During his life, Graham preached in person to more than 100 million people and to millions more via television, satellite, and film. Nearly 3 million have responded to his invitation to “accept Jesus into your heart” at the end of his sermons. He proclaimed the gospel to more persons than any other preacher in history. In the process, Graham became “America’s Pastor,” participating in presidential inaugurations and speaking during national crises such as the memorial services following the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks.

“He became the friend and confidante of popes and presidents, queens and dictators, and yet, even in his 80s, he possesses the boyish charm and unprepossessing demeanor to communicate with the masses,” said Columbia University historian Randall Balmer.

Billy Graham was born in 1918 in Charlotte, North Carolina, attended (briefly) Bob Jones College, graduating from Florida Bible Institute near Tampa, and Wheaton College in Illinois. He was ordained a minister in the Southern Baptist Church (1939) and pastored a small church in suburban Chicago and preached on a weekly radio program. In 1946 he became the first full-time staff member of Youth for Christ and launched his evangelistic campaigns. For four years (1948–1952) he also served as president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis. His 1949 evangelistic tent meetings in Los Angeles brought him to national attention, and his 1957 New York meetings, which filled Madison Square Garden for four months, established him as a major presence on the American religious scene.

Graham appeared regularly on the lists of “most admired” people. Between 1950 and 1990 Graham won a spot on the Gallup Organization’s “Most Admired” list more often than any other American. Ladies Home Journal once ranked him second only to God in the category of “achievements in religion.” He received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1983) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1996).

Sherwood Wirt, who for 17 years edited the Graham organization’s Decision magazine, described one Scottish minister who made this observation about Graham: “My first impression of the man at close quarters was not of his good looks but of his goodness; not of his extraordinary range of commitments, but of his own ‘committedness’ to his Lord and Master. To be with him even for a short time is to get a sense of a single-minded man; it shames one and shakes one as no amount of ability and cleverness can do.”

Graham was a model of integrity. Despite scandals and missteps that toppled other leaders and ministers, including Graham’s friend Richard Nixon and a succession of televangelists, in six decades of ministry, no one ever leveled a serious accusation of misconduct against him.

That’s not to say he wasn’t seriously criticized. Some liberals and intellectuals called his message “simplistic.” Some fundamentalists considered him “compromised” for cooperating with mainline groups and the National Council of Churches.

His moderate anti-segregationist stance during the Civil Rights era drew fire from both sides: white segregationists were furious when he invited the “agitator” Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at the 1957 New York City crusade; civil rights activists accused him of cowardice for not joining them on protest marches and getting arrested for the cause.

In 1982, when he visited the Soviet Union, agreeing to preach the gospel at the invitation of the government, he touched off a firestorm of criticism. Despite having met with The Siberian Seven, Pentecostal dissidents who were seeking political asylum, Graham was quoted as saying he “had not personally seen any evidence of religious persecution.” Some called him a “traitor.” But he insisted he would go anywhere to preach as long as there were no restrictions on his freedom to proclaim the gospel. He returned claiming he saw the hand of God working in the Soviet Union. He was fiercely attacked for being naïve and “a tool of the Soviet propaganda machine.”

By 1990, however, after the fall of the Soviet Union, his prescience was vindicated when then-President George H.W. Bush said to the National Religious Broadcasters, “Eight years ago, one of the Lord’s great ambassadors, Rev. Billy Graham, went to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and, upon returning, spoke of a movement there toward more religious freedom. And perhaps he saw it before many of us because it takes a man of God to sense the early movement of the hand of God.”

Perhaps Graham’s lasting legacy was his ability to present the gospel in the idiom of the culture. He did this brilliantly, making innovative use of emerging technologies—radio, television, magazines, books, a newspaper column, motion pictures, satellite broadcasts, Internet—to spread his message.

In the 1990s he reengineered the formula for his “crusades” (later called “missions” out of deference to Muslims and others offended by the connotation). His standard “youth night” was revolutionized into a “Concert for the Next Generation,” with Christian rock, rap, and hip-hop artists headlining the event, followed by Graham preaching. This format drew record numbers of young people who cheered the bands and then, amazingly, listened carefully to the octogenarian evangelist.

In addition, he helped launch numerous influential organizations, including Youth for Christ (he was the first full-time staff member of this entrepreneurial and innovative organization), the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Christianity Today. The ripple effect of his shaping influence extends to such schools as Wheaton College in Illinois, Gordon-Conwell Divinity School in Massachusetts, Northwestern College in Minnesota, and Fuller Seminary in California. His encouragement and support helped develop the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, Greater Europe Mission, TransWorld Radio, World Vision, World Relief, and the National Association of Evangelicals.

He brought the global Christian community together through international conventions: a 1966 Congress on World Evangelism in Berlin, the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, and three huge conferences in Amsterdam for itinerant evangelists in 1983, 1986, and 2000, which drew nearly 24,000 working evangelists from 200 countries.

In many ways, Billy Graham both formed and embodied the evangelical movement. Theologian J. I. Packer attributes the evangelical “convergence” to Graham. “Up to 1940, it was every institution for itself. There wasn’t anything unitive about the situation. There were little outposts of resistance trying to keep their end up in face of the liberal juggernaut. Increasingly, from the 1950s onward, evangelicals came together behind Billy Graham and the things he stood for and was committed to. It continues that way to the present.”

