A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Unlike many Fundamentalist preachers, Billy wrote out his sermons in great detail, giving them such catchy titles as “Who’s Who in Hell” and “Mobilization Under the Blood-Spangled Banner.” A portion of a sermon manuscript from 1940, his last year at FBI, suggests he had already found the formula that typified his later preaching. He began by announcing that “crime has increased 500% in the last thirty years and costs the gov’t $50,000,000,000 in the last ten years or three times the cost of the World War.” He observed that three times as many young women were selling liquor as were going to college and asserted that “75,000,000 people see moving pictures every day and half of these are children, and 75% of the pictures are immoral.” He spoke of pestilence, earthquakes, astronomical phenomena, and a worldwide increase in natural disasters. Then he surveyed political developments in Europe, where Nazi Germany was moving against its neighbors. These events might confound the secular world, he said, but they did not surprise Fundamentalist Christians: “Amist it all and the ones that were not shocked was those that had studied their Bibles. . . . Twenty-five hundred years ago God saw the political situation of the world as we are seeing it fulfilled today in the present setup.” Since those ancient prophecies were now being fulfilled, the second coming of Christ and the end of the present dispensation were obviously just around the corner, so anyone not in a right relationship with God should correct that situation immediately. This sermon also reflects an imprecision of language and carelessness with facts that would often appear in his later preaching. In addition to “Amist,” Billy spoke of “epidemics of desise,” “the 14th [and 15th and 17th] centry,” “hurricuns,” and problems befalling “Londen” and “Porto Rico.” These errors offend the eye more than the ear, but he was capable of startling mispronunciations, and he often failed to recognize that some of the “facts” he cited were quite improbable. Depending on what one included as a governmental cost of crime, a fifty-billion-dollar outlay over ten years might be plausible, even during the depression. It is less likely that every child in America between the ages of three and eighteen attended 365 movies in 1940, which is what his statistics would require, or that the same two-minute whirlwind that descended on Miami in 1927 and had “blown to bits that great concrete and steel city” had then “passed on to Japan and India doing fearful damage.” Such flaws would never disappear from his preaching; neither, however, would they obscure his central message or pose much of a problem for his congregations.

  Billy was willing to practice his sermons in an empty auditorium, but when the time came to face a live audience, he wanted those seats full. From the beginning, he showed keen appreciation for the role self-promotion could play in an evangelist’s career. To advertise his appearance at a little mission church, he paid a sign painter $2.10—more than two thirds of the love offering he received—to make a banner that encouraged people to “Hear Billy Graham.” He distributed handmade fliers that asked, “Have you heard the young man with a burning message?” As his reputation and self-confidence grew, he billed himself as “Dynamic Youthful Evangelist Billy Graham,” “A Great Gospel Preacher at 21,” and, even more grandly, “Billy Graham, One of America’s Outstanding Young Evangelists—Dynamic Messages You Will Never Forget.” He also learned to advertise the fact that the services included plenty of consecrated entertainment (“Good Songs Each Night—-Trios, Quartets, Duets, Solos, Orchestra” and “The Melody Three—The Foremost Ladies Trio in America”) and abundant opportunity to socialize (“Your Friends Will Be There—Why Not You?”) Sometimes, his exaggerated assessment of his stature and his quest for crowds had hubristically comic results. Back in Charlotte one summer, Grady Wilson received a handbill advertising Billy’s revival at the First Baptist Church of Capitola, Florida. On it Billy had scrawled “Big Baptist church in the capitol of Florida. Pray for me.” When Grady decided not only to pray but to travel from Charlotte to attend the revival, he discovered that Capitola, far from being a nickname for Tallahassee, was little more than a logging camp, and that the revival had been canceled when its student pastor, one of Billy’s classmates, had gone home unexpectedly. Grady never let Billy forget this bit of puffery, but he acknowledged his admiration for his friend’s optimism: “The printer said Billy had ordered a thousand fliers for that little two-hundred-person community. He was ready to go after it.”

