A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Graham repeatedly justified both his break with the Fundamentalists and his decision not to take a more prophetic stance on race and other social issues by pointing out that God had not called him to theological disputation or headline-grabbing social action. His call, he insisted, was to “do the work of an evangelist,” and he ended the decade as he had begun it, with an intense flurry of preaching. During 1959 and 1960, he held rallies and crusades in 40 cities on four continents, speaking in person to more than 5 million people and adding 227,000 more inquirers to his carefully kept box score. The most memorable of these campaigns were a 1959 tour of Australia and New Zealand, which still ranks as one of the most successful of his entire ministry, and a less triumphant but still notable 1960 safari for souls in nine nations of Africa.

  16

  Unto the Uttermost Parts of the Earth

  By 1959 Billy Graham was an internationally renowned figure, sought after by Protestant churchmen and civic leaders throughout the world. Still, the nations beneath the Southern Cross seemed a formidable challenge. Less than a third of Australians attended church with any regularity, and the stereotype of a hard-drinking, rough-and-ready, egalitarian, and largely secular people—happy pagans, they were sometimes called—seemed to fit a substantial segment of the population. Certainly, the Australians had shown little enthusiasm for itinerant evangelists. They treated Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson with virtual contempt, and in 1956 rowdy Melbournites disrupted an Oral Roberts meeting with a stink bomb, then cut down his tent and tried to set fire to his equipment, causing him to cut short his campaign and return to Tulsa in humiliating defeat. Graham was aware of this history but took some comfort from the fact that he was not coming as an unwelcome interloper. On the contrary, the impetus for the invitation, issued at the height of the New York crusade in 1957, grew out of an initiative led by the archbishop of Sydney, primate of the Anglican Church in Australia, who was joined by most Anglican leaders and prominent churchmen from other Protestant bodies. When the archbishop died in 1958, he was replaced by Hugh Gough, bishop of Barking, a vigorous supporter of Graham’s Harringay crusade who hoped for an Australian rerun of that great triumph. The chief justice of the state of Victoria headed the group offering a parallel invitation to Melbourne, suggesting a crusade would enjoy significant civil legitimation as well.

  When Jerry Beavan visited both cities a few months later, he found even broader support than anticipated. Still, Graham left nothing to chance. In 1958–1959 Beavan moved to Sydney and Walter Smyth, yet another Youth for Christ leader who had joined the team, opened a crusade office in Melbourne. Both men set about to solidify organizational and financial support from the churches, to arrange for crusade sites, bus reservations, landline relays to more than four hundred communities, and contracts for radio and television, and to launch the inevitable barrage of publicity. To build excitement, they scheduled screenings of several of Graham’s films, including Souls in Conflict and Miracles in Manhattan which told the fictionalized stories of several converts in the Harringay and New York crusades. Attendance consistently outran expectations, and police occasionally had to be called to provide adequate crowd control. On the more explicitly spiritual side, Graham benefited from preparatory work by a team of teachers led by Edwin Orr, who toured churches much as he had done before the Los Angeles crusade, trying to gather the kindling and stack the wood that Billy’s torch might ignite a roaring blaze. Graham originally planned to spend six or seven weeks in Australia, mostly in Sydney, with short visits to Melbourne and Brisbane. Sensing a real hunger for revival, however, Beavan persuaded him to plan major crusades for both Melbourne and Sydney, with shorter campaigns in the capitals of other Australian states and in three New Zealand cities. Associate evangelists Grady Wilson, Leighton Ford, and Englishman Joe Blinco, who joined the team after Harringay, would be the primary speakers in the smaller crusades, with Graham appearing for two or three climactic meetings at the end. This first use of “associate crusades” proved so successful that they became a permanent aspect of Graham’s ministry.