For many, however, William Franklin Graham won’t be remembered for these accomplishments. He’ll always be “Billy,” as he preferred to be called. He titled his autobiography Just As I Am, a reflection of his humble spirit, taken from the hymn sung most often when he invited people to come forward and receive God’s love.

And for millions, his humility before the Almighty encouraged them to approach with that same spirit

Farm Boy: How Billy Graham Became a Preacher

If you go to Charlotte, North Carolina, you will find that the farmland where Billy Graham grew up has been transformed. The rolling fields of the early-20th-century agricultural South have morphed into the strip malls, office buildings, and subdivisions of the New South. But Charlotte of 1918, the year of Graham’s birth, was a sleepier town. Its first streetcars, creating new suburban residences, had just been built, and it wasn’t until Billy was three years old that one of the nation’s first radio stations graced Charlotte’s airwaves. A year later, Efird’s Department Store, which described itself as “the only store south of Philadelphia with escalators,” opened. It was in this Charlotte—straddling rural and urban, and experiencing the first pangs of transition into the world-class city people know today—that Graham was born.

Frank and Morrow Graham built, and reared their four children on, a thriving dairy farm. The children grew up in a colonial-style house with indoor plumbing. The family was close-knit. Indeed, Billy and two younger siblings, Catherine and Melvin, shared a bedroom until Catherine was 13. Jean Graham Ford—the youngest Graham sibling, born almost 14 years after Billy, and his only surviving sibling today—recalls the special bond shared by Billy and his mother. Billy was always doing little things to please her, like going out into the fields and bringing her wildflowers. Jean also recalls that young Billy loved Morrow’s cooking and had a seemingly insatiable appetite: “When you walked in the back door during the spring and summer months, Mother would always have tomatoes on the shelf in the back porch. He would pick up the tomato and eat it just like he would an apple.” Billy especially enjoyed a boiled custard that only his mother could make. She would fix it by the quart, and he would drink it down.

The Graham children’s early years were quiet but full. Morrow Graham recalled it as “just a quiet country life.” Billy and Melvin helped in the dairy farm from a young age, and they played ball. “Billy always loved his ball,” his mother recalled.

The story of Billy Graham’s conversion is well known. In the fall of 1934, Mordecai Ham, a Kentucky-born Baptist revivalist, came to Charlotte and preached a powerful sermon. The revival stretched over weeks, and for the first week or so, the Grahams didn’t attend. Billy was persuaded to check out Ham by Albert McKain, one of his father’s most trusted employees. There, in response to Ham’s powerful teachings about sin, Billy famously made a decision for Christ. Later that night, standing in the Grahams’ breakfast room with fixings for a sandwich, Billy shared his experience with his family: putting down his sandwich, he turned to Morrow and said, “Oh, Mother, I’ve been saved tonight.” In a 1976 interview, Billy’s sister Catherine recalled some of the subtle ways his conversion changed him: He no longer wanted to go to the movies, and he was nicer to his siblings. Doubtless, Billy’s sense that stirring preaching could inspire a dramatic personal commitment to Christ inspired his own lifelong ministry.

And yet it is worth remembering that, as decisive as this experience was, it wasn’t the beginning of Graham’s Christian life. To the contrary, by the time Graham found his way to Ham’s revival, he had already experienced nearly two decades of powerful formation in his local Presbyterian church and at home. Both of Graham’s parents were raised in the Presbyterian Church, although Morrow was more active than her husband before they married. As children, Jean recalls, the Graham family was at church every time the doors opened, and prayer was part of their daily life. “From the time Mother and Daddy were married, they had family devotions. They prayed together and read Scripture together—even on their honeymoon they knelt together.”

Throughout Billy’s childhood, the family had devotions, usually at night, in which Frank or Morrow would read a Bible passage and then family members would take turns praying. Sabbath was a special day in the Graham household. Morrow cooked all of Sunday’s food on Saturday so that no more work than necessary (cows do always have to be milked) would be undertaken on Sunday. This was the strong foundation on which Billy’s decisive moment at the Ham revival was built.

From Bob Jones to Florida Bible

But Billy’s early Christian formation was not the only aspect of his life in Charlotte that made an impact. His experiences at various schools would shape his intellectual life, and his understanding of Christian institutions, for decades. Scholarship was not Billy’s great strength; indeed, at first it was not clear to anyone that he would graduate from high school. His sister Jean recalls the day his homeroom teacher came to the house and warned Morrow that her eldest son wouldn’t pass his senior year. (He graduated from Sharon High School in 1936.) His lackadaisical attitude toward schoolwork may have been more of a comment on his desire to follow his own intellectual interests than anything else. He loved to read and read what he wanted to, even if it meant letting some of his assignments fall by the wayside. Jean remembers Billy often sitting cross-legged in a chair, “biting his fingernails and reading, letting the rest of the world go by.”

That Morrow Graham’s children would attend college was a given, but before matriculating came Billy’s storied stint as a Fuller brush salesman. He surprised his friends—who thought he was not the most hardworking person on the planet, and that he would be a flop—by selling brushes throughout the Carolinas. Is it any coincidence that America’s most famous and successful proponent of the gospel had his first career success persuading people that they needed a Fuller brush? Though Graham never exactly “sold” the gospel, it’s not too much of a leap to imagine that the charm and persuasiveness he used to sell brushes were part of the same powers of persuasion that God used to awaken people to the gospel through Billy’s preaching.

