A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Security was seldom the obvious problem that it was during the Paris campaign, but great care was always taken both to protect Graham and his team from injury or harassment and to preclude or short-circuit any attempts to disrupt the services. In most cities the team worked closely with local police or, in some places, national police, military, and intelligence forces for months before a crusade to map out detailed security and crowd-control plans. When circumstances seemed to justify it, the association hired former Secret Servicemen to oversee security operations. “People try to get to him,” Tex Reardon said simply. “You don’t always know for what purpose. We try to protect him from strangers walking off the street.” The team’s own security personnel downplayed physical threats to avoid setting up challenges for addled publicity seekers and also to protect Graham from anxiety. For the most part, their efforts were limited to greater attentiveness to possible problems. “If someone comes in with a package,” Reardon explained, “we don’t deliberately search it or anything, but we note it. We log where it is.” In addition, they altered a long-standing practice of storing programs and counseling materials under the speaker’s platform: “If you were going to do anything, what better place than a cardboard box under a platform? So we eliminate boxes. We also have guards watching the facilities all night.” Graham knew of such measures, but if they bothered him, he managed not to show it. He told Ruth and his colleagues not to pay ransom if he were ever kidnapped and he appeared to believe, in good Presbyterian fashion, that nothing would happen to him unless God willed it. Ruth shared his view, contending that “nothing can touch a child of God without his permission.” Still, Graham and his staff took precautions against the twisted fantasies and misplaced hatreds demented souls sometimes direct toward public figures. According to T. W. Wilson, the evangelist received more threats of violence during the mid-1980s than during the thirty years prior to that. Pulling out a four-inch folder filled with vile imprecations that documented his point, he said, “We turn all threats over to the FBI, and they look into it. Some of the language is so filthy, and the hatred so bitter, you wouldn’t believe it.” One warned, “I’m going to get you. I’m going to cut up your wife’s body in small pieces, feed her innards to wild animals, and bury the rest in a shallow grave. I have never been arrested and have no police record.” It was signed with a swastika. Because the letter bore a California postmark and had been addressed to a BGEA post-office box, it seemed likely the writer was on the ministry’s mailing list. The FBI narrowed the field to 4,000 neo-Nazis in the San Diego area, cut that number to a dozen most-likely candidates, and assigned agents to stake out each one of them. When the would-be assailant, a young woman, sent the fifth such letter, agents arrested her, went to her home and found the typewriter on which she had punched out her malevolent missives, and confronted her shocked parents with what their daughter had been doing. Apparently feeling little real danger existed, Graham decided not to press charges. “If they really want you,” Wilson conceded, “they can usually get you, but we take all the threats seriously. We have more trouble with religious nuts than anything else.”

  One part of the crusade plan that seldom worked perfectly, even after forty years, was the effort to increase black participation in crusade preparations and black attendance at services. Team members admit that despite their efforts to integrate the crusades, blacks still regarded them as predominantly a white enterprise and did not usually participate as fully as had been hoped. Charges that BGEA was not sensitive to black issues and sensibilities stung Graham, and he directed his associates to make every conceivable effort to involve blacks in the 1986 Greater Washington Crusade. John Akers acknowledged that “we made our best shot with regard to blacks in Washington. We have tended to do what whites tend to do: make plans and invite blacks to join in. This time we made a deliberate effort to involve black churches and black leadership from the beginning. Every committee had a black cochair. But we did not do this in Tallahassee a few months later.” Ralph Bell agreed that “the association really went out of its way in Washington. If that same effort were made in other crusades, I think it would be much better. But we have not made as much effort since then. We forget really quickly. I think it is in Billy’s mind, but I don’t think it is in the minds of the guys who carry it out to really involve themselves in the black community. At times in a team meeting, we have talked about developing a strategy to reach black America. We’ve said we were going to talk about it, and cry over it, and pray about it, and get ideas, and call in resource people, and explore opportunities, and so forth. It’s a good idea, but it never happens. It’s a matter of commitment. If it were a matter of technology, they would explore the avenues, figure out how to do it, and go ahead and do it. But I don’t think that, apart from Billy himself, that we have been committed to that goal with respect to the black community.”

  Some blacks have noted that the decorous style of Graham’s crusades lacked the spirit and demonstrative character of the worship services to which they are accustomed. Some white supporters felt the same way. John Bisagno, whose church in Houston is a model of Baptist respectability, ventured that “Cliff and the team have overreacted a little bit too much over the years to criticism. They’re trying a little too hard not to be specifically emotional in the services. I’m hearing people say they are surprised that the services seem kind of structured and flat. They’re not experiencing the kind of life and excitement that they anticipate. We shouldn’t program the joy of the Lord and natural excitement out of the services.” Barrows’s intention was not simply to be innocuous but to try to create a service that would be familiar and reassuring to people who do not go to church regularly. While it is true that the music in many Evangelical churches is far livelier than that in Graham’s crusades, he felt that the limits are set not by what Christians would enjoy but by what non-Christians will find comfortable and reassuring. For that reason, crusade hymns were usually those likely to be recognized by nonregular attenders—“Bless the Lord, O My Soul,” “Amazing Grace,” and “When We All Get to Heaven.” This ruled out most newer songs and choruses. Barrows also avoided choosing hymns that contain such words or phrases as “I worship,” “I adore,” or “I praise your name,” which might embarrass outsiders or make them feel they don’t belong. These sentiments were left to the choir or soloists, who presumably could sing them with a clearer conscience. Barrows was not adamant in resisting change and adjusted to some more recent developments in Christian music, but organist John Innes acknowledged that “Cliff keeps a pretty tight rein. He talks to the special artists carefully, but his more nervous moments are likely to come with the people who give testimony than with the singers, because you don’t know how long they are going to take or, really, what they are going to say when they get up there.”

