A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Graham’s ability to win the support of his clerical critics turned in no small measure on his consistent manifestation of humility in the face of criticism. Colleen Townsend Evans, who had abandoned her movie career for Christian service and had come to London to assist with the crusade, recalled being in a small group as a team member read an article in which a London clergyman had “absolutely blasted” the evangelist. “He listened very thoughtfully and carefully, and finally, when he had heard the whole tirade, he lifted his head and looked at all of us and said very thoughtfully, ‘Well, I guess if I had been in that man’s place, I might have thought the same thing about me.” Whether present on that occasion or not, the often-critical Christian Century found evidence of the same spirit. Billy Graham, the magazine observed, “is revealing himself as extraordinarily teachable and humble, considering that he is surrounded with the fevered adulation of crowds so much of the time. He will learn a great deal in London and will, if he keeps up the growth which has characterized his last three years, put what he learns to good use for Christ and the church.”

  The secular press also experienced a conversion of sorts. With the exception of Hannen Swaffer, whose disdain continued unabated, Graham’s open friendliness, transparent sincerity, and disarming humility transformed acid into warm milk. Daily Express columnist William Hickey admitted he was inclined to be rude to Graham at an interview, but he wrote, “[T]hat is where the personality of the man comes into the picture—he is not a man you can be rude to, for the simple reason that a voice inside you tells you that this is a man of integrity.” While admitting he might be wrong, Hickey said, “I think he is a good man. I am not so sure that he isn’t a saintly man. I just don’t know. But make no mistake about this. . . . Billy Graham is a remarkable man. . . . He is an American. He hasn’t the inhibitions we suffer from. Perhaps he is what Britain needs. . . . It is a bitter pill to swallow.” As if this were not sufficient, at the end of the interview, when Hickey shook Graham’s hand (“He has the firm, self-conscious grip of the American executive”), wished the evangelist Godspeed and left his presence, he was stunned to realize that “my eyes were scalding with tears.” William Conner, writing in the Daily Mirror under the pen name Cassandra, did a similar turnabout. After suffering two acerbic attacks, Graham wrote a short note asking Conner for the opportunity to meet him. “While your articles about me were not entirely sympathetic,” he graciously observed, “they were two of the most cleverly written that I have ever read.” In a nice bit of irony, Cassandra suggested they meet at a pub called Baptist’s Head. After their meeting, at which Conner had a beer and Graham a soft drink, the columnist described Graham as having “a kind of ferocious cordiality that scares ordinary sinners stone cold” and confessed to an urge “to set about some devilment as soon as he switched on his looming, bulging goodness of heart.” But it would not work. “I never thought that friendliness had such a sharp, cutting edge,” he marveled. “I never thought that simplicity could cudgel a sinner so damned hard. We live and we learn. . . . The bloke means everything he says.”

  The massive crowds and widespread acclaim were so dramatic that they helped Graham gain one of the most treasured moments of the campaign: a meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Graham had, of course, invited Churchill to the crusade and had sought to arrange a personal meeting with the great man through one of his private secretaries, but Churchill declined both requests. The Wembley rally, however, piqued his curiosity and he agreed to receive the evangelist for a courtesy visit of five minutes, probably calculating that he and his party could not be hurt by a nod of recognition to the man who had so captured the nation’s attention. Precisely at noon on the second day after the Wembley service, Billy Frank Graham of Charlotte, North Carolina, was ushered into the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street to meet the most formidable figure of the midtwentieth century. Ironically, Churchill may have been more anxious than Graham; before Billy arrived, he paced back and forth, wondering aloud what one talked about with an American evangelist. When Billy entered the room, whose dim light suggested dusk rather than midday, he found the prime minister standing at the center of a long conference table, fingering one of his famous cigars, still unlit. He was surprised to discover that his host was such a short man but still felt awed in his presence. Churchill seemed depressed. Several times he said, “I am an old man, without any hope for the world.” Then he asked Graham, “What hope do you have for the world, young man?” Whether by design or accident, the prime minister had hit upon the perfect topic to discuss with an American evangelist. Billy reached into his pocket, withdrew his little New Testament, and earnestly burbled, “Mr. Prime Minister, I am filled with hope!” Gesturing with his Testament, he said, “Life is very exciting, even if there’s a war, because I know what is going to happen in the future.” He then proceeded to give Churchill a recitation of the significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and professed his strong belief that Christ would come again to bring human history to a glorious conclusion. Churchill said little, but he listened closely as the visit stretched to forty minutes. He told Graham that perhaps the only hope for humanity was, indeed, a return to God, and he asked that the details of their conversation remain private. His aides later indicated that he had been impressed with the earnest young American. Certainly, Graham had been impressed with him. “I felt,” he said, “like I had shaken hands with Mr. History.”