  If Billy had pursued his dream of attending the University of North Carolina, these activities would have marked him as an exceedingly peculiar young man, a butt of jokes, a last resort as a date. At the institute, where the highest accolade was to earn the tag “soul winner,” he stood out like Saul among the Benjaminites. His peers elected him president of the eleven-member senior class and named him the outstanding evangelist in their ranks. At commencement in June 1940, valedictorian Vera Resue observed that in times of crisis, “God has chosen a human instrument to shine forth His light in darkness. Men like Luther, John Wesley, D. L. Moody and others were ordinary men, but men who heard the voice of God. The time is ripe for another Luther, Wesley, Moody. There is room for another name in this list.” Billy may have wished to pencil his name into the space Miss Resue left blank in the published version of her speech, but he realized that God’s next hero might need more formidable credentials than a Christian Worker’s Training Course Diploma from an unaccredited Fundamentalist school. During his three-and-a-half years at the institute he acquired a nearly unshakable faith in the Bible as the inspired and literal word of God, and he learned a great deal about preaching, but Bible colleges did not pretend to offer a broad curriculum, and he knew there were yawning gaps in his education. As much as he wanted to spend every waking hour in active evangelism, he wisely decided to accept a remarkable offer he had received a few months earlier. During the winter, a party of tourists associated with Wheaton College had spent a few days at the institute’s hotel. They heard Billy preach at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle and were impressed but felt he needed some broadening and deepening. Elner Edman, the brother of Wheaton’s president, V. Raymond Edman, told him he should go to Wheaton. Billy said, “That’s what my mother wanted, but it’s too expensive.” A day or two later, Edman and another man, whose brother was the chairman of Wheaton’s board of trustees, asked Billy to caddy for them. On the golf course, they offered to pay for his first year at Wheaton and to use their influence to try to get him a scholarship for succeeding years. To Billy, it was an answer to prayer. Some of his friends advised against accepting their offer. He already possessed an undisputed talent for winning souls. Why risk tainting it or watering it down with more education? But he never seriously hesitated. After another summer of revivals, including a Pennsylvania campaign not far from where his grandfathers had fought to save the Confederacy, he shifted the center of his world to the placid Chicago exurb of Wheaton, Illinois, now (after the loss of Princeton to the Modernists) the intellectual and political center of the Fundamentalist world.

  5

  Ruth

  Theologically, Wheaton was a Lamb’s-blood relative of Bob Jones College and Florida Bible Institute, and the motto carved on the cornerstone of Blanchard Hall—For Christ and His Kingdom—clearly expressed the dominant ethos, but Wheaton embodied the broadest spirit of American Fundamentalism in the 1930s. As an accredited and academically respectable liberal arts college, it attracted the offspring of many of America’s most affluent and influential Fundamentalist families. Because Wheaton gave him almost no credit for his courses in Florida, Billy, now almost twenty-two, had to enroll as a freshman. If his bright clothes, Li’l Abner brogans, and North Carolina accent caused people to think him a naive country boy, his age and status as an ordained minister with real preaching experience gave him a jump on other neophytes, and he soon emerged as a well-known campus figure. He had not yet drawn many invitations to preach, and Frank Graham had stopped sending him money, so he found a job working for another student who hauled luggage and furniture in a battered old yellow pickup. The CEO of the Wheaton College Student T
rucking Service was preparing for mission work in China and introduced his new assistant to Ruth Bell, a second-year student who, as the daughter of a Presbyterian medical missionary, had grown up in Tsingkiang, China. Ruth claims not to remember their first meeting with any real clarity. Billy fell in love with her immediately and informed his mother of that fact before he ever got up the courage to ask for a date.

