A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  By the early 1980s, Graham was beginning to echo Roman Catholic statements about God’s presumed “preferential option for the poor.” During an address at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he astonished the school’s dean, a former resident of Charlotte, and many of the students gathered to hear him, when he said, “As a Christian, I believe that God has a special concern for the poor of the world, and public policy should in some way reflect this concern. I believe God has a special concern for things like peace, racism, the responsible use of Earth’s resources, economic and social justice, the use of power, and the sacredness of human life.” He admitted that “how these matters are to be implemented is a very complex matter” and confessed that “I have not always seen many of the complexities. . . . I am still learning. . . . But I have come to see in deeper ways some of the implications of my faith and the message that I have been proclaiming.” In Approaching Hoofbeats, which appeared the following year, he offered details on the worldwide scope of such problems as hunger and infant mortality, asserted that the disparity between the rich and the poor is “one of the basic causes of social unrest in Central America and other parts of the world,” and condemned “the indifference of certain governments to the plight of their own people.” And by the end of the 1980s, he was insisting that the United States do its part for underprivileged nations by helping them gain relief from international debt. Though he recognized that Americans would bridle at the austerity such a policy would entail, since it would inevitably increase the tax burden on Americans, he saw no other alternative. “I think we’ve got to help them with this debt,” he said. “It’s threatening Latin countries and countries throughout the world, and we’ve got to do something about it.”

  The evangelist was also willing to identify, or at least to sympathize publicly, with groups that had once drawn his barely disguised scorn. During a two-installment tour of British cities in 1984 and 1985, he repeatedly expressed concern for the unemployed, making it clear that he no longer regarded people who were out of work as willfully lazy. “The most important thing, apart from finding jobs,” he said, “is that unemployed people should not be made to feel that they are second-class citizens. Christians should be deeply concerned for the problems of society and should be supportive of those who are socially deprived.” While preaching in the industrial city of Sheffield, he met with miners who had been involved in a brutal union dispute to suggest how Christian teaching might apply to their situation. Details of their conversations were not revealed, but they apparently went beyond the pious palliatives that have led many British working people to give up on the church. The president of the National Union of Mineworkers called the meeting “extremely useful,” and Graham, while insisting he did not know enough about the situation to take sides, did the miners’ cause no harm by saying, “My heart goes out to people who hurt.” British churchmen, who have often faulted Graham for excessive individualism, professed to be gratified “by the way in which the social awareness of his maturity finally tempers the fundamentalist fires of his youth.”

  Graham’s views on crime and punishment also took on a more liberal cast. He grew more aware that not all crime is street crime or committed by poor people—“Many of our crimes are committed in upper-middle-class or affluent environments”—and believed that some form of gun control would be appropriate. He also developed reservations about capital punishment. “One of the hesitations I’ve had,” he told a reporter, “is that so many blacks are executed. The system has always been too one sided, and many of the people on death row are poor people who couldn’t afford good lawyers. There is no perfect system of justice on this earth. God will have it at judgment. But this is a very imperfect system. And execution makes the imperfection final.” At hearing her husband backtrack on some of his earlier law-and-order sentiments, Ruth frowned and bluntly interjected, “I’m for capital punishment. I think it is a deterrent. I know in countries where they have it, I feel safer walking down the streets.” Unwilling to start an argument but also unwilling to abandon his position, Graham gently responded, “Darling, there are countries where they have executions in which I don’t feel safe at all.”

  No shift in Graham’s social thought drew more attention than his increased concern for peace and nuclear disarmament. Given the flak his 1982 visit to Moscow drew, he might easily have backed off his more dovish sentiments or claimed he had been misunderstood or misquoted. Instead, he stood by his ploughshares and included an extended statement of his views on disarmament in his 1983 book, Approaching Hoofbeats. He began with a confession and a statement of repentance. “To limit the growing threat of nuclear warfare seems perfectly in line with Christ’s call to be peacemakers on the earth,” he said, but admitted that “in those first years of the nuclear age I did very little in this particular area. I preached the gospel throughout the world, which was my primary calling, and I warned people against war in my sermons from the very beginning. . . . But perhaps I should have done more . . . I wish now that I had taken a much stronger stand against the nuclear arms race at its beginning when there was a chance of stopping it.” He repeated his by now standard statement that he was neither a pacifist nor an advocate of unilateral disarmament and acknowledged that, given the sinful nature of humankind, police and military forces would always be necessary in this temporal realm. Still, he regarded a worldwide concern for peace as a heartening sign, and he called on all Christians “to rise above narrow national interests and to give all of humanity a spiritual vision of the way to peace.” He then repeated the recommendations he had made at the 1982 Moscow conference: Urge all governments to respect the rights of religious believers, get to know one another personally, and encourage world leaders to work toward eliminating all nuclear and biochemical weapons of mass destruction.