  Despite all this preparation, the mission nearly had to be canceled. Shortly before they were to leave for Australia, Graham and Grady Wilson went out for one of their frequent rounds of golf. “I noticed that several times, Billy would swing at the ball and just miss it completely,” Grady recalled. “He said, ‘It looks to me like the ground has ridges in it.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to come up with a better one than that.’ I didn’t take him seriously, but he insisted he was serious, and he even got down on the green and felt it.” Suddenly, a stabbing pain assaulted his left eye and he lost all peripheral vision in that eye. An ophthalmologist in Louisville sent him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where his condition was diagnosed as angiospastic edema of the macula, an abnormal swelling of the blood vessels brought on by muscle spasms in back of the retina and directly traceable to overwork and exhaustion. He might have suffered a bleeding ulcer or a heart attack; instead, he seemed in danger of losing his sight in at least one eye. His doctors gave him appropriate drugs, but insisted he take a long rest immediately and return to work only at a much reduced pace. According to Grady, “They said it would be a whole lot better for him if I would just take a two-by-four and knock him in the head. They were about half-serious about it, too.” Fortunately, such an extreme measure was unnecessary. Through the generosity of a Canadian millionaire who had been converted in the Toronto crusade, Billy was able to take his prescribed rest at a lovely estate in Hawaii, and he used the opportunity to prepare himself mentally and spiritually for the crusade. BGEA paid to have Wheaton’s longtime president, V. Raymond Edman, join the Grahams and the Wilsons in Hawaii for several weeks, “just to teach us the scriptures.” Grady remembered that, “for a couple of hours each morning, each of us would read from a different version of the Bible, then Dr. Edman would call on us to talk about it. That’s the way he taught us the scriptures. That really refreshed Billy’s heart for the Australia crusade. I can see now that God just set him aside for that month of time to sort of get his spiritual batteries recharged and all, to get him ready for the crusade.”

  Graham’s inability to cultivate the media and local church and civic leaders in customary fashion did not seem to hinder the crusade. As Jerry Beavan had discerned, Australian churches, many stimulated by Edwin Orr’s diligent efforts, were ready for revival, and Billy Graham’s straightforward simplicity was well suited to their temperament. In Melbourne, so many people had to be turned away from the 10,000-seat indoor arena during the first week that the crusade moved to an outdoor music bowl, where crowds of up to 70,000 blanketed a grassy hillside. Long-scheduled events forced still another move, this time to the agricultural showgrounds located several miles from the center of the city and next to a malodorous slaughterhouse. At least in part because of a spell of heavy rains, attendance fell off but still ranged between 10,000 and 28,000. At the final service on March 15, over 143,000 people jammed the stands and manicured turf of the magnificent Melbourne Cricket Grounds, obliterating (by 27,000) previous highs recorded during soccer finals and the 1956 Olympics, and achieving a personal best for Graham as well. Normally, noisy trains rattled past the grounds—no serious problem for a cricket or soccer match, but potentially disruptive for a worship service. On this day, however, at the personal order of the chief officer of the state railway commission, the trains slowed to an inobtrusive crawl as they passed. The railroad commissioner was not the only civil official to take note of the gathering; the queen sent her personal representative, the governor of Victoria read the twenty-third Psalm, and Graham read a letter of greeting and congratulation from his old friend Dwight Eisenhower. The response in Sydney and in the three largest cities of New Zealand (Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch) was, if anything, even more remarkable than in Melbourne. An estimated 20 percent of New Zealanders attended the associate crusades and relay services. In Sydney volunteers attempted to deliver an invitation at every home in the city,
a technique that paid off handsomely. Total attendance for four weeks of meetings fell just short of 1 million, with 150,000 appearing for the closing rally at the Sydney Showgrounds and adjoining cricket club. To a degree that exceeded even Harringay, Billy Graham became a national figure. Observers doubted any visitor to Australia ever received as much space in the press; certainly, no religious event had been treated so favorably.

