A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  The evangelist managed to sidestep discussion of Vietnam during his 1968 visit to Sydney, but his perceived closeness to Nixon and the increased unpopularity of American policy made him the target of sharper questioning from newspaper and TV reporters during the 1969 tour. Unidentified antagonists threatened to bomb his meeting in Auckland, and a group of antiwar protesters interrupted a service at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne. When Leighton Ford, normally well received by college groups, spoke at the University of Adelaide, he was heckled by students who launched dozens of paper airplanes at him as he spoke. Perturbed that the ever-polite Graham and his associates could be treated so rudely, Christianity Today speculated that the day might soon return when Christians would be stoned for their faith. Despite these problems, the 1969 tour was far from a failure. An estimated 85,000 came to the cricket grounds for the closing service in Melbourne, and an unusually large number of youthful inquirers gave promise of long-term benefit to the churches.

  Graham’s continuing ability to draw large numbers of young people to his crusade encouraged and intrigued him, and moved him to make an honest, if limited, attempt to understand the sixties youth culture. He purchased a stack of rock albums, and after he and Ruth listened to them at least once, declared that he had been “frankly surprised to find that a lot of rock music is deeply religious” in the sense that the lyrics asked, “What is the purpose of my life?” “Where did I come from?” and “Where am I going?” He tried to mingle inconspicuously with hippies and protesters at several festivals and demonstrations, at least once donning fake whiskers to disguise his appearance. While he continued to deplore discourtesy and disorder and still regarded student radicals as a menace to society, he came away with a mostly positive view of what he had seen and heard. “With their talk of Jesus boots and almost biblical language,” he said, probably not intending to assign all the language of the counterculture to this near-canonical category, “they show an unconscious longing for Christ.” To be sure, he disapproved of some tactics favored by young protesters; still, he felt that “they’re asking the right questions” and insisted that “they have a right to want to change the system.”

  In an effort to reach young people, Graham changed his own system somewhat. At his 1969 New York crusade, the team rented a ballroom near Madison Square Garden and operated what they billed as “America’s Largest Coffeehouse,” complete with strobe lights and screens that flashed “Jesus” and “Love” while the apres-crusade set gathered to talk with each other and a covey of youth counselors “in an atmosphere of psychedelic lighting and amplified folk-rock music” played by young Christian musicians, some of whom testified to their recent rescue from drugs and “digging the sex scene.” Later that year, Graham accepted an invitation to speak at a rock festival in Miami. His audience on that occasion seemed more interested in leaflets urging the legalization of marijuana than in his hearty approbation of the “terrific music” he had heard and his promises of a way “to get high without hang-ups and hangovers,” but he told reporters he had received a “tremendous response” and declared that he planned to attend more such gatherings, because “this is where the young people are [that] I want to reach. I love these kids. I really do.”

  Not all young people returned such expressions of goodwill. During a Chicago crusade, a group of approximately three hundred protesters identified by the Chicago Daily News as hippies, but branded as Satanists by Graham and Christianity Today, tried to disrupt a youth service at McCormick Place. Notified in advance of their plans, Graham prayed for forgiveness of and kindness toward the disrupters, but made it plain they would not be allowed to take over the service. “There’s a small group of people here highly organized and ready to demonstrate,” he informed the crowd of 27,000. “You came here to hear the Gospel and we paid for this hall. I’m sure you will know what to do when the time comes—and there are enough of you here to do it.” When a contingent of troublemakers came forward during the second hymn of the service, Graham interrupted the choir and asked the thousands of young Christians in the arena to surround them and to “Love them. Pray for them. Sing to them. And gradually ease them back toward the entrances through which they have come.” A small band of about thirty “Jesus People” joined hands to form a circle around the primary disrupters, chanting “Jesus is the Way,” “Join the Jesus Revolution,” and simply “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Some singled out individual “Satanists” and began to share their faith with them or, in more dramatic fashion, threw their arms around them and began to pray for their salvation. Thousands remained in their seats, imploring God’s Spirit “to confound the work of Satan in our midst,” while hundreds of other young people formed an irresistible human wave that swept the interlopers toward the exits. A scuffle broke out briefly when one of the protesters tossed a firecracker, but swift police intervention forestalled any serious conflict, and the service resumed with an exhilarating sense of triumph over the Enemy. A similar incident in Oakland the following month was handled in the same manner.

  Billy’s concern for understanding young people no doubt stemmed in part from watching his own brood move into adulthood. Second daughter Anne, described by siblings and nonfamily members alike as a near-model child, had limited her flirtation with the world to bleaching her hair and paying considerable attention to makeup, but the results had been appealing enough to win her part-time work as a model for several of Asheville’s better clothing stores. Some dour Fundamentalists may have clucked at such behavior, but the Grahams saw no harm in it. Anne recalled quite simply that “Mother totally trusted me and encouraged me and loved me. Therefore I was always the person she thought I was.” Like sister GiGi, Anne was married at eighteen—in her case to former University of North Carolina basketball star Danny Lotz, who subsequently became a dentist and an active worker in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Bunny, who attended the Stony Brook School for girls on Long Island, followed her older sisters’ example, also marrying at eighteen; the groom was Fred and Millie Dienert’s son Ted, whom she met for the first time at the 1966 London crusade. Ted subsequently entered his father’s advertising business and eventually became producer of Graham’s syndicated television programs.

