A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Fortunately, Graham recognized this tendency in himself. The next evening, he said, “The United States owes a trillion dollars. Do you know how much that is? If you stacked dollar bills all the way to the moon and back, you wouldn’t have a trillion dollars.” Then, perhaps having been chided by friends for his previous remark, or simply finding his own illustration implausible, he paused, then said, “I heard that. I think that’s an exaggeration. I believe you would have a trillion.” Generous chuckles rippled through the audience. Caught up in the amusement, he added, “But I read that in some paper, and I always believe everything I read in the paper. Especially the Inquirer.” Laughter rolled out of the stands, and no one appeared to enjoy the self-deprecating humor more than Graham’s own colleagues. Perhaps the evangelist’s ability to poke fun at his own foibles was aided by the insightful aphorism he quoted a few moments later: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  Analysts from within Graham’s camp believe it was precisely his trusting simplicity that made him so effective as a preacher. Whatever his audiences thought about his intellectual acumen, they viewed him as utterly sincere about what he said in the pulpit. “There is no magic, no manipulation,” observed Gavin Reid. “The man just obviously believes what he says, and he comes over as a very human person.” In the end, however, they insist that any attempt to explain Billy Graham in secular terms was bound to fail. “There is something quite miraculous about his power,” John Innes said. “I think people believe they are going to hear something from God when Mr. Graham gets up there, and I believe they do. They hear another voice through him—-the voice of God.” Graham agreed with these observations but thought they apply to all true evangelists, not just himself. “An evangelist,” he said, “is a person with a special gift and a special calling from the Holy Spirit to announce the good news of the gospel. You’re an announcer, a proclaimer, an ambassador. And it’s a gift from God. You can’t manufacture it, you can’t organize it, you can’t manipulate it. . . . I study and read and prepare all the time, but my gift seems to be from the Lord in giving an appeal to get people to make a decision for Christ. That seems to be the gift. Something happens that I cannot explain. I have never given an invitation in my whole life when no one came.” According to Graham, exercising his gift took a tangible physical toll on his energy: “In the five or ten minutes that this appeal lasts, when I’m standing there, not saying a word, it’s when most of my strength leaves me. I don’t usually get tired quickly, but I get tired in the invitation. This is when I become exhausted. I don’t know what it is, but something is going out at the moment.”

  Perhaps the most notable development in Graham’s preaching over the years was a shift in his stance on various moral and social issues of high interest to Evangelicals. His code for personal behavior remained quite conservative, but he displayed a more tolerant attitude toward human frailty than he once did, he recognized differences between cultures, and he stressed forgiveness more than judgment. He also developed an increased appreciation for the need to change social structures and conditions as well as individual hearts.

  While many Evangelicals and Fundamentalists continue to regard the use of alcohol as one of the surest signs of a corrupt lifestyle, Graham frequently noted that “I do not believe the Bible teaches teetotalism. I can’t believe that. Jesus drank wine. Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast. That wasn’t grape juice as some of them try to claim. The Greek word is the same as the Bible uses everywhere else for wine.” When he first went public with that assertion in 1976, in defense of Jimmy Carter’s admission that he enjoyed an occasional highball, Graham drew a fusillade of criticism from stunned supporters, but he refused to back down. Drunkenness is clearly a sin, he said, and distilled liquors make the use of alcohol far more risky than it was in biblical times. He even agreed that it was better for Christians to abstain completely from alcohol than to risk falling into the problems it could cause. But in contrast to his occasional tactic of claiming he had been misquoted and misunderstood, he not only continued to defend and repeat his earlier statement but acknowledged that he used alcohol himself from time to time, and that he knew something of its effects. “Once in a while I will have a sip of wine before I go to bed,” he told a reporter. “I only have to drink a little wine and my mind becomes foggy and I don’t like it. After all, a clear mind is what I have been striving for all my life.”

  The years did not diminish Graham’s conviction that sex offers perhaps the most formidable temptation human beings can face, and that abstinence from fleshly lusts is the proper course to follow, but he displayed considerable compassion for young people growing up in a sex-saturated culture. “It’s very, very difficult,” he acknowledged. “If I had grown up in the present society, I’m not sure I could have coped at all. I think the only way a person can live clean today is if he has had a very real experience with God. I think they are given a supernatural power to live a clean life.” Perhaps recalling evenings of delicious temptation in his father’s shiny Plymouth automobile, he recommended that dating couples put a Bible on the car seat between them as a reminder that “Christ is the cure of even the most torrid of earthly temptations,” and assured them that if they would make the decision to resist temptation, “God provides a way of escape. The Holy Spirit is there to help.” Graham professed to have direct knowledge of the Spirit’s power to manage sexual tension. “I’ve been away from my wife as long as six months,” he volunteered, “but I never engaged in any sort of sexual practice. This means that a person can control his sex desires with the help of God.” Though he clearly believed that sex is wonderful in its place—at home, between loving marriage partners—he frequently reminded his audiences that “you don’t have to have sex to live. It is not like water or bread. Many have lived without sex. They have taken a chastity vow, and they have a strength and a power and an alertness that other people don’t have. . . . God can give you power to control that part of your body.”

