Billy Graham

Graham speaking at a Crusade in Oslo, Norway, 1955

From the time his ministry began in 1947, Graham conducted more than 400 crusades in 185 countries and territories on six continents. The first Billy Graham Crusade, held September 13–21, 1947, in the Civic Auditorium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was attended by 6,000 people. Graham was 28 years old. He called them crusades, after the medieval Christian forces who conquered Jerusalem. He would rent a large venue, such as a stadium, park, or street. As the sessions became larger, he arranged a group of up to 5,000 people to sing in a choir. He would preach the gospel and invite people to come forward (a practice begun by Dwight L. Moody). Such people were called inquirers and were given the chance to speak one-on-one with a counselor, to clarify questions and pray together. The inquirers were often given a copy of the Gospel of John or a Bible study booklet. In Durban, South Africa, in 1973, the crowd of some 100,000 was the first large mixed-race event in apartheid South Africa in which he stated that "apartheid is a sin."[43][44] In Moscow, in 1992, one-quarter of the 155,000 people in Graham's audience went forward at his call.[24] During his crusades, he frequently used the altar call song, "Just As I Am".[45]

Graham was offered a five-year, $1 million contract from NBC to appear on television opposite Arthur Godfrey, but he had prearranged commitments. He turned down the offer in order to continue his touring revivals.[33] Graham had crusades in London, which lasted 12 weeks, and a New York City crusade in Madison Square Garden in 1957, which ran nightly for 16 weeks.

Graham spoke at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's Urbana Student Missions Conference at least nine times – in 1948, 1957, 1961, 1964, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1984, and 1987.[46]

At each Urbana conference, he challenged the thousands of attendees to make a commitment to follow Jesus Christ for the rest of their lives. He often quoted a six-word phrase that was reportedly written in the Bible of William Whiting Borden, the son of a wealthy silver magnate: "No reserves, no retreat, no regrets".[47] Borden had died in Egypt on his way to the mission field.

Graham also held evangelistic meetings on a number of college campuses: at the University of Minnesota during InterVarsity's "Year of Evangelism" in 1950–51, a 4-day mission at Yale University in 1957, and a week-long series of meetings at the University of North Carolina's Carmichael Auditorium in September 1982.[48]

In 1955, he was invited by Cambridge University students to lead the mission at the university; the mission was arranged by the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, with London pastor-theologian John Stott serving as Graham's chief assistant. This invitation was greeted with much disapproval in the correspondence columns of The Times.[49]

In 1950, Graham founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) with its headquarters in Minneapolis. The association relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1999, and maintains a number of international offices, such as in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.[43] BGEA ministries have included:

• Hour of Decision, a weekly radio program broadcast around the world for more than 50 years
• Mission television specials broadcast in almost every market in the US and Canada
• A syndicated newspaper column, My Answer, carried by newspapers across the United States and distributed by Tribune Content Agency[50]
• Decision magazine, the official publication of the association
• Christianity Today was started in 1956 with Carl F. H. Henry as its first editor
• Passageway.org, the website for a youth discipleship program created by BGEA
• World Wide Pictures, which has produced and distributed more than 130 films

In April 2013, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association started "My Hope With Billy Graham", the largest outreach in its history, encouraging church members to spread the gospel in small group meetings after showing a video message by Graham. "The idea is for Christians to follow the example of the disciple Matthew in the New Testament and spread the gospel in their own homes."[51] The video, called "The Cross", is the main program in the My Hope America series and was also broadcast the week of Graham's 95th birthday.[52]

Graham's early crusades were segregated, but he began adjusting his approach in the 1950s.[53] During a 1953 rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham tore down the ropes that organizers had erected in order to segregate the audience into racial sections. In his memoirs, he recounted that he told two ushers to leave the barriers down "or you can go on and have the revival without me."[54] He warned a white audience, "we have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride."[54]

In 1957, Graham's stance towards integration became more publicly shown when he allowed black ministers Thomas Kilgore and Gardner C. Taylor to serve as members of his New York Crusade's executive committee[55] and invited Martin Luther King Jr., whom he first met during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955,[55] to join him in the pulpit at his 16-week revival in New York City, where 2.3 million gathered at Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, and Times Square to hear them.[10] Graham recalled in his autobiography that during this time, he and King developed a close friendship and that he was eventually one of the few people who referred to King as "Mike", a nickname which King asked only his closest friends to call him.[56] Following King's assassination in 1968, Graham mourned that the US had lost "a social leader and a prophet".[55] In private, Graham advised King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).[57]

