Billy and I hit New York City at the same time, the summer of 1957. He was 38 and about to clinch his reputation as the premier evangelist in twentieth-century America. I was twelve and about to taste freedom. But not quite yet. Without my permission, my parents packed themselves and me into a steamy subway to go down to Madison Square Garden to hear the Great Man preach. I remember that he was witty and charismatic and at the end of the sermon thousands surged forward to give or recommit their lives to Christ. Beyond that, nothing stuck. Soon our first family vacation to the Big Apple was finished, and we headed back to the quiet of a small town in southwest Missouri. As a kid, I never could figure out what the big whoop over Graham was all about. I soon realized, however, that Graham's core constituents—the millions of preponderantly white, middle-class, moderately conservative Protestants we might call “Heartland Americans”—did not share my puzzlement. They knew exactly what the big whoop was all about.Footnote ²

In slightly more than two decades—roughly from 1949 to 1971—Graham moved from leader to celebrity to icon, and he retained that iconic status into the new millennium. Statistics pile up like snowdrifts. By the time he retired in 2005, reportedly he had preached to nearly 215 million people in person in more than 185 countries and territories, and to additional hundreds of millions through electronic media. Those numbers probably swelled in the telling, but, with the possible exception of Pope John Paul II, Graham likely addressed more people face-to-face than anyone in history. He set multiple attendance records, including 1,120,000 in Seoul in 1973 (at that time, possibly the largest religious gathering on record). In 1997, HarperCollins's first printing of his autobiography ran a cool million. Graham's 27 books sold millions of copies and saw translation into at least 50 languages. Between 1955 and 2006, he won a spot on the Gallup Organization's roster of “Ten Most Admired Men” 50 times, trumping his closest rivals, President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, who appeared “merely” 31 and 27 times. The list of honors bestowed on Graham grew so long that even he seemed to lose track. It suffices to say that the U.S. government gave him the two highest honors a civilian could receive: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 and, with his wife, Ruth Bell Graham, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1996.Footnote ³

Perhaps the most telling marks of Graham's influence are simply anecdotal—cultural snapshots, we might call them. Four brief examples represent many. First, except for elected officials, Graham may have been the only person in the United States who needed no mailing address beyond his name. Just “Billy Graham” scratched on an envelope would do. Second, of the thousands of letters sent to Graham from children, one, posted in 1971, probably from a first- or second-grader, seemed to speak for all. After requesting a free book, the young author signed off, “Tell Mr. Jesus hi.” Third, in 1988, on Graham's seventieth birthday, the historian Martin E. Marty judged that he was, with the pope, “one of the two best-known figures” in the world. Finally, the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom summed up the preacher's impact with brilliant succinctness: “You don't run for office among us by proclaiming your skepticism or by deprecating Billy Graham.”Footnote ⁴

This register of statistics, awards, and cultural snapshots suggests that Graham's reach, like that of his contemporaries Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., extended beyond passing fame to enduring influence. For millions of Heartland Americans, he functioned very much as a Protestant saint. By the middle 1950s, he had eclipsed all competitors among postwar Protestant evangelists and, with the exception of George Whitefield in the eighteenth century, all in U.S. history. More important, by the middle 1960s, he had become the “Great Legitimator.” If the newspaper coverage of his ministry serves as a reliable index, his presence conferred sanctity on events, authority on presidents, acceptability on wars, desirability on decency, shame on indecency, and prestige on dessert recipes. Most important, by the middle 1970s, many deemed him “America's pastor,” as the senior President George Bush called him in 2007 in Charlotte at the dedication of the Billy Graham Library—an event attended by all three living U.S. ex-presidents. As America's pastor, he seemed to stand above the fray, transcending denominational boundaries, theological disputes, and partisan agendas. Graham symbolized, as his premier biographer, William Martin, suggested, Americans' “best selves,” what they wanted to believe about themselves and their dedication to “fundamental verities.” That many Americans failed to live up to those verities was beside the point. Graham did.Footnote ⁵ 