  Other media also raised public awareness of the crusade. Television had come to Australia only two years earlier, and Billy Graham was its first national attraction. The major network, Australian Broadcasting, aired numerous features and bulletins about Graham before and during the crusade. When Melbourne station GTV got a large positive response to a taped replay of a sermon, it broadcast others and found itself with a star on its lens. To encourage the crusade and no doubt to build its audience, the station let the team use its studios as headquarters for the telephone-counseling operation, and announcers encouraged viewers to call the number appearing on their screens. The first night, telephone calls mounted into the hundreds over the course of the evening; on the second night, an estimated 10,000 calls (many of them repeat tries by the same people) were attempted during the first hour, overloading Melbourne’s automatic telephone network to such an extent that few people making any kind of call were able to obtain anything but a constant busy signal for several hours. On subsequent evenings callers simply gave their numbers, which were then relayed to freshly recruited counselors who called them back as soon as possible, thus alleviating frustration on the part of seekers and keeping public resentment to a minimum. GTV also obliged Graham by letting him conduct a studio service one Saturday evening when trotting races crowded the crusade out of the agricultural showgrounds; the live program was viewed by an estimated 200,000 people. Stations in Sydney and New Zealand were not as directly involved, but they also continued to give Graham extensive attention so that he dominated television in both countries for nearly three months. “It was,” one Graham admirer said, “the closest to national adulation of an overseas figure, other than the Queen, that Australia has ever seen.”

  When the time came for summing up, the results were impressive. An Anglican bishop declared the crusade to be “the biggest thing that ever happened in the church history of Australia,” and the data seemed to support him. Total attendance for all services exceeded three million, and countless others heard the evangelist on television. Known inquirers numbered almost 150,000, three quarters of whom claimed to be making first-time decisions. Reflecting defensiveness about stereotypes of Evangelicals as unsophisticated people, crusade supporters proudly noted that the ranks of inquirers included the wife of a state governor, many students from top universities, scores of lawyers, dozens of doctors, more than a thousand nurses, and over eight hundred high-ranking business executives.

  As always, distribution of the harvest was uneven. No church prospered more than Sydney’s St. Stephen’s Presbyterian, which took in 310 new members during the first year after the crusade, compared to an annual average intake of less than 50. Two years later, at least half of these remained active and enthusiastic; about one fourth appeared to have fallen away. Reports from other quarters painted a familiar picture. When the pastor and members actively participated in crusade programs, some increase in membership was likely; renewed vitality was almost inevitable. When participation was half-hearted or negligible, congregations experienced little or no growth and tended to regard results such as those at St. Stephen’s as freakish anomalies. Nearly all clergymen, however, registered appreciation for Graham’s efforts, and many expressed gratitude at a new spirit of unity they had found in cooperating with clergy and laity from other denominations.

  Increases in church membership were not the only gains attributed to Graham’s efforts. Charitable organizations reported a substantial growth in the number of volunteer workers. The Bible Society sold over $125,000 worth of Bibles, and managers of several bookstores reported that their entire stock of Scripture had been cleaned out. The magistrate of Sydney reported that some types of crime—specifically, those associated with alcohol, such as assault, indecent behavior, and drunk and disorderly conduct—dropped by at least 50 percent during the crusade. The record on this score was not perfect, however. At a landline service in a church hall in Katoomba, sixty miles west of Sydney, a man listening to Graham preach about love went berserk, stabbing one woman to death and critically wounding two others. As at Harringay, perhaps the most important long-term result was the increase in the number of men inspired by Graham to enter the ministry. In general, Anglican churches experienced less revitalization immediately following the crusade than did other Protestant bodies, but Jack Dain, who later transferred from India to become a coadjutant bishop in Sydney, noted that sixty-five clergymen in that diocese alone traced their decision to enter the ministry to the 1959 campaign, and that fully half of the students in the diocesan seminary during the decade of the 1960s were there because of Graham’s influence. In 1986 Dain asserted that “[Today,] the Anglican Church in Sydney is totally Evangelical.” For all this, however, the 1959 meetings seemed also to prove that the days when an evangelist could truly make a dramatic and lasting impact on a secular culture were long past. As Edwin Orr, who became one of Evangelical Christianity’s foremost historians of revivalism, ruefully observed in 1986, “They were the greatest crusades Australia has ever seen, but Australia is still far from revived.”