  In many respects, Ruth’s and Billy’s childhoods could hardly have differed more. He had pored over books about faraway lands; she lived about as far away from Charlotte as it was possible to get. He had heard sermons on the wickedness of card playing and swearing; her regular path to school took her alongside putrid streams where dogs ate the tiny carcasses of infants slain by their parents because they were female or deformed. She knew of children kidnapped by bandits and sold into slavery or prostitution, and of missionaries who had been murdered or who had killed themselves in despair over the wretchedness of their circumstances. Billy arose at 2:30 A.M. to milk cows; Ruth often still lay awake at that hour, unable to sleep because of the noise from gunfire and bombs, or from fear of rats and scorpions that even the strictest measures could not eliminate. In Mecklenburg County, the religiously peculiar were those who insisted on singing hymns without an organ or who kept the Sabbath as if they were Jews; Billy’s father had once warned him to be wary of Lutherans because they held “very strange beliefs.” In North Kiangsu province, nine thousand miles away, the heretics were the Christians, foreign devils with their peculiar belief in only one God, and that one a wrathful being who permitted the death of his only son.

  Despite these differences, striking points of contact existed between the two young people. Ruth’s father, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, not only loved baseball but had signed a contract with a Baltimore Orioles farm team shortly before he got caught up in the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (inspired by D. L. Moody) and dedicated himself to medical missions. As head of the Tsingkiang General Hospital, founded in 1887 by Pearl Buck’s father, Dr. Bell proved to be a talented surgeon and, like Frank Graham, a resourceful provider. Also like the Grahams, the Bells steeped their brood in Presbyterian piety, rearing them on daily doses of private and family devotions and expecting them to commit large sections of Scripture to memory. Ruth’s religion, however, took a serious turn far earlier than did Billy’s. By the time she was twelve, she was pointing toward a career as an old-maid missionary to Tibet and praying regularly for a martyr’s death. As another measure of her devotion, she loved to conduct animal funerals, complete with hymns and eulogies, before interring the dearly departed in her own pet cemetery. Of these leanings, Dr. Bell observed in a note to her teacher, “We feel Ruth has a slight tendency to revel in the sad side of things, letting her religion (which is exceedingly real and precious to her) take a slightly morbid turn.” As she matured, the darker side of her piety gave way to a spunky willingness to tackle the world head-on rather than look for avenues of escape, but she continued to cling to the vision of a solitary mission to nomadic Tibetan tribes, at least in part, because it seemed like the hardest challenge she could possibly undertake.

  During 1935 and 1936, the Bells spent a furlough year in Montreat, North Carolina, a picturesque mountainside village that served as a conference center and retirement community for Southern Presbyterians. Both Ruth and her sister Rosa finished high school that year. Rosa entered Wheaton in the fall of 1936, and Ruth followed a year later. Though obviously of modest means—her dress wardrobe consisted of one good black dress, a blue tweed suit she had picked up at a street bazaar in Chicago, and some dime-store pearls—Ruth’s vivacious beauty, a young lifetime of unusual experiences that fascinated Christian youth who considered the mission field the highest of human callings, and her well-known piety (she rose regularly at 5:00 A.M., for prayer and Bible reading) made her the prize catch of her class.

  Though Ruth felt no thunderbolt when she met Billy Graham during the fall semester of 1940, he impressed her a few days later by the fervor of his prayer at an informal church meeting. “I had never heard anyone pray like [that] before,” she said. “I sensed that here was a man that knew God in a very unusual way.” When he eventually summoned the courage to ask her to accompany him to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, she readily accepted. After the concert and a slow, snowy walk to a professor’s house for tea, he wrote home again, announcing that he planned to marry this new girl who reminded him so much of his mother. The Grahams took note but made no wedding plans. As younger sister Jean recalls, “He had fallen in love so many times, we didn’t pay much attention to him.” Ruth, always more private, chose to let God alone know that “if you let me serve you with that man, I’d consider it the greatest privilege in my life.” Their courtship was a strange one. Well aware that a young woman might not return his affection in full measure, Billy seemed to doubt he deserved or could win Ruth’s love. Their next date came six weeks later, after she invited him, by mail, to a party at her boardinghouse. A week later, he asked her out again and clumsily sputtered that he had been reluctant to pursue his interest in her because he did not feel a definite call to the mission field, a revelation that seemed a bit premature for a third date. He followed this by asking her out, then ignoring her, then asking if he was embarrassing her by taking her out too frequently. He also told her that he had asked the Lord to give her to him if that was his will, but to keep him from loving her if that would be best for both of them. She was clearly intrigued and wrote to her parents about this “humble, thoughtful, unpretentious, courteous” young man with an uncommon determination to discern and do God’s will, but she found his courtship rituals a bit peculiar and began to date other students. This produced the desired result, and Billy delivered an ultimatum: “Either you date just me, or you can date everybody but me!” That also worked, and they began to go out on a regular basis, usually to some kind of preaching service. He impressed her with his “fearless, uncompromising presentation of the Gospel,” but she later confessed she thought his preaching was too loud and too fast, and it took her some time to get used to the fact that, almost invariably, it produced an impressive harvest at the invitation.