Then came college. Where should a lanky farmer’s son from North Carolina study? Morrow had her heart set on her children attending Wheaton, but Bob Jones College (then located in Cleveland, Tennessee) came to seem a better option, because it was close to home and less pricey. Yet Billy struggled at Bob Jones from the moment he arrived. As he recalled in his memoir, Just As I Am, students’ social life and intellectual life were strictly regulated; students’ mail was even checked to make sure nothing untoward got through the postal service. Perhaps foreshadowing the showdown he and Jones would have years later, Billy chafed against the regulations. Indeed, Billy and his friend Wendell Phillips both broke enough rules to rack up about 149 demerits—one more, and they’d be out. His schoolwork suffered, as did his health and, not surprisingly, his spiritual life. “I can’t seem to get anywhere in prayer,” he wrote to his mother. “I don’t feel anything.”

So in 1937, Billy transferred to Florida Bible Institute, which he found much more congenial. There, he learned a framework for thinking about critical issues that would stay with him for life: “We were encouraged to think things through for ourselves, but always with the unique authority of Scripture as our guide. … I could stretch my mind without feeling that I was doing violence to my soul.”

It was also in Florida that Billy started preaching. His mentor, academic dean John Minder, brought Billy with him on an Easter jaunt to a Baptist conference center in Palatka, Florida. Their hosts invited Minder to preach that evening at a small Baptist church. Minder, perhaps determined to get his young friend into the pulpit (but perhaps unable to imagine the awesome ministry that would result), declined the invitation, saying that Billy would be happy to take the service. What could Billy do but agree? So that evening, in a small room where a potbellied stove warded off the chill, Billy stood up before a small group of Baptist preachers and recited not one but four sermons he had memorized from a Moody Press book. This was, Billy later recalled, an “awkward debut,” to say the least. “Whatever glimmer of talent Dr. Minder might have thought he saw in me was Raw, with a capital R.”

That night in Palatka was, of course, just the beginning. Before long, the rough edges of Billy’s earliest sermons were burnished through prayer and practice, and he grew from a tyro into a masterful preacher. The seeds of his phenomenal work for Christ were clearly evident in his early years. His love of reading and his willingness to think about challenging issues, always in a biblical framework, would find new direction when he finally matriculated at Wheaton. And his understanding that powerful preaching could help lead even an ordinary North Carolina farm boy to make a decision for Christ would yield copious fruit in decades of evangelism around the world.

Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God

Billy Graham debuted on a national stage during his Los Angeles Crusade in fall 1949. Just 30 years old, Graham met his audience with a fiery call for repentance from sin, boldly announcing on the opening night that “this city of wickedness and sin” had a choice between revival and renewal—or judgment. At first, Los Angeles responded rather coolly to Graham’s ire. But after a publicity boost from news magnate William Randolph Hearst, Graham’s crusade entered its “5th Sin-Smashing Week!” A week later, the “Canvas Cathedral” overflowed as Graham presided over the “6th Great Sin-Smashing Week!”

Graham was no false advertiser. According to The Los Angeles Times, when the sawdust settled, some 6,000 souls had either “re-consecrated their lives” or converted to a life in Christ, “weeping forgiveness for their sins.” Their tears were understandable since, according to Graham, they had narrowly missed hellfire and damnation. “Those who reject Christ,” Graham bellowed in an early sermon, “will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone to spend eternity.” He emphasized the point even more vividly in a sermon about Judgment Day. Upon Jesus’ return, Graham warned, he would condemn the unrepentant with “fire coming from his eyes,” and a “sword coming from his mouth.” The young evangelist rounded off the theme of condemnation near the end of his crusade with a recitation of Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Such firebrand sermons produced restless nights among some audience members, forcing Graham to employ a “‘swing shift’” evangelist to handle decisions for Christ motivated by nightmares of a terrifying Jesus and a wrathful God.

Along with the thousands who turned to Christ, Graham’s life and evangelism were never the same after Los Angeles. Virtually overnight he went from a well-known minister within the evangelical subculture to a nationally recognized preacher. Amidst a deluge of media coverage, an editor at Life captured the transformation simply but presciently: “A New Evangelist Arises.” Graham’s meteoric rise to prominence awakened him to the burden and responsibility of his national role. That his sermons were scrutinized by the press and analyzed by “hundreds of clergy, laymen, and theologians throughout the world,” Graham recalled later, “baffled, perplexed,” and “frightened” him. Consequently, the Los Angeles crusade was the beginning of the end of the “turn or burn” style of preaching that had characterized many of his sermons there.

If the 1949 campaign marked the beginning of a shift in his preaching tone, the end came a decade later. Graham announced in a 1960 Christian Century article, “What Ten Years Have Taught Me,” that he centered his message on the Cross and its dual revelation of the “sins of men” but also the “unwearying love of God.” Four years later, in 1964, he confirmed the tonal change of his evangelism, remarking, “I stress a great deal the love of God from the Cross saying to the whole world, ‘I love you, I love you, I will forgive you.’ “

What about the intervening years caused this shift in emphasis? In the space of a decade, Graham had become the most renowned evangelist in the world, magnifying a hundredfold the burden he felt after Los Angeles. With an audience numbering in the millions, Graham understood that his words had the potential to alienate as much as invite untold numbers around the globe. Accordingly, while the theme of repentance was as strong as ever, he curbed excessive references to the flames of hell. More importantly, Graham, as the title of his Century article suggested, adopted the posture of a student. Lacking a formal theological education, he hungrily studied the Bible and theology and realized more fully that the gospel really was good news to those “lost and confused and frustrated about purpose and meaning in life.” Practical experience also pushed Graham toward his revised message. His wide travels schooled him in the vast diversity of “the family of God” and further convinced him of the need for Christians of all stripes to “love one another.” Finally, Graham studied his audience and recognized that he ministered to a population—especially in America—beset by doubt, loneliness, and unhappiness during an era known as the “Age of Anxiety.” In light of such malaise, Graham adjusted his message to fit the concerns of his constituents, promising an “age of grace” for those who would turn to Christ.