  Sinners, critics, and skeptics were not the only ones who changed. At the suggestion of advisers, Billy reduced both the speed and volume of his delivery, further reined in his tendency to pace about the stage and dramatize his stories, and even disowned some of his most egregious literalisms. Of his 1950 description of heaven as a sixteen-hundred-mile cube, for example, he said, “It is a statement I do not make any longer, something I no longer hold. But there seems to be no way I can live it down.” It was sufficient, he thought, to know that “to live with God is called heaven.” As for hell, he told reporters that “I do believe in hell. I believe there is a hell on earth for those who break the moral laws of God, and I believe there is a hell to come; but whether there is fire there I do not know.” In keeping with this progressive move toward decorum and respectability, Cliff Barrows retired his trombone, and when reporters suggested that people responded to the invitation because of the almost hypnotic effect of the music, he stopped using an invitation hymn for a time, with no effect on the response. Graham also moderated some of his political views. Not long after arriving in London, he conceded that “you can say what you like about socialism, but it’s done a lot of good here.” More substantially, he repeatedly touted the labor-union movement as one of the proudest legacies of Wesley’s and Moody’s revivals, and he urged the churches to show as much concern for unions as for other economic groups. At the same time, those who viewed him as a crass American entrepreneur who used professional revival techniques to extract money from the gullible could not but fall silent when they learned that BGEA was picking up over half the £150,000 cost of the crusade, and that Graham had permitted the sponsoring committee to stop taking collections at services long before the crusade ended, even though this increased the burden on his organization.

  The critical test of an evangelistic crusade, of course, is not the amount or quality of press coverage, nor the number of famous people met and favorably impressed, but the lasting impact on individuals and institutions. Some results were easy to quantify. When relay services and meetings held by associate evangelists were added to those at which Graham preached, the total attendance for the twelve-week crusade topped two million. Of that number, 36,431 filled out decision cards and received counseling. According to BGEA figures, 90 percent of those reported some kind of church connection, but 75 percent regarded themselves as making a first-time decision, suggesting the connection was quite nominal. Approximately half of all inquirers described themselves as essentially “unchurched.” Enthusiastic British Evangelicals almost uniformly credited t
he crusade with producing the greatest wave of religious interest since the onset of World War I, and some boldly compared it to Wesley’s efforts, which had led to the founding of the Methodist Church. Those who regarded its results more modestly took pleasure in seeing religion, particularly Evangelical religion, become front-page news and a topic of general conversation. Even the venerable London Sunday Times noted that the churches had been astonished to discover that the spirit of materialism they believed had caused people to lose interest in spiritual matters had been exposed as no more than a veneer covering a widespread and genuine religious longing.

