A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Ruth hired an architect to draw plans for the house but served as counter-architect and project manager herself. Her task was not easy. Local workmen found it hard to understand why a woman whose husband had a good job would want a house made out of old logs instead of clean brick or brand-new lumber covered with asbestos siding, and then want to fill it with country junk instead of going to Sears, Roebuck and buying furniture that matched and wasn’t all scratched up as if somebody else had used it. Billy himself had some preference for the new and modern—“When Bill gets to heaven and finds it’s not like a Holiday Inn or Marriott,” Ruth joked, “he’ll be back”—but he let his wife build it to suit herself, stipulating only that it have comfortable chairs and plenty of good lighting. Several of the craftsmen never caught her vision. One carpenter finally quit when she insisted he hang weather-beaten cabin doors in the front hall closets. “I weren’t mad at none of you men,” he told his co-workers, “but everything I done up there I had to do wrong. A man can’t take no pride in this kind of work.” But others eventually came to share at least a bit of her affection for “mountain primitive,” and one finally conceded, “You know, this house kind of grows on you, and before you know it, you catch yourself a-liking it.”

  Little Piney Cove is not hard to like. The view across the mountains, framed in great sweeping windows that fill the high-ceilinged, rough-beamed living room, dining room, and large functional kitchen is beyond price. The rooms themselves are large, warm, and rich with wood and books and mementos and the redolence of four fireplaces, the largest of which, in the living room, is of walk-in dimensions and crowned with a mantle (fashioned from an old diving board) carved with the words Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”). To the question of how many rooms it has, Ruth laughs and gives a stock answer: “The architect told me, ‘Ruth, if you are smart, you will never count the rooms in this house.’ So I never have. You have to decide what’s a room and what’s not a room. Ned [their youngest son, born in 1958] always slept in what was supposed to be the linen closet.”

  Isolated as it was, Little Piney Cove did not permit complete withdrawal from the world. Graham’s foreign tours had enabled him to avoid direct involvement with mounting racial tensions in the United States during 1955 and the early part of 1956, but as he faced repeated questioning about the American situation and watched with a mixture of dismay and fascination at the nonviolent protests led by fellow Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., he began to ponder what he might do to help. Others had been pondering the same question. Alabama congressman Frank W. Boykin, a friend and supporter, wrote to President Eisenhower, recommending that he enlist the evangelist to help the South make the transition to integration—“to quiet it down and to go easy and, in a godlike way instead of trying to cram it down the throats of our people all in one day, which some of our enemies are trying to do.” Eisenhower, whose chances of reelection could be hurt by racial turmoil, seized immediately on Boykin’s suggestion and dictated a long letter to Graham. The President referred to a previous conversation in which they had discussed “the opportunity open to ministers of promoting both tolerance and progress in our race relations problem” and listed several gradualist measures he thought might help reduce tensions. “Could we not begin to elect a few qualified Negroes to school boards?” he asked. “Could not universities begin to make entrance into their graduate schools strictly on the basis of merit—the examinations to be conducted by some Board, which might even be unaware of the race or color of the applicant?” Might it not be possible to develop flexible seating plans for public buses so that blacks would not be left waiting at bus stops while seats reserved for whites went vacant? “It would appear to me,” the President ventured, “that things like this could properly be mentioned in a pulpit.”

  Graham’s response, dispatched by return mail and followed with a visit to the White House two days later, not only reflected his willingness to use his influence to help ameliorate an important social problem but showed his oft-repeated claim of political neutrality to be less than fully accurate. He assured Eisenhower he would convene a meeting of the leaders of the major southern denominations and would urge them to call on their people to show moderation, charity, and compassion as they moved toward compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision. He also noted that he had talked with Governors Luther Hodges of North Carolina and Frank Clement of Tennessee and had urged them “to consider the racial problem from a spiritual point of view.” Then, moving from the role of minister to partisan tactician, he said, “Immediately after the election, you can take whatever steps you feel are wise and right. In the meantime, it might be well to let the Democratic party bear the brunt of the debate. Your deeds are speaking for you. You have so wonderfully kept above the controversies that necessarily rage from time to time. I hope particularly before November you are able to stay out of this bitter racial situation that is developing.”

  As promised, Graham met with a wide range of black and white southern religious leaders, both in groups and privately, laying before them “what I considered to be a sensible program for better race relations.” He had little doubt that like the President and himself, God approved of a gradual approach to integration. “I believe the Lord is helping us, and if the Supreme Court will go slowly and the extremists on both sides will quiet down, we can have a peaceful social readjustment over the next ten-year period.” Like many another moderate, however, he soon found that standing in the middle affords more people an opportunity to shoot. On the Right, staunch resisters of desegregation denounced him as a meddler and traitor to his people. On the Left, liberal Christians wondered why he demanded that some sins be renounced immediately and totally but thought it permissible to repent of racism a step or two at a time. Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the most acute and influential religious thinker in America at the time, scolded Graham in Christian Century for a moderate approach that failed to take black suffering seriously and that looked pale and timorous when compared to Charles Finney’s vigorous support of abolition.