I could extend this inventory of the marks of Graham's status at length, but I will close it with a recollection. At Duke, one of my first-year students once pointed out that Graham never won a Nobel Prize. Then she asked, with lethal perceptiveness, “Well, which is more important, to win a Nobel Prize—or for someone to notice that you have not?”Footnote ⁶

I. America's Puzzle

The reasons for Graham's ascendency, longevity and, above all, singularity are not obvious. His early years offer few clues. The most remarkable feature of young Billy Frank's childhood and adolescence is how unremarkable they really were. Born in 1918, he grew up near Charlotte, North Carolina, in the bucolic obscurity of a dairy farm. In high school he was, he later admitted, an ordinary student, mainly interested in girls, baseball, and fast cars. Fundamentalist education at Bob Jones College, Florida Bible Institute, and Wheaton College in Illinois launched him into a modestly successful career as a local pastor, itinerant evangelist, and Youth for Christ speaker.Footnote ⁷

At first glance, Graham's middle career years—the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—are equally barren of clues. To many, he personified the proverbial stump orator, firing 240 words a minute. In an era when academic theologians and mainline ministers favored dialogue over proclamation, Graham unflinchingly presented his own version of the Good News as the only viable one. His hobnobbing with the rich, the famous, and the powerful troubled his friends and energized his foes. And then we heard his odious remarks about Jews and the media, uttered in private in President Richard Nixon's office but secretly recorded in 1972 and revealed in 2002. Though Graham apologized in print and in person to Jewish leaders, the episode tarnished his record. Yet most disturbing, for all but the most ardent followers, was Graham's political posture in the 1960s and early 1970s. His real or perceived support for the Vietnam War and his jut-jawed defense of Nixon during Watergate lingered long after most Americans had given up on both causes.Footnote ⁸

Outsiders, noting Graham's flaws and failures, subjected him to merciless criticism. Some of it was fair and thoughtful; much of it was unfair and thoughtless. Besides a steady flow of hate mail and occasional death threats, he received censure from all directions: the left, the right, the academy, the media, and the church. President Harry S. Truman led the charge. In 1950, when the young evangelist bungled a meeting with Truman, the president soured on him. Two decades later, Truman still remembered Graham as a “counterfeit.” “I just don't go for people like that,” he grumbled. “All he's interested in is getting his name in the paper.” In 1966, following Graham's interdenominational crusades and ecumenical overtures, Bob Jones, Sr., president of Bob Jones University, judged that Graham was “doing more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any other living man.” When Graham held a crusade at the University of Tennessee in 1970 and invited President Nixon to speak, the student newspaper slammed the event as a “one-man circus” complete with an “elephant.” Shortly afterward, the novelist-satirist Philip Roth had Graham, the “Reverend Billy Cupcake,” saying, “‘I was in a European country last summer and one of the top young people there told me that the teenagers in his country want leadership more than anything else.” In 1982, following Graham's visit to a Soviet Union disarmament conference, the conservative columnist George Will judged that Graham was “America's most embarrassing export.” Will hoped that the preacher would “stop acting as though pious intentions are substitutes for intelligence, and excuses for irresponsibility.” Twenty years later, when the National Archives released Graham's conversation with Nixon about Jews, the secular essayist Christopher Hitchens pounced. Hitchens called the aging evangelist an “avid bigot as well as a cheap liar,” “a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant.” White hair offered no protection.Footnote ⁹

Graham's multiple public identities make his success even more puzzling. He presented many faces. That the fiery anti-Communist of the 1940s differed from the irenic senior diplomat of the 2000s seems easy enough to explain. People change. But other variations are more elusive. Which was normative, the simple preacher or the savvy CEO? The down-home country boy or the uptown sophisticate? The humble servant of the church or the name-dropping servant of the White House? The tight-lipped confidant of presidents or the loquacious subject of press conferences and talk shows? All of those identities counted. The problem is that they continually appeared, disappeared, and reappeared throughout his career. Moreover, other hands contributed. Graham's self-presentation was one thing, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's orchestration of his message was another, and the media's marketing of his image was still another.Footnote ¹⁰