Graham’s greater assurances about the love of God transformed his evangelism in his attitude toward sin, social crises, and ecumenism. With the love of God at the center of his message, Graham spoke more often of sin as the condition of all humanity, as opposed to sin as particular transgressions of one kind or another. This distinction crystallized for him as he recognized that God’s loving sacrifice of Jesus at the Cross was meant to “deal with sin and not just individual sins.” Graham’s decreasing emphasis on a gospel of good behavior strengthened his commitment to a social gospel. Make no mistake, Graham never wavered in his primary mission to bring individuals to Christ. But he worried less about—as he preached in 1949—”the sins of the Sunset Strip,” and more about social problems, including racism, AIDS, and poverty. Finally, Graham’s ecumenical spirit deepened and broadened. He refused to speculate about the fate of non-Christians, and offered that “the love of God is absolute … and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have.”

The legacies of Graham’s ministry are many, but perhaps none is greater than its demonstration that it is not the flames of hell but the triumphant love of God that defines and emboldens a Christian life.

Billy in the Oval Office: A Story of Faith, Friendship, and Temptation

In 2007, Time magazine veterans Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy co-authored The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House. The best-selling book chronicled Graham’s influence on American presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush.

On April 25, 2010, Graham hosted President Obama at the Graham family home in Montreat, North Carolina, making Obama the 12th chief executive to interact with Graham, something no other religious leader has done. The two of them prayed for each other during their 35-minute meeting, according to reports.

Graham’s relationships with different presidents varied widely. He skinny-dipped in the White House pool with Lyndon Johnson, played golf with John F. Kennedy, and counseled the Clintons after the Lewinsky scandal.

But Graham acknowledged that his relationship with President Nixon, tainted by partisan politics, was the one most harmful to the evangelist’s gospel mission. Timothy C. Morgan, director of Wheaton College’s journalism program, interviewed Gibbs before Graham’s death.

As journalists, Michael Duffy and you had rare opportunities to interact one on one with Billy Graham. How would you describe him in personal terms?

One description I love is the writer who, looking at Billy Graham’s long arms and long legs, said that it looked as though God had designed him to be seen from a distance.

This figure could fill a stadium with 50,000 or 100,000 people, night after night after night. We imagined this huge public personality. What was most surprising to us the first day we went to Montreat was how completely disarming he was. We were struck by his humility, the gentleness, the quiet, confident grace.

He seemed perhaps the most unguarded man I’ve ever interviewed. He was not spinning, not looking to airbrush his history. The thing he was most worried about was that he might make a mistake or forget to give someone credit for something. The charisma was compelling—what an epic figure.

Any clues on how he got to be that way?

Of course, every President wanted to know that. Presidents very much want to get 50,000 people to come out and hear them. They were deeply curious how this one man was able to do that. As you might well expect, Graham’s answer was, “Well, I didn’t do it. God’s doing it.”

To which the presidents would say, “Well, okay. But there are a lot of preachers out there preaching the gospel who are not filling Yankee stadium night after night, so there must be something in particular about you.”

Graham had a great gift for keeping things simple. He was a very smart, thoughtful man. He never felt like he needed or wanted to stray from the core gospel message of God’s saving grace.

He made it possible for people to let down their own guard. We did go to his last crusade in New York. It was quite extraordinary watching 100,000 people listen to his preaching and just let go of whatever it was they had brought with them that day. He created a safe space, where you could let go of your pride, let go of your self-consciousness, let go of everything, and just focus on what he was saying.

He created that one on one and he created it one on 100,000.

When you were interviewing Graham for your book, it seemed like he crossed the boundary between a journalist and an interview subject. Did he pray with you?

He did pray with us. It was natural as breathing. That was absolutely just the most natural thing in the world for him. He is someone who made a deep impression on everyone he encountered. We were not looking to trick him. We were looking to see if he could help us understand what his experience was like in his interactions with every modern President, starting with Harry Truman.

What part of Billy Graham’s personality do you think American presidents came to value the most?

We were struck by the fact of how many of them got to know him long before they were presidents. His friendships with these men dated back decades before. He met Ronald Reagan in the early 1950s. He knew the Bush family in the early 1950s. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, these were all people that he had encountered, in many cases, not only long before they were President, but long before they were in politics at all.

All of them would have, not what we thought was a public relationship, but in fact a private relationship with the same man. Despite all their different theological backgrounds, political backgrounds, and personal histories, they all had a relationship with the same preacher.

How do you explain that? I’ve heard Billy Graham described as a “triple A” personality. That tends to be true as well of men who become President—people who have energy, intensity, and curiosity. It’s as though they are made out of some alloy that is different from the rest of us. They are boundlessly curious and boundlessly energetic. There aren’t many people like this. They can spot each other at a distance.

When Graham looked at a President, did he see someone who was cut from the same cloth as himself?

