A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Graham did not wring such themes for every ounce of anxiety and fear they might hold, but seldom did he let an invitation pass without giving them at least a twist or two. It was not high pressure, but it was pressure nonetheless, and he felt no qualms in using it to move them to make the decision toward which all his preaching pointed. “I’m going to ask you to get up out of your seats,” he would announce, “and come and stand in front of the platform, and say, ‘Tonight, I want Christ in my heart.’” And then, suddenly and unlike most revivalists, who continued to badger and plead and cajole throughout the invitation hymn, he stopped talking, closed his eyes, rested his chin on his right fist, cradled his right elbow in his left hand, and waited—for the Holy Spirit to move, for men and women and boys and girls to decide that this would be the day of their salvation.

  For all his vitality and carefully honed technique, Graham was far from flawless as a preacher. He often insisted he was no scholar or intellectual, and his sermons were studded with garish justification of his modesty. He seemed to specialize in sweeping generalization and oversimplification, as when he declared that “almost all ministers of the gospel and students of the Bible agree that [the postwar rise of Russia] is masterminded by Satan himself” or blithely proclaimed in a sermon on “The Sins of the Tongue” that “the problems of the world could be solved overnight if the world could get victory over the tongue.” In similar fashion he asserted that the major reasons for the immorality of youth in midcentury America were the troubled marriages of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, Ingrid Bergman’s notorious affair with Roberto Rossellini, and too-frank discussions of marital problems. On other occasions he offered dubious or glaringly erroneous renderings of the thought of authorities he cited, as when he overlooked Thomas Jefferson’s well-known Deism and credited him with having “believed that [man’s] salvation, his only real freedom, is found in a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, because he gives freedom from fear of death, from sin,” or when he lumped Nietzsche, Freud, and Schleiermacher together under the heading of “behavioristic philosophies.”

  Such naive statements gave more learned and sophisticated critics ample excuse to dismiss Graham as an undereducated zealot, but they detracted hardly at all from the quality that gave his preaching its strength and power: the unmistakable authority of his proclamation. The source of his authority, of course, was the Bible and his absolute confidence in its truth. It was for him a saber whose strength and sharpness he used to slash deeply into the consciousness of his hearers. He understood intuitively that countless multitudes—not everyone, to be sure, but far more than enough to fill the largest arena in any city—want to be told what to believe by someone who believes it himself. He advised ministers to hide whatever doubts they might have and to preach what they do believe with full conviction. “People want to be told authoritatively that this is so,” he said, “not be given pro and con arguments. . . . The world longs for finality and authority. It is weary of theological floundering and uncertainty. Belief exhilarates people; doubt depresses them.” His own belief was final and unshakable, if not fully explicable, and because he had no doubts, he was able to convey in his voice, his gestures, and his absolute forthrightness a personal authority that bolstered and exemplified the authority of Scripture. He did not defend his belief; he proclaimed it in clear and perfectly intelligible language, so that no one could doubt or misunderstand what he wanted them to do.

  Though Graham often spoke of social problems of national and global magnitude, he offered few suggestions for dealing with them other than accepting Christ as one’s personal savior. In part, this was because he considered himself an evangelist, not a theologian or social reformer. More crucial was his conviction, widely shared among Evangelicals, that the only way to change society is to change individual men and women, who would then act as a leavening agent to make society more Christian, which he seemed to assume would naturally cause it to resemble the decent, hardworking, middle-class, patriotic, capitalist society to which he belonged and in which he felt most comfortable. He and his fellow Evangelicals did not expect to bring about widespread and basic social change by promoting legislation or disobeying laws that seemed clearly unjust.