  To have become the sort of bold prophet Niebuhr and others wanted him to be was ideologically and temperamentally impossible for Billy Graham. He sincerely believed that laws cannot change hearts, and he found it extremely painful to make people angry enough to renounce him. But if he could not directly confront, he could attempt to persuade, and he did so quite publicly. That fall, in Life magazine, he issued a plea for an end to racial intolerance. He assured a national audience that most southern ministers believed segregation should be ended on buses, in railroad and bus stations, in hotels, and in restaurants, but that it was “far too early to implement school integration in some sections of the Deep South.” Still, he did not lay all the blame at the feet of extremists and outsiders. “We have sown flagrant human injustice,” he confessed, “and we have reaped a harvest of racial strife.” But southerners, he noted, were not the world’s only racists. Jains discriminate against people of low caste in India, the British look down on Jamaican blacks, Arabs and Jews dislike each other, white Americans behave unjustly toward Mexicans and Indians as well as blacks, and blacks themselves often manifest prejudice toward whites. He reiterated his conviction that none of these attitudes could be justified from Scripture—“Let’s not make the mistake of pleading the Bible to defend it”—and noted that after an earlier period of bowing to local custom, he now refused to hold a crusade unless blacks were permitted to sit wherever they pleased, even though his conversations with blacks revealed that they usually felt comfortable sitting by themselves. Parents, he said, should actively teach their children to love people of other races lest they pass on the sin of prejudice, and all Christians should “take a stand in your church for neighbor love. . . . Take courage, speak up, and help the church move forward in bettering race relations.” All things considered, it was hardly a pathbreaking statement, but it was a statement, and it called on Christians to take responsibility for building a better world.


  13

  New Evangelicals, Old Fundamentalists

  As the scope of his ministry expanded, Graham’s supporting nucleus swelled proportionately. When the Minneapolis staff grew to more than 125, prompting a move to larger quarters, BGEA purchased a plain but roomy Standard Oil building that provided twice as much space at less cost than the previous annual rent. Negotiations for the building reveal a telling aspect of Graham’s leadership style, a style that enabled him to husband his energies and concentrate on matters more directly related to ministry. After resigning from the Northwestern Schools, he spent little time in Minneapolis, content to leave the day-to-day operation to George Wilson. He liked the arrangement and saw no reason to alter it, even for something as important as choosing the ministry’s basic administrative facility. When Wilson called repeatedly to laud the advantages of the building, he was both astonished and gratified to hear his boss say, “Man, if you need a building, go ahead and buy it. Don’t bother me with details.”

  Graham was, however, willing to take a stronger hand in augmenting his personal circle. Throughout his ministry, when he needed someone to fill a particular role, instead of launching a formal or informal search for a person with appropriate credentials, he has selected someone he liked and trusted, whatever the shape or content of his portfolio. He has done whatever it took to persuade that person to join him, then endued him with confidence to accomplish the task for which he had been chosen. As he moved more and more in circles of strangers, new friends, and high-powered casual acquaintances, he felt the need for the reassurance that only old friends can provide. And as he had done while in YFC and at Northwestern, he called on one of his oldest and most trusted friends, T. W. Wilson.

  After leaving Northwestern along with Graham, T. W. had gone back into an evangelistic ministry and was achieving considerable success with his own team. He had felt like a misfit at Northwestern and admitted he suspected it was Billy Graham, not God, who had called him to that particular position. When Graham invited him to join his crusade team in 1956, he resisted. Wilson was flourishing financially, a pleasant experience for a man reared in poverty, and admitted that “for me to be willing to take a big cut in salary was my big problem.” Instead of offering to match his current income, Graham used a bit of spiritual jujitsu on Wilson. “T,” he said, “why don’t you come [with me] and just take a salary. I know what kind of offerings you get, but I believe your ministry would be more constructive, more helpful, more edifying, and freer from criticism.” Wilson struggled with the decision but finally gave in. “In a sense, it was a selfish thing,” he acknowledged, “and yet, I wanted to do what was honorable and right. I took a salary of just about one third of what I had been accustomed to, but I was happy about it, and it made me feel more like a gentleman.” Over the next thirty years, no one, including Ruth, would spend more time at Billy’s side than T. W. Wilson.

  A second major addition came with the recruitment of Leighton Ford, an impressive young Canadian whose life Graham had already touched in important ways. Ford, an able preacher and youth leader while in high school, met Graham at a YFC conference at Winona Lake. Their paths crossed again in January 1949, when Billy spoke at a Canadian Youth Fellowship meeting at Ford’s invitation. When only one young woman came forward at the close of Graham’s sermon, Leighton was crushed, apparently feeling he was somehow responsible for not having produced a more receptive audience. After the service, as he stood by the side of the platform, tears of disappointment streaming down his face, he felt the presence of the tall young evangelist he so admired standing beside him. Graham recognized, of course, that Leighton was in no way responsible for the meager response, but he took his young friend’s concern seriously. “Billy put his arms around me,” Ford recalled, “and said, ‘Leighton, God has given you a burden, and He always blesses somebody with a burden.” Graham perceived that Leighton Ford had exceptional promise as a preacher and Christian leader, and he determined to see it realized.