  Crusade guests did generate a bit of anxiety for the platform team, particularly when they were appearing for the first time. Some, like Grammywinning vocalists Sandi Patti and Larnell Harris, country-music performer George Hamilton IV, and British singer Cliff Richard were known and dependable entities. Johnny Cash, another regular, caused little worry about his performance, but his occasional relapse into drug use caused some problems for Graham, who doggedly stuck by his longtime friend and put him back on the platform, penitent and presumably forgiven, as soon as he was physically and emotionally able to get there. In addition to musicians, crusades typically featured several Christians from the sports world, such as former Dallas Cowboy coach Tom Landry, former baseball standout Pat Kelly (who was director of Christian Fan Outreach and husband of Howard Jones’s daughter, Phyllis), and various local sports figures who affirmed that their greatest accomplishment in life came when they became a member of the Greatest Team, under Coach Jesus, who will never cut them from the squad. Former NBA basketball star Pete Maravich had just begun to give testimony at Graham’s crusades a few months before he died of a heart attack in 1987, and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan may have been auditioning for a
spot in Evangelicalism’s main event when he made a point of visiting Graham during the Denver crusade, talking with the evangelist about his own roots in the Baptist church, his personal faith in God, and “the privilege of leading his father to Christ shortly before his death.”

  Guest artists, celebrity testifiers, announcement makers, and prayer givers were all urged to keep their remarks short and succinct to make sure they “leave plenty of time for Mr. Graham.” Though he was pleased to use celebrities to draw crowds and to demonstrate that Christianity need not be a drab and lifeless affair, Graham unquestionably felt that the main event of his meetings was the sermon itself, and he expected Cliff Barrows to see to it that people didn’t have to wait too long to hear him and that he had plenty of time to say what he wanted to say. When a singer threw in a gratuitous testimony, or a testimony giver took an extra two minutes to reveal an unexpected defeat or triumph in the struggle with Satan, Graham began to cast impatient glances at Cliff and to nibble anxiously at his fingernails.

  The team’s largely successful efforts to knock off rough edges, polish away the bumps, and remove any burrs that might make a visitor uncomfortable produced a service that for whatever it may have lacked in the thrills produced at revivals featuring dramatic healings, outbursts of tongue speaking, and rows of ecstatic believers strewn around the pulpit after having been “slain in the Spirit,” nevertheless provided an important and impressive kind of ritual reassurance and reaffirmation. In America, at least, most people who attended the crusades either belonged to or grew up in churches where such middle-of-the-road styles and sentiments were the norm. For them, a Billy Graham crusade was like a gigantic homecoming reunion, an upbeat, friendly, nonthreatening festival that assured them that the old verities are still to be believed, the old songs and prayers still sung and prayed, the old threats and dangers still out there huffing and puffing, but still equally easy to keep at bay if one will “only believe.”

  Crucial to the success of this ritual and to Billy Graham’s remarkable longevity as a crusader was his ability to enlist representatives of the mass media as key soldiers in his campaigns. On occasion, of course, the press was anything but friendly toward him, but anyone who spends several days in the BGEA headquarters browsing through the oversize scrapbooks that fill an entire room cannot help but be impressed with the overwhelmingly positive treatment the media lavished upon him for four decades. That response was neither unsought nor uncultivated. Larry Ross, a Walter Bennett Communications employee assigned almost exclusively to the Graham organization (which was the agency’s only major continuing account), speculated that the favorable treatment Graham typically received from reporters is an example of the benefits of following the Golden Rule. The press generally treated him well “because of how well he treats the press. He is so gracious even when he is dealing with reporters who have written stories that are not in his best interest. He gives them more time than they request or expect. Many times, I have seen him bless those who curse him. I think the Lord has honored that. Even those who don’t agree with his message respect the man and his transparent goodness.” Veteran AP religion writer George Cornell agreed that Graham seemed able to parry even the most pointed thrusts from hostile reporters: “He has the plain, ingenuous directness of a genuinely free human being.” A further reason Graham was able to maintain good relations with the press was his habit of paying them public praise during his crusade services. In 1950 he asked his Boston audiences to write to the editors or publishers of the local newspapers to thank them for the marvelous coverage the crusade had received. Forty years later, he was still making the same request, some times even singling out one or two reporters—typically, the key religion writers from the crusade city’s major papers—for special praise.