  In 1947, Carl F. H. Henry, one of the most prominent and perhaps the most gifted of young Evangelical theologians, wrote a pivotal book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, in which he lamented his own movement’s lack of sensitivity to social problems. Modernists had an insufficient view of the gospel, he believed, but they often demonstrated a concern for society that put Fundamentalists to shame. If Evangelicals were to have the impact they ought to have, they must develop a more progressive social message. Harold John Ockenga agreed. Evangelicals, he insisted, “must concern [themselves] not just with personal salvation and doctrinal truth “but also with the problems of race, of war, of class struggle, of liquor control, of juvenile delinquency, of immorality, and of national imperialism. . . . [O]rthodox Christians, cannot abdicate their responsibility in the social scene.” Also in 1947, radio preacher Charles Fuller, with strong encouragement from Henry, Ockenga, and other leading Evangelicals, founded Fuller Theological Seminary, one of whose goals was to encourage a more socially enlightened ministry. Graham was aware of these currents of modest change and was particularly impressed by Carl Henry’s book, but his overriding passion for winning souls outweighed his social concerns, and his solutions to major social problems were typically those of Evangelical individualism and pietistic moralism—get individuals to attend church, read their Bibles, and pray, and social problems will vanish—and he showed only limited appreciation for corporate efforts to effect social change. He occasionally conceded that organized labor had helped reduce exploitation and ameliorate insufferable conditions in the workplace. He noted with pride that Wesley’s revivals had stimulated improvements in working conditions in England and often noted that Keir Hardy, the founder of the British Labor party, had been one of D. L. Moody’s converts. He was careful to point out that employers should regard their workers not just as “man power” but as human beings, should provide them with a safe and pleasant work environment and treat them with fairness, generosity, and respect, and that responsible workers should give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and “not stoop to take unfair advantage” of their employers. To encourage such a whistle-while-you-work atmosphere, his associates visited industrial sites in every crusade city, setting up prayer groups they hoped would improve relations between employers and employees, and he urged employers and workers to save a seat for Jesus at the bargaining table. “I guarantee,” he said, “that if labor and management alike would bow their knees to almighty God and ask him for a solution, they would solve their problems overnight. If Christ reigned in these labor discussions, . . . we would enter an industrial Utopia.” Still, his reference to the Garden of Eden as a Paradise in which there were “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease,” clearly reflected his preference for a world free of unions and the conflict they produced. Neither Graham’s supporters nor his critics expected or demanded much more of him on most problems facing society during the 1950s, but he could not easily avoid more comprehensive attention to two issues threatening to rend the fabric of unity woven by the war and the following period of recovery. Those issues were communism and racism. The first, he could not resist; the second, he could not avoid.

  To Graham, communism was such an unqualified evil that he regarded attacks on it as but the slightest departure from his ostensible political neutrality. At a precrusade press conference, he told newspeople that “not once will you hear from this platform an attack, by implication or otherwise, against any religious or political group. The only one I mention from the platform occasionally is Communism, which is anti-God, anti-Christ, and anti-American.” On the Hour of Decision he declared that the struggle between Communism and Christianity was “a battle to the death—either Communism must die, or Christianity must die because it is actua
lly a battle between Christ and Anti-Christ,” and he told an Asheville reporter, “I think it gets its power from the devil.” In keeping with that conviction, the first printed sermon he distributed to Hour of Decision listeners was “Christianity Versus Communism.” In it he characterized Communists as devotees of a religion “created and directed by Satan himself. . . . The Devil is their god; Marx, their prophet; Lenin, their saint; and Malenkov, their high priest.” These “disciples of Lucifer,” he charged, “seek in devious and various ways to convert a peaceful world to their doctrine of death and destruction.”