Despite their friendship, tensions between Graham and King emerged in 1958 when the sponsoring committee of a crusade which took place in San Antonio, Texas on July 25 arranged for Graham to be introduced by that state's segregationist governor, Price Daniel.[55] On July 23, King sent a letter to Graham and informed him that allowing Daniel to speak at a crusade which occurred the night before the state's Democratic Primary "can well be interpreted as your endorsement of racial segregation and discrimination."[58] Graham's advisor, Grady Wilson, replied to King that "even though we do not see eye to eye with him on every issue, we still love him in Christ."[59] Though Graham's appearance with Daniel dashed King's hopes of holding joint crusades with Graham in the Deep South,[57] the two still remained friends and King told a Canadian television audience the following year that Graham had taken a "very strong stance against segregation."[57] Graham and King would also come to differ on the Vietnam War.[55] After King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech denouncing US intervention in Vietnam, Graham castigated him and others for their criticism of US foreign policy.[55]

By the middle of 1960, King and Graham traveled together to the Tenth Baptist World Congress of the Baptist World Alliance.[55] In 1963, Graham posted bail for King to be released from jail during the Birmingham campaign, according to Long (2008),[60] and the King Center acknowledged that Graham had bailed King out of jail during the Albany Movement,[61] although historian Steven Miller told CNN he could not find any proof of the incident.[62] Graham held integrated crusades in Birmingham, Alabama, on Easter 1964 in the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and toured Alabama again in the wake of the violence that accompanied the first Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.[55]

Following Graham's death, former SCLC official and future Atlanta politician Andrew Young, who spoke alongside Coretta Scott King at Graham's 1994 crusade in Atlanta,[63] acknowledged his friendship with Graham and stated that Graham did in fact travel with King to the 1965 European Baptist Convention.[64] Young also claimed that Graham had often invited King to his crusades in the Northern states.[65] Former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader and future United States Congressman John Lewis also credited Graham as a major inspiration for his activism.[66] Lewis described Graham as a "Saint" and someone who "taught us how to live and who taught us how to die."[66]

Graham's faith prompted his maturing view of race and segregation; he told a member of the Ku Klux Klan that integration was necessary primarily for religious reasons: "There is no scriptural basis for segregation," Graham argued. "The ground at the foot of the cross is level, and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross."[67]

The friendship between Graham and John Stott led to a further partnership in the Lausanne Movement, of which Graham was a founder. It built on Graham's 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. In collaboration with Christianity Today, Graham convened what TIME magazine described as "a formidable forum, possibly the widest–ranging meeting of Christians ever held"[68] with 2,700 participants from 150 nations gathering for the International Congress on World Evangelization. This took place in Lausanne, Switzerland (July 16–25, 1974), and the movement which ensued took its name from the host city. Its purpose was to strengthen the global church for world evangelization, and to engage ideological and sociological trends which bore on this.[69] Graham invited Stott to be chief architect of the Lausanne Covenant, which issued from the Congress and which, according to Graham, "helped challenge and unite evangelical Christians in the great task of world evangelization."[70] The movement remains a significant fruit of Graham's legacy, with a presence in nearly every nation.[71]

President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan greet Graham at the National Prayer Breakfast of 1981

Graham had a personal audience with many sitting US presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama – 12 consecutive presidents. After meeting with Truman in 1950, Graham told the press he had urged the president to counter communism in North Korea. Truman disliked him and did not speak with him for years after that meeting.[24] Later he always treated his conversations with presidents as confidential.[103]

Truman was not fond of Graham. He wrote about Graham in his 1974 autobiography Plain Speaking, "But now we've got just this one evangelist, this Billy Graham, and he's gone off the beam. He's...well, I hadn't ought to say this, but he's one of those counterfeits I was telling you about. He claims he's a friend of all the presidents, but he was never a friend of mine when I was President. I just don't go for people like that. All he's interested in is getting his name in the paper."[111]

Graham in 1966

Graham became a regular visitor during the tenure of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He purportedly urged him to intervene with federal troops in the case of the Little Rock Nine to gain admission of black students to public schools.[24] House Speaker Sam Rayburn convinced Congress to allow Graham to conduct the first religious service on the steps of the Capitol building in 1952.[24][112] Eisenhower asked for Graham while on his deathbed.[113]

Graham met and would become a close friend of Vice President Richard Nixon,[103][114] and supported Nixon, a Quaker, for the 1960 presidential election.[24] He convened an August strategy session of evangelical leaders in Montreaux, Switzerland, to plan how best to oppose Nixon's Roman Catholic opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy.[115] Though a registered Democrat, Graham also maintained firm support of aggression against the foreign threat of Communism and strongly sympathized with Nixon's views regarding American foreign policy.[116] Thus, he was more sympathetic to Republican administrations.[103][117]