  The Bennett agency counted on the local press to provide an abundance of free publicity for Graham’s crusades and sometimes kept careful score of the results. After the 1984 phase of Mission England, for example, Gavin Reid reported that “the national press had published 157 items and eleven editorials covering nearly 3,000 column inches. The regional press (and we were deliberately working to capitalize on regional awareness) published 1,262 items plus eighteen editorials taking up no less than 37,116 column inches! Radio time amounted to nearly eight and a half hours and television time amounted to five hours seven minutes.” Reid and his assistants had made these tallies at the specific request of the Graham organization. Predictably, however, the agency did not rely solely on cooperative journalists. Every crusade involved a saturation advertising campaign, and though Graham sometimes professed to wish he never had to see his name on another billboard or banner, even his closest friends and staunchest backers admit that he handled whatever embarrassment he felt with considerable equanimity. Bob Evans recalled that shortly before the 1986 crusade, “when he came to Paris, he said, ‘Get some more pictures up. I don’t see my picture up enough.’ He got special permission to put posters in the Metro stations. He felt like he needed more publicity.” And Fred Dienert, who was personally responsible for puffing Graham for forty years, said, in unambiguous admiration, “Bill understands the value of publicity. At night, when he can’t sleep, God evidently gives him thoughts—about the ministry, about promotion, about what to do here and there. It’s uncanny, and they work out well. And it’s because the Lord’s got his hand on him. It’s not us. We do the newspapers. We do the billboards, we buy the spots, and everything else. I believe all that helps, but I think the real answer is God.”

  Of course, the bottom-line goal of every crusade was the number of people who responded to Graham’s call. Though from his early days he had an uncanny gift for the invitation, his colleagues acknowledged that especially since he achieved world renown, several quite unmiraculous factors entered into Graham’s unprecedented success at “drawing in the net.” Gavin Reid admitted that “Billy gets good results because more uncommitted people come to his meetings than is true with other evangelists. He is a ‘name.’” And all gave much credit to the planting and cultivation that went on before the harvester hit town with his evangelistic combine. In giving the invitation, Graham often described the decision to come forward as a difficult one. That can be the case, of course, particularly in foreign countries where Christianity is a minority religion and becoming a Christian may involve painful breaks with one’s family and friends. But for most inquirers, the decision to walk down the aisle is relatively easy; indeed, in some cases, it is easier than staying put. Everyone who has been to a crusade service or watched one on television, which almost certainly includes most of those in attendance, knows that hundreds of others would be streaming to the front and that no embarrassing emotional demonstrations would be expected (or even tolerated). Further, those who came with a friend as part of the Operation Andrew program surely understood that failure to respond would be a bit of a disappointment to the friendly folk who got them a ticket and saved them a place on the bus, and would make the trip home less enjoyable than if they had behaved as hoped—as some of the other invitees were almost certainly likely to have done. Such pressures were not enormous, but they were real, and they helped swell inquirer ranks.

  The inevitable success of the invitation could not help but have an exhilarating effect on the counselors who assisted inquirers in clarifying and confirming their decision. Evangelical Christians feel they should be leading others to Christ, but many find it difficult to talk to their friends and relatives about salvation out of fear they will be thought intrusive or odd. But at the crusade, they talked with people who, by their complete willingness to buy what is being sold, furnished them with the opportunity to do precisely what they thought they should be doing, with an almost perfect guarantee of success. This happy experience almost surely bolstered their confidence and willingness to approach others once the crusade ended.

  In a diffuse and invisible way, this process was repeated a few weeks later, when the crusade was aired on television and viewers were given opportunity
to respond to his preaching by calling a number on their screens. More than a fourth of the 12,000 or so people who called one of BGEA’s eight regional telephone centers during the week of Graham’s quarterly television specials made some kind of decision for Christ. And, as at the live crusades, some of the greatest benefits accrued to the counselors themselves. Terry Wilken, a team member who worked with the telephone ministry from its inception, observed that “nothing increases faith like trying to give it away. Every night counselors go out of here several feet off the ground talking about the blessings they have received from participating. When you look at it from their perspective, its probably the easiest kind of witnessing you could do.”

  As one who long compared himself to the harvester who reaps what others have sown and cultivated, Billy Graham recognized that the harvest, to be of significant use to any but scavengers, must be gathered into barns and protected against hostile elements. By his own criterion, then, it is disciple making rather than decision counting that must serve as the ultimate measure of an evangelist’s accomplishments. Neither he nor his associates pretended that every person who comes forward or calls a counseling center is making a meaningful response. When one watches a father shrug his shoulders and shuffle down the aisle after his grown daughter tells him she is disgusted with him for holding back—“That was the whole point in coming, for God’s sake!”—or sees two prepubescent boys poke one another and toss their caps in the air as they skip across the stadium infield toward the counseling area, or listen to a teenage girl tell her friend, “Well, if I can, you can. There’s nothing to it,” one comes to understand that not every decision flows from the deepest wellsprings of heart or mind. Graham long admitted that people come for different reasons and that some of the reasons are quite superficial. “We never call them ‘converts,’” he said early in his career. “We much prefer to call them ‘inquirers.’ Only God knows when or if a man is truly converted. Many come forward in our meetings who are seekers but not finders.”