  From Australia Graham flew to England, where he visited with the queen and Prince Philip on Philip’s thirty-eighth birthday. They talked, Graham reported, about “the upsurge of spiritual feeling which is taking place here,” and drank “tea out of big cups—really good.” The queen poured. “It was just like having tea with any nice English family,” he revealed. “It was all rather wonderful.” Unfortunately, the perfection of that visit was spoiled by walks through three London parks where he saw people openly “smooching”—and worse. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” he said. “Once upon a time, people went to the parks to see the birds and feed the ducks. It looked as though your parks had been turned into bedrooms, with people lying all over the place in all sorts of conditions.” In fact, Billy was not the only one to notice an increase of open sexual activity in the park; in the three months prior to his comments, London police had made 538 arrests for forbidden sexual behavior, but the deterrent effect of the crackdown seemed minimal. When a reporter asked Graham why he had said nothing to couples he saw doing in public “what is usually done in bedrooms,” he replied, “There were hundreds doing it.” Overemphasis on sex, he warned, yet again, would bring Western nations down. A few months earlier he had offered the remarkable opinion that “if the female bosom were completely covered, that would solve many problems in every realm of life.” Now he lamented that “the new generation coming along is far better acquainted with Jayne Mansfield’s statistics” than with the Ten Commandments. From Las Vegas, where she was appearing at the Tropicana Hotel, Miss Mansfield replied, “I can’t help it if I’m on their minds. It’s a free country and I’m flattered that the youth of America is thinking about me.” She noted that her figure had been given to her by God and by nature and was therefore no cause for shame. And besides that, she revealed, she received more fan mail from twelve-year-old boys than from members of the army and navy, a response she felt conclusively proved it was not her figure but “their liking for me as a person” that accounted for her popularity. Mercifully, Graham did not enter into a continuing debate with Miss Mansfield. He made it clear, however, that he did not intend to tar all of England with the same brush he had used to depict the denizens of its public parks. Without citing specific evidence, he declared, “I think the British people have a higher standard of morals than the entire western world.”

  Unsettling exposure to sex outside the home perhaps helped account for Graham’s unexpectedly warm response to moral and spiritual conditions he found a few days later during a visit to Russia. Though he h
ad been invited by the Moscow Baptist Church, the trip was officially billed as simply a tourist trip. When he attended the packed 3,500-seat church on Sunday morning, he and his associates sat inconspicuously in the balcony. Though church officials reserved a pew for him and provided an interpreter, he was not introduced to the assembly, and he took no part in the service. Some day, he reported, his fellow Baptists hoped to see a great stadium filled with people yearning to hear the gospel, but he anticipated no such occasion in the near future.” “The official said we have to move step by step and I feel this visit is an important step.” He was not at all surprised to hear that atheism was declining and religion on the rise throughout the Soviet Union, since, quite predictably, he “could read on the faces of the people a great spiritual hunger and some sort of insecurity that only God can solve.” This “deepening hunger for God that penetrates even behind the Iron Curtain,” he noted, “gives cause for hope and optimism.” He was also impressed by what he took to be a high standard of personal morality among the Soviet people. “In the Moscow parks,” he reported, just a few days after his upsetting stroll in London, “I saw thousands of young people but I did not see a single couple locked in an embrace. I hate Communism, but I love the Russian people and the moral purity I found among the Muscovites.” This encomium to Soviet morality drew scornful fire from some quarters where he had been viewed as a champion. In New York, the director of the anti-Communist Research Institute of America snorted, “If by morality the Reverend Billy Graham means that the Russians wear longer bathing suits than we do, he’s quite right. If his evidence has persuaded him that in the Soviet Union the entire culture places a lesser emphasis upon sex than is the case in the United States and the countries of Western Europe, that is also entirely true. These, however, are purposeless manifestations of morality when contrasted with the fact that those who first enslaved and then butchered the Hungarians, who were simply seeking freedom, were also Russians.” Asked why he had not criticized the darker aspects of Soviet life, such as slave camps, Graham resorted to an easy disclaimer: “I didn’t criticize Russian slave camps because I didn’t see them. I am aware they exist.” He preferred to emphasize what he had seen. He took particular delight in the sight of the crosses on top of the onion-domed churches inside the walls of the Kremlin itself, venturing that “to have this religious spirit in the heart of the Kremlin is symbolic of some future date.” And outside the Kremlin walls, in Red Square, he paused to pray that if it be God’s will, he might be present on that historic date. Back home a few weeks later, he recommended that President Eisenhower do his part for Russian revival by inviting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to church during his upcoming visit to Washington, noting that, as a houseguest, “if he should refuse to go, it will put Khrushchev on the spot.”