  Graham’s fear that either the Soviet Union or the United States would set off a major conflagration ebbed in the 1980s, but it was offset by concern over nuclear proliferation and the problems inherent in a situation in which “the smaller nations, many nations not quite as stable,” had or would soon have nuclear capability. Showing his willingness to draft such possibilities into the service of his invitation, he told a South Carolina audience, “Fifteen to twenty-five nations have a nuclear capacity. Terrorists are also working on it, and may have it. That’s the reason you ought to come to Christ.” He also continued to insist that “no Secretary of State or government official shuttling back and forth between countries can lessen these international tensions. It may patch things up for a while, but only the coming of Christ will solve the problems.” Still, his shift from a fatalistic view of nuclear war as the likely means God would use to launch Armageddon to a vision of world peace as “a realistic, present hope” for which Christians ought to strive, and his seconding Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 observation that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in a final sense—a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed” was real and significant. Christianity Today correctly characterized his interest in nuclear issues as something other than “the scare tactics of a preacher who wants responses to his sermons.” It reflected instead the agony of “an evangelist and international diplomat” who had “discussed these problems with seven U.S. Presidents and other heads of state and world leaders, and has dealt with more people searching for God than perhaps any man in history.”

  Did Graham honestly think his vision of SALT 10 could ever be realized? “Not likely,” he admitted. “But does that mean I should cease praying, speaking, and working for that day when the people of the earth will unite to remove the ever-present threat of nuclear holocaust? Again, no! . . . I do not plan to be a leader in a peace movement or organization. I am an evangelist. But I am a man who is still in process.”

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  What Manner of Man?

  Billy Graham genuinely believed what he preached, and his organization provided him with the means to accompli
sh what lesser lights can only dream about. But the crucial factor in explaining Billy Graham’s unprecedented accomplishments as an evangelist and world Christian leader is Billy Graham himself. In good Evangelical fashion, his associates and admirers insist that any attempt to account for him on the human level is destined to seem trite, even foolish. Allan Emery uses the image of a turtle on a fence post. Any sensible person encountering that unlikely sight would immediately realize that the turtle had not crawled up there by himself but had been placed there by some larger and more powerful force. The Reverend Maurice Wood, bishop of Norwich and member of Britain’s House of Lords, offered a similar assessment: “I believe that in each generation God raises up certain people he can trust with success. I would put Billy in line with the Wesleys and St. Augustine. Toss Francis in, if you like. He’s in that league, anyway. And what’s extraordinary is that he doesn’t seem to know it. He doesn’t want a Graham church. He is more interested in sharing the load than in grabbing the limelight. He wants to be a servant of the Church, to challenge and spark the churches to be what they must become: the evangelizing agents of God and his Word. But there’s no doubt about it; he is the most spiritually productive servant of God in our time.”

  Some think it a waste of effort to speculate as to when or where the next such figure might arise. “I honestly believe with all my heart that Billy Graham is the most important single thing God has done since the Apostle Paul,” Lane Adams volunteered. “He is the only man who has ever had the ear of the world this long. Could it be that he is like John the Baptist, making straight the way of the Lord? Perhaps he is giving one last clarion cry for the Second Coming of the Savior. When you consider the advent of satellite communications, which makes it possible to have such a broad outreach, you can’t help but stop and wonder.”

  It is true that no person in modern history has done more than Billy Graham to bring to the world’s attention the message and testimony of Evangelical Christianity. Through his crusades, his conferences, his radio and television programs, his newspaper columns and magazine articles and books, his friendship with kings and queens and presidents and prime ministers, and his enduring omnipresence as a public figure, he forced millions of people to pay attention to a kind of religion that ordinarily astute observers predicted would vanish from all but the remotest and most backward of locations by the end of the twentieth century. He stood for and personified the Evangelical conviction that what the Bible says is what the Bible means, but he did so without encouraging the blatantly anti-intellectual tendencies that have often characterized Fundamentalist and, to a lesser degree, Evangelical Christianity. Moreover, his warm ecumenical heart melted barriers that traditionally separated Evangelicals from more liberal Christians and repeatedly opened itself to non-Christians as well. Prominent rabbi Marc Tanenbaum said of him, “The American Jewish Committee can tell in moving chapter and verse how Dr. Graham came time and again to the aid of the embattled people of Israel, when his voice and influence in high places made a crucial and, at times, a decisive difference Dr. Billy Graham has been and continues to be one of the greatest friends of the Jewish people and of Israel in the entire Christian world in the twentieth century.” And in recent years, when Muslims could easily have provided him with a convenient target for demagogic attacks, he repeatedly called attention to the commonality between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition, recommending that Christians “go out of our way to love them,” and pointing out that his son Franklin has visited Lebanon nearly thirty times to help rebuild Muslim homes destroyed by bombs. “[Franklin] felt he needed to do something to show Islamic people that Christians could love them, in spite of the wars and the troubles.”