There is the shared experience they had. Very few people understand what the presidency does to you. John F. Kennedy said, “There’s nothing that prepares you for the office.”

Graham was part of a very small circle—his privacy was every bit as hard to maintain as theirs was, his family life was as challenged, the demands on him, the burdens on him—he was if anything an even bigger global celebrity than they were.

There are not many people who are bigger global celebrities than the President of the United States. Arguably he was. Look at Gallup’s most admired list over the years. It’s always a toss-up whether he comes out one step ahead or one step behind whoever is in the Oval Office at the time.

The very nature of being President is that you only get to make hard decisions. Any easy decisions don’t make it to your desk. They are made further down the chain of command.

If you make a hard decision, the reason it’s hard is because there are good arguments for going either way. You are continually in need of forgiveness.

In what sense is there a need for forgiveness?

Because if you decide A, there was a really good case for B. Even if the decision turns out to be “the right one,” the decisions leave a mark on you. There’s a need to have someone sitting across from you, as Graham would do, and offer to pray with you and say to you, “God loves you and he wants to help you and he is walking right next to you, step by step.”

The comfort that he gave them, and the assurance of pardon that he gave them, and the sense of being loved that he gave them, was enormously valuable.

Quietly and privately, they would ask him the most simple questions. “How do I know I’m going to go to heaven?” “What happens after we die?” “Am I going to see my parents again?”

Many of the presidents we looked at had come from devout families, often extremely devout mothers. Sitting with Billy Graham allowed them to reattach themselves to the faith of their childhood, the faith of their families. He brought them home.

We know, of course, Graham never ran for political office. But would he have made a great President?

I don’t think so. He was fascinated by politics. He freely admitted that. But in some ways, the Oval Office is a dangerous place for a guileless man. You can see in what happened between Graham and Richard Nixon how that played out. What too close an association with politics could mean and could do. A President needs to be many things, and I don’t think guileless is one of them.

Why do you think so much of Graham’s involvement across these different presidencies focused on foreign policy or war and peace issues?

Foreign policy or war and peace issues are the realm in which presidents have the most power. It tends to be where the stakes are the highest. The decisions are hardest. The moral imperatives are often greatest. This is where you really wrestle.

When you listen to the presidents talk about what it felt like when they were about to commit troops to a battle, and what that responsibility felt like, it is searing to listen to them. How they would literally wake up in the middle of the night, unable to move, being so tense and so locked down that they had trouble moving in bed.

The other thing is that Graham came to be an extremely well-traveled man who had access to foreign leaders almost as unique as his access to American leaders. He was welcomed all over the world and was a very useful off-the-books ambassador for the President, who could send him with a message to deliver or to get the lay of the land someplace, to sound out a foreign leader over their views about something. It would be back-channel.

Is it such a good idea in terms of American governance to have a figure like Billy Graham fill this historic role decade after decade?

Americans have typically said that they want their President to be a person of faith. They are not nearly as determined as to what that faith needs to be. If there is a feeling among people that they want their President to be a person of faith, then presumably they want a President to have access to some sort of spiritual guidance and interaction.

Every President has come to discover how disruptive his presence can be in a church service. It is a fascinating question, “What kind of person are people comfortable with as a spiritual counselor and sounding board?”

America got lucky with Billy Graham, given how much power he had. He had an agenda when he walked into the Oval Office, it just wasn’t a political one—it was a spiritual one.

He would not confront the presidents typically. His obligation was to witness for the gospel. He would be criticized for failing to speak truth to power: “Why are you not making a moral witness about these moral issues?”

His response would be, “I am speaking truth. It’s the truth that I think I’m called to speak.” That was always the tension in the role that he played.

Looking across these presidential administrations, on which presidents did Graham exercise the most significant influence?

He was personally probably closest to George Herbert Walker Bush, politically closest to Richard Nixon, and theologically closest or pastorally closest to Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson would invite him to the White House, to the ranch, all the time. He would want him to sit by his bed, read Scripture with him, pray together. Lucy Johnson would talk about how when Billy Graham came to the White House, it was like the entire temperature came down a few degrees. Everyone breathed more easily.

With Richard Nixon, it was a much more political transaction. This was where Graham got to indulge his hidden fascination with political strategy and was a very shrewd reader of the electorate and political tactics. There was a political closeness that was very damaging to his reputation and his ministry. With the Bush family, there is just a true, deep personal friendship between the Grahams and the Bushes. The two men just had an enormous appreciation of each other. There was more distance between Graham and Jimmy Carter.

What would you say to a pastor today if he received an invitation to meet personally with the President?

They should heed the very hard lesson that Billy Graham learned the first time he was invited, which was to see Harry Truman. It wasn’t that the visit went badly. It was perfectly what one might expect and they talked and prayed together.

But the problem was that when Graham left and confronted the great sea of cameras and reporters outside the White House and proceeded to tell them everything that had been said, he realized he had made a terrible mistake. There was temptation to talk about what you said to a President or what the President said to you. He learned that that is a temptation that must be avoided at all costs.

The Oval Office is a place that knocks the air out of you. Even aides who have known the President for a long time will walk in, intending to give him a piece of their mind, and then just say, “Hey, nice tie, Mr. President.” It is a real challenge to speak truth to power. Make sure you have your wits about you and your feet firmly on the ground.

What do you think Graham could have done differently in retrospect in his relationship with Nixon?