On December 16, 1963, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was impressed by the way Graham had praised the work of his great-grandfather, George Washington Baines, invited Graham to the White House to give him spiritual counseling. After this visit, Johnson would frequently call on Graham for more spiritual counseling as well as companionship. As Graham recalled to his biographer Frady, "I almost used the White House as a hotel when Johnson was President. He was always trying to keep me there. He just never wanted me to leave."[118]

In contrast with his more limited access with Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, Graham would not only visit the White House private quarters but would also at times kneel at Johnson's bedside and then pray with him whenever the President requested him to do so. Graham once recalled "I have never had many people do that."[118] In addition to his White House visits, Graham would visit Johnson at Camp David and occasionally met with the President when he retreated to his private ranch in Stonewall, Texas. Johnson was also the first sitting President to attend one of Graham's crusades, which took place in Houston, Texas, in 1965.[118]

During the 1964 United States presidential election, supporters of Republican nominee Barry Goldwater sent an estimated 2 million telegrams to Graham's hometown of Montreat, North Carolina, and sought the preacher's endorsement. Supportive of Johnson's domestic policies, and hoping to preserve his friendship with the President, Graham resisted pressure to endorse Goldwater and stayed neutral in the election. Following Johnson's election victory, Graham's role as the main White House pastor was solidified. At one point, Johnson even considered making Graham a member of his cabinet and grooming him to be his successor, though Graham insisted he had no political ambitions and wished to remain a preacher.[118] Graham's biographer David Aikman acknowledged that the preacher was closer to Johnson than any other President he had ever known.[116]

He spent the last night of Johnson's presidency in the White House, and he stayed for the first night of Nixon's.[113] After Nixon's victorious 1968 presidential campaign, Graham became an adviser, regularly visiting the White House and leading the president's private worship services.[103] In a meeting they had with Golda Meir, Nixon offered Graham the ambassadorship to Israel, but he refused.[24]

President Barack Obama and Graham meet at Graham's home in Montreat, North Carolina, April 2010

In 1970, Nixon appeared at a Graham revival in East Tennessee, which they thought safe politically. It drew one of the largest crowds in Tennessee and protesters against the Vietnam War. Nixon was the first president to give a speech from an evangelist's platform.[103] Their friendship became strained in 1973 when Graham rebuked Nixon for his post-Watergate behavior and the profanity heard on the Watergate tapes.[119] They eventually reconciled after Nixon's resignation.[103]

Graham officiated at one presidential burial and one presidential funeral. He presided over the graveside services of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973 and took part in eulogizing the former president. Graham officiated at the funeral services of former First Lady Pat Nixon in 1993,[24] and the death and state funeral of Richard Nixon in 1994.[120] During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Graham asserted that he believed President Bill Clinton to be "a spiritual person". He was unable to attend the state funeral of Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, as he was recovering from hip replacement surgery.[121] This was mentioned by George W. Bush in his eulogy.

On April 25, 2010, President Barack Obama visited Graham at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, where they "had a private prayer".[122]

Graham had a friendly relationship with Queen Elizabeth II and was frequently invited by the Royal Family to special events.[123][124] They first met in 1955 and Graham preached at Windsor Chapel at the Queen's invitation during the following year. Their friendly relationship may have been because they shared a traditional approach to the practical aspects of the Christian faith.[125]

Graham was outspoken against communism and supported the American Cold War policy, including the Vietnam War. In a secret letter from April 15, 1969, made public twenty years later, Graham encouraged Nixon to bomb the dikes in North Vietnam if the peace talks in Paris should fail. This action would "destroy the economy of North Vietnam" and, by Nixon's estimate, would have killed a million people.[126]

In 1982, Graham preached in the Soviet Union and attended a wreath-laying ceremony to honor the war dead of World War II, when the Soviets were American allies in the fight against Nazism. He voiced fear of a second holocaust, not against Jews, but "a nuclear holocaust" and advised that "our greatest contribution to world peace is to live with Christ every day."[127]

In a 1999 speech, Graham discussed his relationship with the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, praising him as a "different kind of communist" and "one of the great fighters for freedom in his country against the Japanese." Graham went on to note that although he had never met Kim's son and former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, he had "exchanged gifts with him."[128]

During the Watergate affair, there were suggestions that Graham had agreed with many of President Richard Nixon's antisemitic opinions, but he denied them and stressed his efforts to build bridges to the Jewish community. In 2002, the controversy was renewed when declassified "Richard Nixon tapes" confirmed remarks made by Graham to Nixon three decades earlier.[129] Captured on the tapes, Graham agreed with Nixon that Jews control the American media, calling it a "stranglehold" during a 1972 conversation with Nixon, and suggesting that if Nixon was re-elected that they might be able to do something about it.[130]