  Just as he helped Evangelicals make their presence felt in the mainstream of American religion, Graham also encouraged them to take a more active political role. Though he disliked being labeled the High Priest of the American Civil Religion during the Johnson and Nixon years and admitted he sometimes acted imprudently on behalf of his friends in the White House, he continued to encourage Evangelicals to be involved in the political process and showed them that their involvement need not be as fanatical and narrow-gauged as some of the efforts of the Christian New Right. In the process, his own political outlook had broadened and deepened. “Eisenhower once said publicly that I was the greatest ambassador that America had,” he recalled. “Of course, at the moment he said it in the 1950s, I was pleased. Now I would not be pleased because I feel that my ministry today is a world ministry. Now when I say something, I think, ‘How is this going to sound in India? How is it going to sound to my friends in Hungary or Poland?’ I don’t ever want to dodge the truth, and I don’t ever want to back down on my convictions. But I’m beginning to see that there are more sides to some of these questions than I once thought. I am not as dogmatic.”

  Graham’s ability to speak to American culture so successfully for sixty years stemmed in some measure from the fact that he was in many ways an apotheosis of the core values of that culture. If results are the metric, he was the best who ever was at what he did, but he attained that height through hard and honest work, not through inheritance or blind chance. Always ready to use the latest technology to accomplish his goals and maintain his prominence, he nevertheless insisted that his most valuable asset was a circle of loyal friends. He walked with royalty and received unprecedented media attention for over four decades but was still something of a small-town boy, astonished that anyone would think him special. In a profession stained by scandal, he stands out as the clearly identified exemplar of clean-living integrity. In a society riven by divorce, he and the wife of his youth reared five attractive and capable children, all of whom are faithful Christians with their own intact families. He is, in short, an authentic American hero.

  Billy Graham was, for most of his life, a genuinely charismatic figure. Using such a term as charisma may seem a resort to a supernatural, and therefore nonverifiable, explanation, but social observers as uncongenial to the supernatural as Max Weber and Eric Hoffer have regarded charisma as palpably real and historically important. The term owes its presence in sociological literature to Weber, one of that discipline’s patriarchs, who described the charismatic leader as a man able to inspire people to follow him and accept his authority, not out of fear or hope of material gain but out of love, devotion, and enthusiasm. He typically possesses a strong sense of mission, a conviction that his mission is admirable and obtainable, and a confidence that he is particularly well equipped to accomplish that mission—either because he has been chosen by God or some impersonal destiny, or simply because his peculiar set of talents seem so well matched to the historical circumstance. Hoffer added to these elements “a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); . . . a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants.” Graham’s associates and enthusiasts would doubtless object to having their hero lumped in with some of the figures to whom students of politics and religion have applied the concept—Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, Sun Myung Moon, Jim Jones, and L. Ron Hubbard—and would probably quibble over the cynical tone of Hoffer’s characterization, but whenever they move beyond the sovereignty of God as an explanatory variable, they speak in terms that fit easily into these accounts of charisma.

  British Evangelical John Stott agreed that “what is most captivating about Billy is his sincerity. There isn’t an iota of hypocrisy in the man. He is real. I sat in Harringay night after night asking over and over, ‘What is the reason [for his success]?’ I finally decided that this was the first time most of these people had heard a transparently honest evangelist who was speaking from his heart and who meant and believed what he was saying. There is something captivating about that.” Another old friend echoed Hoffer’s “cunning estimate of human nature.” Graham, he said, “is not an intellectual in the academic
sense of the word, but he is a genius. He preaches to presidents and kings and queens in a way that no other man has ever been able to do. He is so ‘people sensitive.’ He knows just what to say without either compromising the gospel or turning anyone off. I’ve watched him with a telescope and I’ve watched him with a microscope but I haven’t changed my views of him. He has his faults. Everyone does. But he is just an amazing, amazing man.”

  Without doubt, it was Graham’s prowess as a soul winner that commended him most powerfully to Evangelical Christians, since no activity has higher standing in their minds than bringing the lost to Christ. But he was also an exemplar in other aspects of his personal life, leading the kind of life they feel they should lead but seldom actually manage on a sustained basis. He arose around seven o’clock each morning and performed a round of devotions that included prayer and the reading of five psalms and one chapter of proverbs—“Psalms for how to get along with God, Proverbs for how to get along with man.” After breakfast he spent an hour in Bible study, tried to get some exercise—in later years, usually a brisk walk—and rounded out the workday with writing, reading, meetings, and telephone calls. During crusades he rested most of the afternoon—“We don’t bother him, except for emergencies.” He socialized little apart from obligatory planned events and, when he was in Montreat, rarely left his mountain retreat. He was strongly conscious of time and expected others to share his concern. “I become impatient if I feel I’m being used,” he admitted. “I value my time. I only have a certain amount left, and I want it to be put to the best use. Also, I hate to be late for an appointment. I don’t mind waiting for someone for an hour if he’s late”—an assertion no visitor should take seriously—“but I hate to be late.”