I’m not sure anything could have been different. Richard Nixon did not love many people, but he loved Billy Graham. And Billy Graham loved and trusted Richard Nixon, and saw the best in him. Graham was predisposed to see the best in people. He often brought out the best in people.

You could say he was naïve to the point of blind trust, but it was his nature to trust people. He came away really seared by the experience and recognizing the danger of being so close. Just at the point you had other evangelical leaders moving into the public space, you had Graham pulling out of it saying, “It is our job to preach the gospel, and that is what we need to do—not get drawn into these other controversies and activities.”

Wasn’t it also a passage, an inevitable thing for him to experience? Yet he moved past it and still found a new sense of direction.

Over the 50 years that we write about, it came right in the middle. It saved the second half of his ministry. It allowed for a course correction that made it possible for him to continue to play an enormously important role. It was a very painful passage for him.

In the now-famous 1973 Nixon White House tape recording in which Graham makes disparaging comments about the Jews (for which he apologized in 2002), what was at work?

We asked him about that. When those tapes came out, it was so shocking to him that he had trouble believing that was his voice. It was so not what he believed. He was horrified to hear himself and felt so badly about it. He said, “I think it was like locker room talk. I was just trying to go along and ingratiate myself.”

What was so damaging was a fear that he was too willing to ingratiate himself, that he cared too much about remaining in the good graces of whatever President and would go along with whatever was being said. This was a very painful thing for him to hear.

On the other hand, there was an occasion in the same timeframe when Graham does confront [Nixon], saying, “You need to come out and admit that you’ve made mistakes,” and he does not pull his punches. That, more than anything, highlighted the problems of being caught up in extraordinary temptations.

This is a story of temptation, ultimately. How does anyone resist it? No one resists it perfectly.

Lead Us Not Into Scandal

On countless occasions during his career, usually at a press conference preceding a major crusade, Billy Graham declared that he sensed religious revival was breaking out and about to sweep over the land. In 1948, he happened to be right. During the 1940s, church membership in America rose by nearly 40 percent, with most of the growth coming after the end of the war, as the nation tried to reconstruct normalcy on the most dependable foundation it knew. Church building reached an all-time high, seminaries were packed, secular colleges added programs in religious studies, religious books outsold all other categories of nonfiction, and Bible sales doubled between 1947 and 1952. While Graham and his colleagues in Youth For Christ (YFC) and the Southern Baptist “Youth Revival Movement” were packing civic auditoriums and stadiums, William Branham, Jack Coe, A. A. Allen, and Oral Roberts were filling stupendous nine-pole circus tents with Pentecostal believers desperate to see afflictions healed, devils cast out, and the dead raised.

For evangelists, it was like being a stockbroker in a runaway bull market. As in other fields, however, the boom attracted some whose motives and methods were less than sanctified, who fell prey to the temptations described in Scripture as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16) but are better known by their street names, “sex, money, and power.” Despite good intentions and behavior, Graham and his associates occasionally found themselves the objects of suspicion and condescension from ministers and laypeople alike. As they contemplated the checkered history and contemporary shortcomings of itinerant evangelism and talked with veteran campaigners, they realized that much of the skepticism was warranted. To prepare his own defenses, Graham called the members of his evangelistic team to his hotel room during a campaign in Modesto, California, in November 1948. “God has brought us to this point,” he said. “Maybe he is preparing us for something that we don’t know.” He instructed them to spend an hour recalling issues that had been stumbling blocks to previous evangelists.

The assignment was easy. They had all seen enough evangelists rise and fall, or leave town in a cloud of disillusionment, to be able to pinpoint the key problems readily. When they regrouped in Graham’s room later in the afternoon, each had made essentially the same list, which came to be known in the oral tradition as “The Modesto Manifesto.”

The Root of Many Scandals

The first problem was money. Some evangelists had deliberately worn their oldest suits during revivals or told gripping stories of sick children or lamented the broken-down condition of their homes or the high costs of transportation. Even the most rectitudinous of men could find it difficult not to pull out a few extra flourishes when the love offering was collected, typically on the last night of a revival. When he traveled for YFC, Graham turned offerings over to local or national bodies and was paid a straight salary. But no parent body existed to fund his independent revivals, so the group saw no viable alternative to the love-offering system, even though it made them uncomfortable. They did, however, pledge not to emphasize the offering, and they tried to keep themselves free from suspicion regarding the way they handled the money by asking members of the sponsoring committee to oversee the payment of all bills and disbursement of funds to the revival team. On one occasion, Bev Shea sent the sponsoring committee a check for $30, just in case the hotel had levied a charge for extra laundry service for his infant son.

The second potential problem was “immorality.” As energetic young men in full bloom, often traveling without their families, charged with the raw excitement of standing before large and admiring crowds, and living in anonymous hotels and tourist courts, they knew well the power and possibilities of sexual temptation, and they had seen promising ministerial careers shipwrecked by the potent combination of lust and opportunity. They asked God “to guard us, to keep us true, to really help us be sensitive in this area, to keep us even from the appearance of evil,” and they began to follow simple but effective rules. They avoided situations that would put them alone with a woman—lunch, a counseling session, even a ride to an auditorium or an airport. On the road, they roomed in close proximity to each other. And always, they prayed for supernatural assistance in keeping them “clean.”