  Eventually, of course, church leaders and journalists and sociologists began to look at the results more closely and critically. As would prove to be the case throughout Graham’s ministry, the spectacles through which the investigators examined the data tended to affect their methods and their findings. Seven months after the crusade ended, a London Evening Standard poll of the city’s 20 largest Anglican parishes found that over two thirds of the 336 inquirers referred to them were already members or regular attenders of the churches that received their cards; of the remaining 110 people, only 35 were still attending church. If these proportions held good for other congregations, the net gain in new members for all of Great Britain’s churches would be 4,000 people, a mere 11 percent of all inquirers. Evangelicals responded by noting that limiting the survey to Anglican churches could skew the results, since the most vigorous supporters of the crusade had been non-Anglican Evangelical bodies. The British Weekly, a nondenominational Christian paper that had backed the crusade, eventually conceded that “the main impact was among already sympathetic church members. The effect outside the Church, speaking generally, appears to have been very little indeed in terms of figures.” The archbishop of Canterbury expressed a similar sense of mild disillusionment. Immediately after the crusade, he wrote a quite positive assessment of Graham’s work for the Canterbury Diocesan Notes; three years later, he reluctantly concluded that “there is very little to show” for the Harringay crusade. Graham’s supporters typically defended the crusade with anecdotes rather than with statistics, telling of churches directly across the street from each other, one of which had supported the crusade wholeheartedly, while the other remained disdainful and aloof, with the result that the standoffish church got no new members, and the active church soon had to add new services to accommodate a swarm of converts. The lesson seemed clear: Churches got from a crusade what they put into it. But not every case supported this analysis. Some active churches gained few or no new members, but many pastors reported that even with little tangible growth, they saw increased vitality in their congregations and indicated they would welcome another Billy Graham crusade. Perhaps the most significant tangible impact of the Harringay crusade was its role in persuading an unusually large number of young men to enter the ministry, and to do so with explicitly Evangelical beliefs and motives. Before the crusade, only 7 percent of Anglican seminarians and ordinands identified themselves as Evangelicals; the rest tended to be theological liberals, with little or no interest in evangelism. In 1956, twenty-three of thirty-three men ordained in the various Anglican dioceses of London were Evangelicals. A year later the proportion was twenty-two of thirty-two. Other dioceses and other denominations reported similar figures. From that time until the present, according to knowledgeable Anglican churchmen, Evangelical theological schools have consistently enrolled far more students than their liberal counterparts, and numerous key British church leaders, Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike, trace either their conversion or their decision to enter the ministry to the Harringay crusade.

  No individual experienced a greater impact from the crusade than Billy Graham himself. However one might assess the effects of his preaching on others, Harringay gave his own career an incalculable boost. By touching London, he touched the entire British Empire, whose tentacles reached around the globe. By leaving his mark on this great world capital, he transformed himself into a world figure. Both the American ambassador and the British home secretary credited him with doing more for Anglo-American relations than any man or diplomatic effort had been able to achieve since the end of the war. In reporting that bit of intelligence to President Eisenhower, he offered an observation that might well have expressed his feelings about all the accolades and generous assessments tossed his way in Harringay’s aftermath: “This may be an exaggeration, but if these meetings have helped, I am deeply grateful.”

  12

  Fields White Unto Harvest

  In the years following the triumph at Harringay, Graham did his best to fulfill Jesus’ directive to “preach the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15), or at least enough of it to satisfy his 1954 aspiration to be a true world evangelist. Though he held only eight full-scale crusades in the United States between Harringay and the end of the decade, he kept busy spreading his message from Berlin to New Delhi to Tokyo. As a result of his worldwide successes, he advanced from being the popular young favorite of Evangelical Christianity’s key leaders to occupying a position of unchallenged prominence in their front rank.

