite easy and natural for him to say, with complete sincerity, precisely what Nixon and his conservative Republican constituents wanted to hear.
In turn, Nixon’s background had prepared him for Billy’s brand of religion. The particular Quaker sect in which he was reared was not greatly unlike the fundamentalist and evangelical churches from which Graham draws most of his following. Nixon has credited Graham with having encouraged him to run for the presidency in 1968, and when he secured the nomination, Billy sat in on the session at which Spiro Agnew was selected as Nixon’s running mate. (Graham’s first choice, however, was Mark Hatfield.) Though he did not publicly endorse Nixon, the evangelist did appear as a member of the studio audience on question-and-answer TV shows, and when the wire services reported that his absentee ballot had carried Nixon’s name, the candidate’s camp readily exploited the information. As the corruption in the Nixon Administration came to light, Graham acknowledged Nixon may have abused their relationship, but refused to abandon his disgraced friend, a stance that was hardly motivated by a desire to enhance his own public image. “When a friend is down,” he said, “you don’t go and kick him—you try to help him up.”
Since Watergate, Graham has conceded that if the President told lies, it was a sin and has called for national repentance “from the White House to your house.” His critics, including evangelicals, have observed pointedly that when David took Bathsheba and sent her hapless husband off to die in battle, the prophet Nathan did not simply preach a series of lessons decrying immodesty, adultery , and abuse of power, but strode into David’s presence and said accusingly, “Thou art the man!” But Nathan was a prophet and not an evangelist. Prophets are sent away from the court, cast into jails and cisterns, and threatened with death. Evangelists, like salesmen, hesitate to make a potential customer feel uncomfortable in a way that might risk loss of the sale.
Graham’s religious and political beliefs have always given his ideological opponents plenty to shoot at, but the cynics among his detractors have been less fortunate. He has avoided any hint of the sexual scandal that has tainted several other ministries by making certain he is never alone with a woman other than his wife or a close relative even for a few minutes. And, throughout most of his ministry, he has been a model of financial integrity .At the close of his 1950 Atlanta crusade, the Atlanta Constitution carried two photographs side by side. One showed Graham waving goodbye to the city. The other showed money bags containing $9000 collected as a “love offering” for the five weeks the evangelist had spent in the city. The insinuation rankled Graham and his team, and he quickly accepted a recommendation that he scrap the love-offering system and place himself on an annual salary to be set by his board. At that time, his salary was set at $15,000; at present, it is $39,500. In addition to his salary, of course, he receives full expenses while away from home, plus income from his writings. He has also inherited land valued at $420,000 and sold other inherited properties for $250,000. Although he has established trust funds for his children, much of the considerable income from his books has gone either to charitable causes or back into his ministry. He estimates, for example, that he gave away approximately $600,000 last year. He is thus financially comfortable, but has not taken advantage of his position to build a personal fortune. His organization owns no airplane or stable of expensive automobiles; Graham’s two personal cars are a Volvo and a Jeep.
Because the BGEA is incorporated as a church, it is not required to file an IRS return and has not published a financial statement for the benefit of its donors. Still, Billy’s salary and rough estimates of the ministry’s income and overall expenses have not been dark secrets, and until mid-1977 virtually every investigation into Graham’s finances found him and his organization without spot or blemish. One of the most thorough of these investigations was conducted early in 1977 by Mary Bishop and Robert Hodierne of the Charlotte Observer, Billy’s hometown paper. According to the Observer, Graham said he was giving the most complete statement of his and his ministry’s finances that he had ever given and, moreover, that he was holding nothing back. He had told them, for example, that in 1976 the ministry had spent approximately $25 million and that it regularly spent all that it took in. The reporters claim they asked George Wilson if a list of organizations related to the ministry was complete and were told it was. Wilson also told them the organization owned no stocks or bonds and had no land holdings other than those directly related to operations.
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