  Ruth and Billy were mildly disappointed that none of their daughters got more than a smattering of college but were pleased with the men they chose for husbands, all of them older and competent, all of them active Christians. Franklin gave them more cause for concern. More than any of the siblings, Franklin chafed at the role of son and namesake of the world’s most famous preacher, and he determined not to wear his father’s mantle gracefully. At age ten he supposedly “asked Christ to come into his heart,” but if the invitation was accepted, Christ found but a small and disorderly back room in which to dwell. As a teenager, Franklin flaunted the very behaviors Evangelicals shunned. He smoked and drank, wore long hair, drove fast cars, rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and stayed out past midnight with girls who did not seem well suited for life in a parsonage. He fired his shotgun through his bedroom window and set his stereo in front of the intercom system just to irritate his family, and he warted poor Ned unconscionably. After a brief stay at Stony Brook School for boys, where his parents hoped he might straighten up, he came home to finish at the local public high school. But he was never a good student, as one old friend delicately observed. “Franklin’s schooling was a matter of prayer for some time within the family.” Friends despaired over Franklin, fearing he might fit the mold of the preacher’s child gone bad. “There was a period in there,” one observed, “when I thought Ruth and Billy had a moral casualty on their hands.” Ruth and Billy were apparently never quite as worried as their friends. “I never pretended to be the stereotype of a fellow with a Bible under my arm,” Franklin recalled, “but my parents pretty much let me be. . . . They knew the Lord would deal with me on these things.” Not that his behavior was ignored or winked at; after telling him she preferred he smoke and drink at home rather than snea
k away to indulge his vices, Ruth grew so disgusted with his smoking that she once emptied his ashtray on his head while he slept. Their relationship, however, was less truly adversarial than like a sparring match, with each protagonist respecting the other’s point of view and neither regarding the other as an enemy. Always jealous of his privacy, Franklin habitually locked his bedroom door to keep his mother out. One morning, after he had come in later than she deemed appropriate, Ruth crawled out on the roof, a tin cup full of water in her mouth, intending to creep over to his open window and splash him into wakefulness. Franklin heard her coming and slammed the window down just in time to stop the deluge. A sporting loser, Ruth sat on the shingles and joined her son in a good laugh.

  Ruth was able to show a special forbearance toward Franklin, it seems, because she understood his rambunctious spirit. She too sometimes became aggressive with machines, so much so that novice drivers in Montreat were warned to “watch out for Mrs. Graham,” who seemed to regard speed limits and lane dividers as optional suggestions rather than legal boundaries. As she sped along, quite aware she was breaking the law, she frequently offered a brief exculpatory prayer: “Father, I’m sorry, but you understand.” Whatever God thought, a state trooper who caught her doing eighty on old U.S. 70 between Waynesville and Montreat thought she needed reproof and correction. Anxious to get home to serve tea to Billy and a favored guest, Ruth accepted the ticket without arguing or trading on her name, but she stopped short of repentance. “Could you please hurry with that,” she asked. “And when you finish, please don’t follow me, because I’m going to have to do it again.” For a time, it appeared Ruth might add motorcycles to her arsenal of offensive weapons. Instead of scolding Franklin for roaring through the sleepy campus of Montreat-Anderson College on his Harley hog, she asked him to teach her how to ride it. She was not a natural, but neither was she a quitter. The first time she climbed aboard by herself, she drove it over an embankment on the highway. When a worried truck driver got out to offer help, she assured him she was fine. “If you could just get it on the pavement headed in the other direction,” she said, “I’ve a friend at the end of the road who’ll help me stop.” That experience didn’t stop her; her second try ended when she plunged into a lake. Not until her third effort, when she mistook the accelerator for the brake, ending in yet another scary heap and severing a vein in her leg, did this middle-aged preacher’s wife abandon this particular form of fun on the open road.

  Graham’s 1969 New York crusade drew capacity crowds to the Garden, but it differed from previous American crusades in that the primary focus was on the television audience. The successful use of television relays in the 1966 and 1967 British crusades convinced the evangelist to experiment further with that medium. This time, in addition to relaying the service to various auditoriums in outlying areas, he arranged to have local television stations broadcast all ten of the Garden services three times each in the New York area and once each in a dozen other cities. Response was good, and the team regarded the experiment as a success, but the saturation live coverage in specific cities proved no more effective than the customary three-night nationwide broadcast several weeks after the crusade, and this particular strategy was not repeated. Graham and his team, however, remained convinced that nothing could multiply the impact of a crusade so effectively and economically as television, and that although an arena or stadium crusade might draw more people overall, the proportion of inquirers tended to be a bit higher in the relay halls. In 1970 they launched an elaborate and ambitious effort to reach Western Europe and Yugoslavia with simultaneous transmission (and translation) of crusade services from Dortmund, Germany. To offset initial skepticism, BGEA paid to bring a sizable number of clergymen from all over Europe to Frankfurt for a demonstration of the Eidophor big-screen projection system to show them how effective it could be. Most were sufficiently convinced to return home and attempt to enlist other clergy in their regions to support the project, soon to be known as Euro ’70.