  Shortly afterward, he contacted President Edman of Wheaton and got him to accept Ford as a student. Then, not content with the role of college recruiter, he decided to become a matchmaker. In his subsequent letters to Leighton and even in a carbon copy of a letter he sent to Edman, he managed to mention that his younger sister, Jean, would also be enrolling at Wheaton in the fall. If Ford understood this simply to be incidental news, his mother did not. Throughout the spring and summer, whenever he dated a girl, she would remind him that he should not get serious, because “you haven’t met Billy Graham’s sister yet.” On the home front, Graham was telling Jean about Leighton. Perhaps sensing that once Billy decided what people ought to do with their lives, the chances of getting him to relent were minimal, the two young people accepted their fate and were married in December 1953; the bride’s older brother performed the ceremony. During the summer of 1952, Ford worked for BGEA as a representative of the film ministry, arranging screenings for Mr. Texas in churches and rented halls throughout the Midwest. In 1955 he was a student at Columbia (Presbyterian) Theological Seminary in Georgia and spent the summer in Scotland holding one-night meetings aimed at keeping Graham’s Kelvin Hall inquirers plugged into local churches. He proved so effective that Graham persuaded him to return to Toronto in the fall to help with a three-week crusade in his home city. Soon afterward, he became a full-time associate evangelist with the team, a position he would hold for thirty years.

  That Graham was able to summon men to his side attested to his status as a key leader and the most prominent public figure in a movement that had assumed definite shape and called itself the New Evangelicalism. The term, coined by Harold John Ockenga, signified a form of conservative Christianity that consciously marked itself off from old-line Fundamentalism in several crucial respects. Its adherents clung loyally to such basic tenets of Fundamentalism as the inspired and fully reliable nature of Scripture, the Virgin Birth, the sinfulness of humanity, the substitutionary atonement, the Resurrection, and the Second Coming, but tended to be rather tolerant of minor theological differences among themselves. Upward mobility, education, travel, and the associations they afforded helped them understand that good and sincere people could look at the world quite differently and that these differences need not always be threatening. They tended to feel more comfortable in Evangelical congregations, denominations, and parachurch organizations but did not insist these were the only bodies in which one could serve God. If an Evangelical believer chose to remain affiliated with a mainline denomination, as had Nelson Bell and Harold Ockenga, that was acceptable, perhaps even desirable, since they might counteract tendencies toward liberalism in those bodies. Most were skeptical of the tongue speaking and healing that occurred in Pentecostal denominations, but they hesitated to define the work of the Holy Spirit too narrowly, and they regarded the Pentecostals who belonged to the National Association of Evangelicals as brothers and sisters in Christ. Similarly, though they deemed Modernist theology to be both erroneous and threatening to true Christianity, their opposition lacked the hysterical brittleness manifested by Carl McIntire and men of his ilk. To the New Evangelicals, it was far more important to proclaim the gospel than to defend it.

  Despite their conviction that theological disputation should take second place to evangelism, the New Evangelicals were by no means anti-intellectual. On the contrary, Ockenga and Bell and Carl F. H. Henry, as well as other leaders of the movement, had high regard for serious intellectual work and devoutly believed that Evangelical convictions could and should be set forth and defended according to the same rigorous canons of scholarship observed in liberal and secular universities and seminaries. For true Christianity to commend itself to modern men and women, it had to be intellectually respectable. It could announce that “the Bible says,” but it had to show why that announcement deserved special notice. It might ultimately reject evolution, but it would address the same evidence secular scientists considered and not simply declare that evolution could not be true because it
differed from the Genesis account of creation.

  As part of their willingness to take a hard look at positions long held, many New Evangelicals began to reexamine some of their distinctive and cherished beliefs, including that hallmark of Fundamentalist doctrine, dispensationalism. Few surrendered their conviction that Christ would one day return to bring human history to a divinely ordained consummation, probably including a glorious millennial reign. Some key leaders, however, rejected the dispensationalist notion that history is following a blueprint so detailed and immutable that human attempts to affect its course are futile, a belief that underlay Fundamentalism’s notorious lack of concern for social reform. Speaking directly to this issue, Ockenga asserted that the New (and true) Evangelical “intends that Christianity will be the mainspring in many of the reforms of the societal order. It is wrong to abdicate responsibility for society under the impetus of a theology which overemphasizes the eschatological.” By the mid-1950s, they had not only rejected the narrowness of the Fundamentalist vision but had begun to believe they might have an outside chance to regain a kind of cultural hegemony Evangelicals had not known, outside the South at least, since the Civil War. Modernist faith in the inherent goodness of humanity and the inevitability of progress had taken a terrible pounding in the previous two decades, making the biblical view of a tragically flawed humanity seem quite plausible and the offer of radical transformation quite attractive. In apparent response to this circum stance, America was experiencing unmistakable religious revival, evinced in part by the growing popularity of Billy Graham. Many New Evangelicals dared hope that with God’s help and Billy Graham’s connections, they might revitalize Evangelical Christianity, and through it, America and the world.