  Graham, like many Americans, expressed admiration for those claiming to find subversives in government and elsewhere in American society. When Senator Joseph McCarthy, frustrated by witnesses who refused to answer his badgering questions, called for changes in the Fifth Amendment, Graham recommended that if that was what it took, “Then let’s do it.” Even after McCarthy’s and similar committees came under heavy fire for their abusive and demagogic tactics, Graham persisted in his admiration for their efforts. In a 1953 sermon, a year before the Senate censured McCarthy, he said, “While nobody likes a watchdog, and for that reason many investigation committees are unpopular, I thank God for men who, in the face of public denouncement and ridicule, go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle and from that vantage point, try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid, and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known—Communism.” As McCarthy became more intemperate, and as his opponents began to demonstrate that he was a liar and a charlatan, Graham began to back away from him and his ilk. He admitted that while there might be some leftist, Marxist thinking in American churches, as McCarthy and others charged, he did not know of any such cases personally and was opposed to having people “put under suspicion without solid documentary facts and proof.” And in 1954, when reporters pressed him for a statement, he said, “I have never met McCarthy, corresponded with him, exchanged telegrams or telephone him. I have no comments to make on the Senator.” When they asked whether, simply as a Christian leader, he did not have some opinion on McCarthyism, he replied, “I am not answering that.” A few weeks later, he informed President Eisenhower that “most people are laughing off the McCarthy hearings” and were not giving them the kind of seriousness they had earlier received. Later that year, however, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Graham observed that like Nero during the burning of Rome, the Senate was fiddling over “trifles” and “bringing disgrace to the dignity of American statesmanship” by making such a fuss. Other patriotic Americans besides Billy Graham (including Robert F. Kennedy, who worked for McCarthy for six months before becoming disillusioned) had been taken in by the junior senator from Wisconsin, and despite his apparent willingness to modify the Constitution if it would help ferret out enemies of freedom, Graham’s tolerant spirit made him uncomfortable with McCarthy’s excesses once he understood their implications. Still, his conviction that America was locked in a death struggle with Satan’s own ideology kept him from ever declaring flatly that Joseph McCarthy had also been an enemy of freedom.

  Graham by no means believed that all of America’s problems were caused by Communists themselves. Equally at fault were American leaders who had underestimated the Communist threat, had listened to bad advice, and had followed a course of appeasement that encouraged Communist aggression of the very sort that led to the war in Korea. “We’ve lost prestige in the Far East, shown weakness, betrayed friends,” he lamented. “Our morally weakened allies are now calling for the admission of Red China into the United Nations and crying for the scalp of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa.” Such a faltering approach, he warned, was doomed to fail. “There can be no bargaining, there can be no parleying or compromising with evil.” America must stand firm, “no matter what it costs.” Firmness did not necessarily entail support of the United Nations. In a 1953 sermon, “America’s Decision,” he observed that “we have been caught in the web of the United Nations,” then quoted a Life editorial that had said of the UN’s intervention in Korea, “They set the policies, we shed the blood and pay the bills.” Though Graham would come to have a higher opinion of the UN in later years, he criticized it during the Korean conflict for its failure “to stand up to Russia” and ventured that a root cause of its some times spineless behavior was its lack of a clear theistic foundation: “At the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, there was no prayer made to God for guidance and blessing. We were afraid that the Godless, atheistic Communists would not like it, so we bowed in deference to Russia.” Such statements earned Graham recognition as a staunch anti-Communist. The Chicago Daily News characterized him as “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One,” and the Soviet Army newspaper, Red Star, denounced him as a quack, a charlatan, and a howling hysteric whose comments on world affairs impressed only “simpletons inexperienced in politics.” With equal vehemence, East German papers depicted him as a hypocritical demagogue fronting for a war-mongering White House and soulless Wall Street capitalists. Clearly, however much impact they assigned to his efforts, the Communists regarded Graham as something more than just another itinerant missionary.

  For all the seriousness of the Communist threat, attacking it was a relatively risk-free enterprise. Evangelists since Billy Sunday had pounded on communism with impunity; not many Communists wandered into their tabernacles, and few Fundamentalists held up a hand to argue that their Communist friends had been misunderstood. All Graham had to do was avoid looking foolish. Racism posed a much trickier problem. Many Christians, as well as many observers who were not Christians, felt Graham ought to use all his influence to denounce segregation and prejudice. At the same time, others among his supporters, particularly in the South, continued to defend racist policies and practices and did not want him to meddle with what they regarded as a God-ordained system. To complicate matters even further, increased reliance by blacks on various forms of public protest ran counter to Graham’s own deep abhorrence for conflict and impropriety. The complexities of that problem would dog him for decades.