When the tapes were made public, Graham apologized[131][132] and said, "Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office conversation with President Nixon ... some 30 years ago. ... They do not reflect my views and I sincerely apologize for any offense caused by the remarks."[133] According to Newsweek magazine, "[T]he shock of the revelation was magnified because of Graham's longtime support of Israel and his refusal to join in calls for conversion of the Jews."[132]

In 2009, more Nixon tapes were released, in which Graham is heard in a 1973 conversation with Nixon referring to a group of Jewish journalists and "the synagogue of Satan". A spokesman for Graham said that Graham has never been an antisemite and that the comparison (in accord with the context of the quotation in the Book of Revelation[134]) was directed specifically at those claiming to be Jews, but not holding to traditional Jewish values.[135]

After a 1957 crusade in New York, some more fundamentalist Protestant Christians criticized Graham for his ecumenism, even calling him "Antichrist".[136]

Graham expressed inclusivist views, suggesting that people without explicit faith in Jesus can be saved. In a 1997 interview with Robert Schuller, Graham said

I think that everybody that loves or knows Christ, whether they are conscious of it or not, they are members of the body of Christ ... [God] is calling people out of the world for his name, whether they come from the Muslim world, or the Buddhist world or the non-believing world, they are members of the Body of Christ because they have been called by God. They may not know the name of Jesus but they know in their hearts that they need something they do not have, and they turn to the only light they have, and I think that they are saved and they are going to be with us in heaven.[137]

Iain Murray, writing from a conservative Protestant standpoint, argues that "Graham's concessions are sad words from one who once spoke on the basis of biblical certainties."[138]

In 1970, Graham stated that feminism was "an echo of our overall philosophy of permissiveness" and that women did not want to be "competitive juggernauts pitted against male chauvinists".[139][140] He further stated that the role of wife, mother, and homemaker was the destiny of "real womanhood" according to the Judeo-Christian ethic. Graham's assertions, published in the Ladies' Home Journal, elicited letters of protest, and were offered as rebuttal to the establishment of "The New Feminism" section of the publication added following a sit-in protest at the Journal offices demanding female representation on the staff of the publication.[141][142][143][144]

Graham was well known for his practice of not spending time alone with any woman other than his wife. This has become known as the Billy Graham rule.[145]

Graham's daughter Bunny recounted her father denying her and her sisters higher education. As reported in The Washington Post:[146]

Bunny remembers being groomed for the life of wife, homemaker, and mother. "There was never an idea of a career for us," she said. "I wanted to go to nursing school – Wheaton had a five-year program – but Daddy said no. No reason, no explanation, just 'No.' It wasn't confrontational and he wasn't angry, but when he decided, that was the end of it." She added, "He has forgotten that. Mother has not."

Nevertheless, Graham's daughter Anne has long been an active Christian minister who leads a Christian ministry organization known as AnGeL Ministries.[147] Anne's website even claims that her father called her “the best preacher in the family”.[147]

Graham talked his future wife, Ruth, into abandoning her ambition to evangelize in Tibet in favor of staying in the United States to marry him – and that to do otherwise would be "to thwart God's obvious will".[146] After Ruth agreed to marry him, Graham cited the Bible for claiming authority over her, saying, "then I'll do the leading and you do the following".[146] Despite Graham's public views on womanhood, it has been acknowledged that Ruth still remained active in Christian ministry after they married, often teaching Sunday School.[148] In addition to his two sons, all three of Graham's daughters would become Christian ministers as well.[149]

Graham regarded homosexuality as a sin, and in 1974 described it as "a sinister form of perversion".[150][151] In 1993 he said that he thought AIDS might be a "judgment" from God, but two weeks later he retracted the remark, saying, "I don't believe that, and I don't know why I said it."[152] Graham opposed same-sex marriage,[153] and in 2012 he took out full-page ads in favor of North Carolina Amendment 1 which banned it in North Carolina.[154][155] Graham's stated position was that he did not want to talk about homosexuality as a political issue.[152] Corky Siemaszko, writing for NBC News, noted that after the 1993 incident, Graham "largely steered clear of the subject".[156] However, Graham appeared to take a more tolerant approach to issue of homosexuality when he appeared on the May 2, 1997 episode of 20/20, stating "I think that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin, but the Bible also teaches that pride is a sin, jealously is a sin, and hate is a sin, evil thoughts are a sin, and so I don't think that homosexuality should be chosen as the overwhelming sin that we are doing today."[157] After his death, commentators, such as Douglas Robertson writing for The Independent, called Graham "homophobic".[158]

Graham authored the following books;[210] many of which have become bestsellers. In the 1970s, for instance, The Jesus Generation sold 200,000 copies in the first two weeks after its publication; Angels: God's Secret Agents had sales of a million copies within 90 days after release; How to Be Born Again was said to have made publishing history with its first printing of 800,000 copies."[33]