  And yet he refrained from making people feel guilty about every sexual thought they may have. When speaking of lust, he noted that “I’m not talking about looking at a beautiful girl and admiring her. That’s natural, and God gave us these sex instincts, and I don’t think we should deny them. But he drew some circles around it and said, ‘Thus far, and no further.’ And if you do [go further], you hurt yourself.” He recognized, of course, that many devout Christians do go further, but his response to such slips was hardly a bluenosed harshness. If he had children who he knew engaged in premarital sex, he said, “I would tell [them] that I totally disapprove, but I would love them even if they did.”

  Graham showed similar flexibility in his attitude toward homosexuality and abortion, two other issues on which Evangelicals have taken a generally rigid stance. He continued to regard homosexuality as a sin but refused to put it in the category of special heinousness. “The Bible teaches these practices are wrong,” he said, “but no more so than adultery.” More boldly, he asserted, “I love them and don’t treat them any differently than my other friends. There are worse sins.” Clearly, he felt that treating homosexuals as pariahs was an un-Christian response. Just as clearly, however, he believed that conversion would lead to a change in sexual orientation, or at least to an ability to control homosexual behavior. “You have to take a vow to God,” he recommended, “and ask God to help you, and he will.” He recognized that not everyone in his audience would share his views, but rather than write them off as hopeless and hell-bound, he offered them the best advice he could find. In a 1988 telecast focusing on AIDS, he included an extended appearance by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who made it clear he believed abstinence is the proper course for unmarried people but urged those who were not being abstinent to use condoms, a notable departure from the standard Evangelical television program.

  On the volatile question of abortion, Graham took a conservative but not absolutist line. “The Bible does not support the indiscriminate practice of abo
rtion,” he said, but added that “an exception might be made in the case of incest, rape, or when the mother’s life is in danger,” noting that “this is about the same position as Pope John Paul II takes. I know some people feel that is not the right position, but that’s my position.” He disagreed with the pope’s position on birth control. “I am a strong advocate of birth control,” he said, acknowledging that this runs counter to official Catholic doctrine, but added, “I suspect that many Catholics practice it.” Protestants have typically favored birth control, but Graham’s position explicitly reflected his expanded social consciousness. “When you travel through India, Pakistan, etc., you have to believe in some form of control of the population. I don’t think it should ever be state control, . . . but the population explosion is a very serious thing.”

  Demographic realities also pressed Graham, along with other Evangelical leaders, to relax long-standing strictures regarding divorce and remarriage. Traditionally, strict Evangelical teaching has frowned strongly on divorce and sanctioned remarriage only for those whose spouses were guilty of adultery. In practice, many people who divorce for reasons other than adultery remarry and continue to attend church, but they are often the cause of some awkwardness for all parties, and many divorced Evangelicals either remain single out of explicit fear of eternal punishment, or if they choose to remarry, move to new churches to give themselves a fresh start. As the high divorce rates prevalent in the larger society began to appear in Evangelical circles, the churches have not only shown a greater tolerance for what they once regarded as a notable aberration but have made the “singles ministry,” which typically includes a substantial divorced contingent, a major feature of many successful congregations. Graham felt more comfortable with the traditional teaching; in describing a case in which a divorced woman had remarried, he discreetly noted without giving details that “she was free to remarry,” meaning that her husband had committed adultery. And what of those who are the sinners instead of the sinned against? “If they are not the innocent party,” he replied, “there is a question in my mind. Not a definite yes or no. I am not a legalist. Some of these things have to be taken case by case, point by point. God can forgive adultery.” His frequent use of the phrase “You can’t unscramble eggs” when referring to such cases indicated a pragmatic belief that trusting God to forgive all sorts of past mistakes is a more viable course of action than trying to rewrite history.

  Graham also moderated other views regarding the family. In earlier years he spoke of the husband as “the master of the house” who “organizes it, holds it together, and controls it,” and had counseled wives “to remain in subjection” to their husbands. By the mid-1970s, he had absorbed enough feminist rhetoric to cause him to rethink his position. Volunteering that he had based his earlier views on a misinterpretation of the Bible, he said, “I believe the Biblical position on women’s rights is that the husband and wife are equal.” He still believed that “in the governing organization of the home, the husband is the head,” but was willing to concede that “the woman is also the head in certain areas and there is an equal responsibility in the home.” Like vice-presidents in a corporation, they have equal status but manage different divisions. In this kind of arrangement, subjection would not be an issue. Husbands and wives would “submit to each other.” Predictably, he decried a feminist tendency to devalue the role of wife and mother as “a Satanic deception of modern times” but conceded that “there are things in today’s feminist movement that I like because I think women have been discriminated against.”