Two other problems, less imperious in their prodding than money or sex but capable of generating cynicism toward evangelists, were inflated publicity and criticism of local pastors. Because it helped win invitations to bigger churches and cities, and thus fed their egos and fattened their pocketbooks, evangelists had grown accustomed to exaggerating their crowds and their results. Critics accused them of counting arms and legs instead of heads, and the phrase “evangelistically speaking” signified that anyone interested in accuracy should discount an itinerant’s reports of his own accomplishments. D. L. Moody refused to keep statistics, lest he be drawn into exaggeration or boasting. Graham and his team were too wed to the modern ethos to adopt that approach, but they did begin to use a consistent procedure. Instead of generating their own figures, they usually accepted public officials’ crowd estimates, even when they felt that estimate was too low. They also readily admitted that many who came down the aisles during the invitation were counselors assigned to help inquirers, not inquirers themselves. As for the criticism of pastors, they had heard many a fire-breathing evangelist attack the local clergy to gain attention and make himself look good, then leave town while the hapless pastors tried to regain the confidence of their parishioners. Graham was determined to avoid this destructive course. He would gladly meet with pastors who criticized him but would not publicly criticize men who planted the seed and tilled the fields that he swooped in to harvest.

In addition to these major issues, Graham’s team also pledged to avoid sensationalism, excessive emotionalism, anti-intellectualism, overemphasis on biblical prophecy or other controversial topics, and lack of proper follow-up on inquirers. There may have been others; no one kept a copy of the list, but the problems were so familiar that no one needed to. Over the years, Graham and his team spoke of the Modesto Manifesto from time to time, often in response to inquiries from journalists about how he and his organization had managed to avoid scandal throughout decades of public ministry. It drew particular attention in the late 1980s, when sex and money scandals wrecked the ministries of Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts drew ridicule by claiming that God had threatened to end his life if his supporters didn’t come up with $8 million in ransom money. By coincidence, I happened to be spending time with Graham when the Bakker scandals broke, as part of my research for A Prophet with Honor. He told me that reporters were calling, urging him to comment, but that he was reluctant to talk to them. “If I say they should have taken the same measures we did to protect ourselves,” he said, “I’ll sound self-righteous, and I don’t want to do that.”

A Pledge for Financial Accountability

Graham’s commitment to the financial principles of the Manifesto was demonstrated in 1977, when The Charlotte Observer, in an extensive story about the finances of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), charged that, while purporting to provide a full disclosure of its finances, it had failed to reveal the existence of a fund containing assets worth nearly $23 million. In fact, the creation of the fund in 1972 had been announced at a press conference and major media had mentioned it during the first year or two of its existence. Its stated purposes were to provide support for various evangelistic organizations such as Campus Crusade, to establish an evangelism institute at Wheaton College, and to develop a layman’s training center near Asheville. Any disbursement of its funds had been carefully documented and reported to the IRS. Legally, the fund was separate from BGEA and was incorporated in Texas, but its assets came from BGEA and its board was essentially identical to that of BGEA.

When the relevant history and facts were laid out, the cloud over the organization lifted, but the negative publicity and temporary drop in contributions made an impression on Graham. Years later he told me, “We should have said, ‘We’ve got another fund down in Texas that we are going to do thus and such with.’ We told the government about it, but we didn’t think the newspapers necessarily had a legitimate right to know about everything. I’ve changed my mind on that. I think they do. Because I think we should be publicly accountable for everything.” This was not just hindsight. Graham became a zealous advocate of full disclosure by parachurch organizations and in 1979 played a key role in founding the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. “If you give to any Christian charity (including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association),” he wrote in 1983, “and you don’t insist on an understandable financial accounting of your gift, you are in danger of falling prey to [dishonesty].”

Fleeing Sexual Temptation

Despite the importance of financial probity to a ministry’s reputation, most people who are aware of the Modesto Manifesto probably think of it primarily because of the measures Billy Graham and his associates took to avoid illicit sexual entanglements. The journalist and biographer Marshall Frady once likened Graham to Billy Budd, a man with “exactly that quality of raw childlike unblinking goodness,” possessing “a staggering passion for the pure, the sanitary, the wholesome, the upright.” The allusion to Melville’s classic American Innocent is a natural one, and by no means completely off the mark, but it falls short at a crucial theological point. Budd was naturally good and unable to believe that others did not share his elemental guilelessness. Graham suffered from no such fantasies. He did seem to have “a passion for the pure,” but never for a minute did he imagine that he, or anyone else, was beyond corruption. And that is the secret of his ability to avoid public scandal. No one who listened to Graham warn against succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh would imagine that he derived his information solely from data. Just as he had the wisdom to put others in charge of the purse, he clearly understood that his best strategy for avoiding sexual temptation was to keep himself out of its path.

It may not be realistic to think the Modesto Manifesto is universally applicable. It is possible, however, to pledge and to pray for strength to uphold the fundamental principle at the heart of each of the Manifesto’s tenets: integrity. That effort will be aided by cultivation of the attitude that led Graham to ask the questions that led to its formulation: humility. Circumstances change, and measures suited for one era or arrangement may need to be adapted or amended to suit those changes, but men and women of integrity, humble enough to acknowledge their fallibility, will find in the Modesto Manifesto an attitude and approach that should serve them well in any situation. Integrity and humility are portable and never go out of date.

Not the Stuff of Romance Novels

Billy Graham and Ruth Bell’s early love story didn’t unfold at all the way a romance writer might have penned it. There were no flirtatious winks across the room, no mushy meetings between classes, no plaintive pledges of undying love. They were far more serious about pursuing Jesus than each other.