  As Billy grew surer of their relationship, he began to assume the authoritarian, patriarchal manner he had learned at home. He told Ruth what to eat and sat across from her until she complied. He insisted she get more exercise and personally put her through a rigorous program of calisthenics. She confided to her parents that Bill (she never called him Billy) “isn’t awfully easy to love because of his sternness and unwavering stand on certain issues,” but his assurance that he did what he did because he loved her invariably melted her resistance. They talked of the future in terms of their respective “calls.” She still clung to her dream of evangelizing Tibet. He respected this noble aspiration but, since he felt no Himalayan call himself, tried to convince her that the highest role a woman could fill was that of wife and mother. Both agreed to read the Bible and pray for God’s leading. No burning light of revelation came, so Billy decided to proceed without it. At the end of the spring semester, just before they parted for the summer of 1941, he asked Ruth to marry him. She did not respond immediately, but a few weeks later, while he was filling in for John Minder in Tampa, she wrote that she believed their relationship was “of the Lord” and would be pleased to become his wife. On July 7, she acknowledged to her parents, “To be with Bill in [evangelistic] work won’t be easy. There will be little financial backing, lots of obstacles and criticism, and no earthly glory what-soever,” but added, “I knew I wouldn’t have peace till I yielded my will to the Lord and decided to marry Bill.” At this point, they had yet to kiss.

  That summer, Billy met the Bells, who had finally been forced out of China by the Japanese, and Ruth came to Charlotte to visit the Grahams. Both visits went well. At the end of the summer, Billy went to Montreat, North Carolina, where the Bells had settled permanently, and presented Ruth with an engagement ring. Then, just as she prepared to return t
o school, Ruth grew so ill that her parents feared she might have malaria and decided to put both her and Rosa, who was suffering from tuberculosis, into a Presbyterian sanatorium in New Mexico. The rest restored Ruth’s health—Rosa also recovered, though much more slowly—but the equanimity she experienced during the separation resurrected old doubts. Eventually, she wrote Billy that she had grown unsure of her love for him and thought it best to break their engagement. He was crushed but decided not to react hastily. When she returned to school in January 1942, he offered to take back the ring, but she hesitated, explaining that the real problem was that she still felt called to be a missionary. Sensing an opening, he used an approach whose efficacy he would not forget: He convinced her that not to do what he wanted would be to thwart God’s obvious will. “Do you or do you not think the Lord brought us together?” he asked. She admitted she thought that was indeed the case. He pointed out that the Bible says the husband is head of the wife and declared, with an authoritativeness probably grounded on shifting sand, “Then I’ll do the leading and you do the following.” Ruth Bell eventually surrendered her missionary vocation, but only the blindest of observers would conclude that she also surrendered her will or her independence.

  Billy and Ruth set their wedding date for August 1943, still more than eighteen months away. In the meantime, they finished school. Ruth majored in art, with a minor in Bible. In the eyes of most of their friends, then and thereafter, she was the better student, he the charismatic communicator, but Billy took his studies more seriously than ever, developing the healthy conviction that he always needed to know more. Under the influence of an outstanding professor teaching at Wheaton between stints at the University of Pennsylvania, Billy decided to major in anthropology. Instead of leading him toward cultural relativity, with its assumption of the absence of a dependable yardstick of truth and value, the Wheaton version of anthropology provided instead a reassuring affirmation that people in every culture are essentially alike and therefore equally open to a straightforward explanation of their problem (sin and separation from the one true God) and its solution (acceptance of the saving grace made possible through Christ).