  As a son of the South, Graham inherited a view of blacks as a qualitatively different and inferior people. “It was sort of an unspoken assumption that we were in a different class,” he recalled. “Whether it was master/servant, I don’t know. It was with some people, I’m sure. I don’t think I ever analyzed it when I was a boy.” Like many southerners, however, he was not exposed to a particularly virulent form of racism. His father used the word nigger, later softening it to nigra and then to negro, but he also hired Reese Brown, a black man who had been to school and served as a sergeant in World War I, to be foreman of the dairy farm. Billy admired Brown, worked alongside him, learned from him, played with his children, and shared meals at his table, experiences that made it difficult to sustain any notion of blacks as subhuman creatures. He often claimed that after his conversion he found it difficult to reconcile racial discrimination with worship of a God who is “no respecter of persons,” but these misgivings remained latent for a number of years. Bob Jones College and Florida Bible Institute were whites-only schools, and issues of racial justice did not arise. Wheaton College had been founded by abolitionists, and its student body included a sprinkling of black students, some of whom Billy befriended. His anthropology studies taught him that race is a quite imprecise term and concept often used by laypeople to explain such obviously nongenetic traits as language, religion, and social values. He also learned that most of the world’s peoples, including those responsible for some of humanity’s greatest achievements, are of mixed heritage. But these experiences and insights demanded no radical response. Most Evangelicals, even in the North, did not think it their duty to oppose segregation; it was enough to treat the blacks they knew personally with courtesy and fairness, and Billy found that quite easy to do. Dr. Bell, whom he admired tremendously, saw no contradiction between being a Christian an
d endorsing traditional southern racial attitudes, and he strongly urged his son-in-law to stay away from social-reform efforts that might deflect him from his primary task of winning souls.

  During the early years of his independent ministry, Graham followed the example set by Billy Sunday and others by holding segregated meetings wherever that was the local custom. In Los Angeles and New England, blacks were welcomed and free to sit wherever they liked, but the few who supported his crusade in Columbia, South Carolina, were obliged to sit in a clearly designated “colored section.” When he returned to New England for his reprise tour, reporters grilled him about his acquiescence to this racist practice. He had no persuasive defense for not taking a stronger stand, but he affirmed his belief that the gospel is for all people, regardless of color, and that spiritual revival, which he professed to see on every hand, was the only dependable way to break down racial barriers. He managed to avoid a major controversy, but awareness that a skeptical public would be watching everything he did pricked his increasingly uneasy conscience. In Portland that summer, he objected to the automatic assumption that just because he was a Southern Baptist, he also favored racial inequality. “All men are created equal under God,” he said flatly. “Any denial of that is a contradiction of holy law.” Brave words and good copy, but two months later, he accepted just such a denial and contradiction by preaching to segregated audiences throughout his Atlanta crusade. Though Georgia was experiencing considerable racial tension at the time, Graham railed against the evils of alcohol, drugs, crime, divorce, and suicide, but said nothing about the evils of racism. It troubled him that few blacks attended his services and that the black ministerial association indignantly refused, and the leading black newspaper vigorously criticized, his offer to hold a special service for blacks only. Unfortunately, he was not sufficiently troubled either to speak out boldly against racism or to demand that his next several southern crusades—in Fort Worth, Shreveport, Memphis, Greensboro, and Raleigh—be integrated. It bothered him that blacks stayed away, but he resisted any action that might engender conflict or offend his white hosts. During his brief Hollywood Bowl crusade in 1951, he tried to play both sides of the issue, announcing that he personally favored improved race relations but that organized reform efforts were likely to do more harm than good, especially since it seemed to him that Communists and Communist sympathizers were at the root of most such efforts. Once again, he could imagine no route to racial harmony that did not run past the cross. “You can’t clean up a city,” he said, “until you clean up the hearts and minds of individuals, and the only successful method of accomplishing this is to lead them to an acceptance of Christian faith.”