  Cooperation did not follow automatically; in some cases, it never came at all. Evangelical churches in France, where Graham’s old friend Bob Evans was still active, signed on immediately and enthusiastically, as did Denmark and Norway; Sweden and Finland chose to remain uninvolved. Holland and Belgium agreed, but not until the last minute, in Belgium’s case because of resistance from Roman Catholic influence within the state-run television authority. Small Evangelical populations and noncooperation from Catholics left Spain and Italy out of the network. In Yugoslavia, however, the only Eastern European country to participate, the Roman Catholic Church, still warm with the memory of Graham’s 1967 visit, not only publicized the crusade but offered St. Marko Krizevcanin’s Church in Zagreb as the meeting site. Great Britain was represented among the venues, but London and other major cities chose not to participate. According to a journalist covering the event for both Christianity Today (CT) and World Wide Publications, British Evangelicals were not keen on broadcasting a crusade originating in Germany with a German translator standing alongside Graham.

  Ironically, perhaps the strongest opposition among participating countries came from within Germany itself, where, according to CT, “the theological centers of influence and the churches . . . [lay] under the devastating spell of humanism and theological liberalism.” In addition to the same theological objections they had raised against Graham’s meetings since his days with Youth for Christ, they now objected to spending great sums of money on a television extravaganza when the money could be used to feed the hungry. Probably more significant, a number of socially liberal German clergymen objected vehemently to Graham’s political views and activities. At a meeting in Dortmund of nearly five hundred ministers whose divided opinions led to outbreaks of boos, hisses, and table banging, Graham was asked why he had not participated in the demonstrations in America against racism and the war. On the question of race, he replied, “I’m already holding demonstrations in the biggest stadiums and halls in the world, but because they are nonviolent, people think that’s not a demonstration. It is a demonstration.” When pressed to make some clear statement on Vietnam, his artful use of Martin Luther’s image of “two kingdoms” elided much of his effort on behalf of the Nixon administration and probably would have caused his friend in the White House to wince, but it turned away the wrath of most of the challenging clergymen. “You greatly misunderstand my ministry,” he said. “I do not represent the U.S. government. I represent the Kingdom of God. . . . My flag is the flag of Christ. Why did Jesus Christ not lead a demonstration against the tyranny of Rome? Why did Paul not lead a demonstration? Because they represented a different Kingdom. I cannot defend the United States, any more than you can defend what went on in the ’30s and ’40s in Germany.” Then, to turn away wrath on the issue of Vietnam, he said, “Now concerning Vietnam, I promise you this. If Germany is invaded by a foreign power, and the U.S. comes to your aid, I will not lead a demonstration down Pennsylvania Avenue against giving you that aid.” According to one witness, that statement brought “prolonged and unanimous applause.” Still, out of fear that antiwar activists would use the crusade to mount some kind of dramatic protest, the speaker’s platform was constructed at a height and in such a manner that allowed the television cameras to remain focused on Graham and ignore any disturbance that might be going on below. As a further hedge against disruption, a secure backup studio was installed underneath the platform, where Graham and his interpreter could carry on alone in the event of a truly serious outbreak. The logistics of Euro ’70 were far more complicated than those for its British predecessors. Though the All-Britain Crusade had been fed to twenty-five cities whose inhabitants all spoke the same language, the technicians in each city followed a common set of technical specifications to effect the transmission. Euro ’70 used the international television links of the Euro-vision system, but engineers still had to cope with different sets of “specs” and the problems inherent in the simultaneous translation of one sermon into the
language of each participating nation.

  When the crusade finally got under way in April 1970, nearly a thousand men at thirty-nine venues in ten nations (Austria and Switzerland had joined those already named) were involved in the largest closed-circuit television network ever organized in Europe. In addition to the television transmission, the crusade was also carried by Trans-World Radio, a powerful missionary station in Monte Carlo, to Africa and the Middle East, as well as to all of Eastern and Western Europe. To adhere to the strict time demands of radio, technicians would begin to edit tapes a few minutes after the services began, start the landline transmission from Dortmund to Monte Carlo, then hope they could edit the remainder of the service and sermon to fit their allotted one-hour time slot. On several of the eight evenings of the crusade, their transmission exceeded fifty-eight minutes—on one evening, it ran a scant two seconds short of the sixty-minute cutoff point—but no broadcast ran over. Not everything worked so well; one evening at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, a British lighting engineer’s attempt to make a cup of coffee in an electric kettle blew out a fuse that temporarily killed the sound transmission to all thirty-nine cities in the network.