  Immediately following Harringay, Billy and a small band of associates set out on a whirlwind tour of European cities. Bob Evans had planned a series of modest rallies, but the news from Harringay stimulated such interest that most of these were transferred to the largest stadium in each city. The overflow crowds clearly justified the change. In Stockholm 65,000 thronged Skansen arena for the largest religious meeting ever held in Sweden. In Copenhagen 15,000 stood outdoors in a pouring rain to hear Billy speak in the city square. In Amsterdam he preached to 40,000. But it was in Germany that he experienced both the heaviest criticism and greatest success. Repeatedly, he came under fire for what his critics saw as a uniquely American blend of commercialism and sensationalism. They characterized him as “a Hollywood version of John the Baptist” and “a salesman in God’s company” who “advertises the Bible as if it were toothpaste or chewing gum” and is overly concerned with the size of the commission. Critics also scored him for a theology they judged to be superficial and naively literalistic, citing such statements as “from birth to grave, God has a TV camera focused on you, and every bad word is being taped.” His proclamation that people could be born again simply by professing their belief in Christ ran counter to the time-honored process of catechism and confirmation practiced in the Reformed (Lutheran and Calvinist) traditions and to some seemed tantamount to heresy. To step forward at Billy Graham’s invitation as a sign they were accepting Christ as their savior seemed to call into question the validity of the entire confirmation process, and thus of the theology the ministers held dear. Both the individualism and pluralism implicit in revivalist preaching—decisions are personal and differences in belief and practice are downplayed—contrasted sharply with the more hierarchical and communal ethos of the European parish, creating another source of discomfort.

  The sharpest attacks, however, came from the East German press, which charged him with being a spy, a tool of Texas oilmen, a front man for weapons manufacturers (a reference to Alfred Owen), an envoy of American imperialism and capitalism, and a demagogue who used the same techniques employed by Hitler. One paper published a cartoon that showed him flying over Berlin with a Bible in one hand and an atom bomb in the other while Secretary Dulles cheered in the background. Several papers cited his address to American military personnel at Frankfurt, in which he had praised West Germany’s postwar recovery and observed that to deter Soviet aggression, the country should be equipped with the most modern and effective weapons available, a statement that also stirred a furor in London, which viewed any encouragement of German rearmament with deep suspicion. In what would become a familiar tactic, Graham denied he had any political agenda, insisting that the opinion he had expressed was not his own but simply an observation he had heard others make. In light of later controversial statements, it seems likely he was expressing a political opinion he felt would please his immediate audie
nce without adequate consideration of its probable reception in other quarters. But whatever the accuracy of the charges leveled against him, they did little to dampen enthusiasm for his mission.

  The emotional and statistical high point of the German tour occurred in Berlin. The rally was scheduled for the great Olympic stadium where Hitler and Goebbels had goaded a nation into war, and Graham had learned that large numbers of East Germans would be present—the Berlin Wall had not yet been erected. The symbolic aspects of proclaiming the crucified Christ in what had been a shrine of the twisted cross of Nazism did not escape Billy. A few hours before the rally, he lay writhing in agony in his hotel room, suffering from a kidney stone but refusing to take strong painkillers because they would make him too dopey to preach. Wrestling anew with the forces of ambition and humility that warred within him, he speculated to a friend that perhaps God had sent this affliction to remind him that he should not allow the recent triumph at Harringay or the huge crowds he was attracting in Europe to cause him to believe he could depend on his own strength or rhetorical power, since that would be to repeat the tragic hubris Hitler had displayed in the same stadium where he would speak that very afternoon. His friend could understand that fear better than most. John Bolten had been a confidant of Hitler’s during the early years of his rise to power. When Hitler began to unleash his maniacal hatred of Jews, a group of industrialists persuaded Bolten to convey their objections to this policy, and Hitler reacted with such rage that Bolten fled to America, settling in Boston and gradually building a new fortune to replace the one he had left behind in his homeland. He had rededicated his life to Christ during Graham’s 1950 Boston campaign and had become one of the evangelist’s key supporters. Now, back in his native country to help smooth Graham’s way, he pondered the irony of riding in a motorcade, along the same route Hitler had taken to the same stadium less than two decades earlier, in the company of “a young Timothy with a very different message” but nonetheless a charismatic orator whose ability to sway masses of people was propelling him to heights of power.