In some ways, their courtship—and, eventually, their marriage—was an answer to Ruth’s prayer as a young girl: that God would let her live out her days as a missionary. She was 12, the daughter of a medical missionary in China, and she pictured herself an old maid, leading Tibetan people to the Lord. The more difficult the mission field, the better.

God answered her prayer, but not by giving her a post in Tibet.

He gave her Billy Graham.

There was nothing flowery or sentimental about their meeting, courtship, or marriage, nothing of a traditional romance. The sacrifices made for love were not made for each other, but for the sake of the call to serve Christ alone.

By the time they met at Wheaton College, Ruth had lived in China all but her last two years of high school. She was cultured, strikingly beautiful, and driven to deep devotions each day before sun-up. She had no interest in the guys who couldn’t help but stare at her; dating was out of the question.

Billy noticed Ruth long before she knew anything of him. That fall, Billy wrote to his family back home about the girl who had caught his attention. When a third party finally introduced the two, Billy was so taken by Ruth that he wrote home again, this time saying he’d fallen in love.

Now he only had to work up the courage to ask her out.

But Ruth wasn’t interested, that much was apparent. But Billy wasn’t dissuaded. With the gift of persuasion he would later use to lead millions to Jesus, Billy went about winning the unattainable Ruth.

When he took part in a small-group Bible study that Ruth attended, he prayed aloud, fervently and with passion. Suddenly he had Ruth’s attention; she had never heard anyone pray with such feeling. She could see that Billy’s deep relationship with the Lord was like only one other Ruth knew: her own.

When Billy found the courage to ask Ruth to accompany him to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, Ruth said yes. Afterward, they walked along a snow-covered path to a professor’s house for tea. For Billy, the night was magical. Again he wrote home, this time declaring that he would marry Ruth.

Ruth kept her feelings to herself, but she was just as changed by that first date. That night, she changed her prayer; instead of seeking an arduous place in the mission fields of Tibet, she asked God to let her serve him with Billy Graham.

But Billy had begun to doubt himself. How could he win over such a girl? His insecurity kept him away for six weeks, and when he finally asked her out again, he expressed his hesitancy. He didn’t share her interest in the mission field and didn’t want to hinder her. He said he was willing to walk away if Ruth felt called to Tibet.

“I’ve asked God to give you to me if that’s his will,” Billy said. “But I’ve also asked him to keep me from loving you if that would be best for both of us.”

Over the ensuing months, it wasn’t romance or sweet talk or shows of sentimentality that drew Ruth to accept Billy’s proposal of marriage. Rather she felt God calling her to be Billy’s wife. In what may have seemed more like a ministerial partnership than a glorious love story, they were married. But the glorious love story most certainly followed.

Being married to Billy meant sometimes six months or longer without seeing him, even as their five children came along. From early on, Billy made it clear that preaching and evangelizing took first place in his life. Typically Ruth handled that with feisty determination. But one day she read a letter from a missionary who wrote, “It must be glamorous to be the wife of a well-known evangelist. I’m just stuck here with my husband.” Ruth’s eyes welled as she told a friend, “At least she’s with her husband.”

Being married to Billy was a mixed blessing. It was a marriage in which love was always fresh and new, since Billy was often away. It also wasn’t far from the old maid life Ruth had prayed for. But she would tell anyone who asked that she would rather have Billy part-time than anybody else full-time.

Though she was a strong nurturer and disciplinarian of their children—often playing both mother and father to them—she regularly asked God for wisdom on how to better live out her calling. Often that wisdom came in the form of practical, even comical, advice to her husband. When he was considering a career in politics, Ruth said, “I don’t think the American people would vote for a divorced president, and if you leave ministry for politics, you will certainly have a divorce on your hands.”

Though his ministry cost Ruth much, she wouldn’t have had it any other way. Ruth was Billy’s lifelong bedrock, often speaking up to offer advice, yet she just as often stayed silent so that he could focus on his mission.

“There would have been no Billy Graham … had it not been for Ruth,” said the late T. W. Wilson, a key member of Graham’s staff, in A Prophet with Honor, William Martin’s biography of the evangelist.

Ruth’s sense of humor continued. Once when someone called the home and asked if Billy was handy, she replied, “Not very. But he keeps trying.”

With Ruth to keep him grounded, Billy could easily admit publicly that he was merely a sinner saved by grace, and that he had to constantly seek the Lord for forgiveness. It has been noted that their sins were not those that plagued other famous evangelists, and maybe that was why they both excelled at their calling. They did not struggle with immorality or financial disgrace, but with ever attempting to live a life worthy of their holy God and Savior.

Time proved that Billy and Ruth were indeed made for each other. As they reached their later years, something amazing happened: They found romance. The love story that did not mark their beginning marked their twilight years.

Shortly before Ruth died in 2007, after almost 64 years of marriage, Billy said, “I am more in love with Ruth now than ever before.”

For those who knew them, Billy’s words came as no surprise, because God blesses those who follow his call. Billy’s mission field was the world; Ruth’s was the faces around their dining room table. But in the end, they served out their separate callings in a way that brought them together.

Ruth and Billy found love born of a passion to serve Christ—in humility, whatever the cost. They set about that endeavor almost as teammates driven to a common goal. Maybe that’s why their marriage stands as a beacon of faithfulness in a world of shallow commitments. Because their love came as a result of the greatest calling.

The call to follow Christ.

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Source: Christianity Today