  Such views, of course, were hardly radical, even in Evangelical circles, but Graham took a somewhat bolder step by lending support, or at least not offering opposition, to the ordination of women. In 1975 he admitted that he was simply not sure about what position to take on this touchy subject. Two years later he said, “I don’t object to it like some do because so many of the leaders of the early church were women. They prophesied. They taught. You go on the mission fields today and many of our missionaries are women who are preachers and teachers.” As for women as pastors, “I think it’s coming probably, and I think it will be accepted more and more. I know a lot of women who are far superior to men when it comes to ministering to others.” Men might resist giving them full rights in the church, but such women “are ordained of God whether they had men to lay hands on them and give them a piece of paper or not. I think God called them.” A decade later, following the pattern he had set in dealing with blacks during the 1950s, Graham had quietly placed his stamp of approval on women ministers by including them (albeit in small numbers) in BGEA-sponsored conferences and by inviting them to lead prayer and take other public roles in his crusades.

  Just as association with world church leaders had given Graham a more flexible attitude toward theological positions different from the Fundamentalist revivalism in which he had been raised, so his exposure to the full range of the world’s political and economic systems had made him less confident that Western-style free-enterprise capitalism would be the system of choice in the millennium. While still voicing a clear preference for the free-enterprise system, he said, “I don’t think it’s the only one that Christians can support. We are a socialist society compared to, let’s say, the days of Franklin Roosevelt. There has to be a certain amount of socialism.” The inequity between rich and poor, including disparities between wealthy and developing nations, he observed, “is going to have to change somehow, whether voluntarily or by law. You can’t have some people driving Cadillacs and other people driving oxcarts and expect peace in the community. There is a crying need for more social justice. It’s a problem whose solution is beyond me, but I’ve found about 250 verses in the Bible on our responsibility to the poor.”

  Even though he had supported Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Graham had retained a slight cynicism toward such government programs. In 1969 he spoke with approval at having seen a poster that read, I FIGHT POVERTY. I WORK. And he criticized the motives of those who backed anti-poverty legislation by observing that “many people carry a heavy load for poverty because they want votes, and others want to get involved in the problems so they can get their hand in the till.” He conceded that the existence of opportunists and grifters “should never do away with our responsibility for the legitimate poor,” but his portrait surely gave comfort to those inclined to blame the poor for their own plight. He also continued to maintain a somewhat fatalistic attitude toward poverty, citing Jesus’ observation, “The poor you have with you always,” and reiterating his belief that only the Second Coming and the millennium would bring true relief from the world’s enduring problems. Repeated firsthand exposure to human suffering eventually had its effect on Graham’s native compassion, and he gradually began both to enlist his organization in the struggle against poverty and to acknowledge that poverty had other than individual roots and that something more sweeping than philanthropy would be required to ease the world’s suffering. “From the very beginning,” he said, “I felt that if I came upon a person who had been beaten and robbed and left for dead, that I’d do my best to help him. I also felt that this applied to my relatives and friends and immediate neighbors. But I never thought of it in terms of corporate responsibility. I had no real idea that millions of people throughout the world lived on the knife edge of starvation and that the teachings of [the Bible] demanded that I have a response toward them. . . . As I’ve traveled around through India and Africa and Latin America and all those places for all these years, it can’t help but be a heavy pressure. . . . For a person who hasn’t been there and touched those people and seen those people, it is really difficult to explain . . . [but] as I traveled and studied the Bible more, I changed.”

  In 1973 BGEA inaugurated its World Emergency Fund to provide a more routinized way of responding to similar needs. Aware of the criticism some relief agencies receive for the proportion of their incomes they spend in overhead, Graham took deserved pleasure in noting that “not one penny
” of the monies contributed specifically to this fund was siphoned off for administrative purposes. More as an example than as a serious attempt to alleviate hunger, Graham’s later crusades included a program called Love-in-Action in which people were asked to contribute nonperishable food to the service for distribution through reputable social agencies. Typically, this effort brought in several tons of canned and boxed goods, but Graham freely admitted its limitations and symbolic purpose: “Of course, we can’t feed all the hungry people. It’s only a gesture, to demonstrate what we ought to do all the time. If the churches and synagogues did what they could do, we would not have to have such a confused welfare system.”