The public saw countless faces, too. To begin with, for many Americans, Graham the evangelist blended into Graham the performer. His good looks clearly played a role. When Graham peered into the mirror, he saw the media's construction of the American male ideal: six feet, two inches tall, 180 pounds, blue eyes, flaxen hair, and Hollywood handsome. Nordic features gave him a head start, but he made the most of them with jogging, weightlifting and, of course, golf. For many others, Graham's hallmark was less the appearance than the voice, a timbered baritone of “vast range and power.” It reminded some of his exact contemporary, Walter Cronkite. In 1950, NBC offered the preacher one million dollars a year to host a talk show.Footnote ¹¹

Second and more important, for numerous Americans, Graham the evangelist blended into Graham the idyllic family man. That image took two forms, and both emerged in the popular magazines’ depiction of his sixty-year marriage to Ruth Bell Graham. On one hand, he endorsed hierarchical or complementarian gender roles in the family. On the other hand, he also insisted that marriage should be companionate or equalitarian. Though the positions overlapped, the former predominated in the early years of his ministry, the latter in the later years. Increasingly, the companionate outlook prompted him to stress what many evangelicals had always stressed and what TV sitcoms were beginning to stress: that honesty, modesty, sobriety, gentleness and, above all, fidelity were both Christian and manly virtues. Yielding to desire was easy; resisting was hard.Footnote ¹² 

Third and most important, for myriad Americans, Graham the evangelist blended into Graham the man of character. Character was broader than Christian. It suggested a cluster of personal traits that people of all religious traditions—or none, for that matter—found admirable. Almost all visitors to the Graham household, including critics, came away saying that they found him to be a figure of warmth, humility, and sincerity. Indeed, the Time magazine journalists Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy likened his sincerity to “paint stripper, removing any pretense and pride.” Martin Marty famously ranked him among the “non-mean,” one who displayed the “fruit of the Spirit.” Virtually no one questioned his financial integrity, unpretentious lifestyle, or marital faithfulness. To be sure, many non-Heartland Americans perceived Graham's character less benignly. They viewed him as a chaplain for the business establishment and as a conservative political partisan. He “certainly prays Republican,” charged the columnist Murray Kempton. Graham saw himself otherwise. Brushing off suggestions that he was either a role model or a man of affairs, he insisted that God had called him to be an evangelist, and only an evangelist. Both privately and publicly, he worried that he might fail the assignment. The historian David Aikman spoke for multitudes when he judged that the preacher's achievement lay not in how he handled adversity but in how he handled success.Footnote ¹³

These considerations help focus the problem at hand. Given such unpromising beginnings, so many missteps, such mordant criticism, and so many public identities, how did Graham become the premier Protestant evangelist in the United States (and many other countries) and hold that perch, unrivaled, for nearly six decades? Asked differently, how did he become, as the historian James Morris put it, the “least colorful and most powerful preacher in the United States”? More important, what does his success say about twentieth-century America?Footnote ¹⁴

I propose one answer to the puzzle of Graham's singular eminence. It applies primarily to the American story but also, with important modifications, to its international corollaries. I can state it in a tidy sentence. A producer as well as a product of his age, Graham displayed a remarkable ability to adapt broad cultural trends for his evangelistic purposes. Sometimes he seemed to move by instinct, sometimes by design, and sometimes by both. The evidence strongly suggests that his approach was simultaneously heartfelt and pragmatic. I will sketch four instances of the pattern. Though they overlapped, I will note them in the order that they began to mark his public ministry conspicuously.

II. America's Southerner

The middle third of the twentieth century witnessed a vast process of social and cultural transformation that historians have called the “Southernization” of America. Massive population movements from the South to the North and West allowed Southern attitudes and practices to move outward. Southern emigrants carried Dixie's earmarks with them. Elvis, NASCAR, and the California Gunbelt, dominated by ex-Southerners, symbolized the force of the impulse. So did Charlotte's hometown boy.Footnote ¹⁵

How did Graham represent the South, the region of his roots and, as he repeatedly said, his heart? Most noticeably, he spoke as a Southerner. Though he gradually modulated his distinctive accent—what one New York City journalist called “Carolina stage English”—he never lost it. In addition, Graham's machine-gun facility with language and fondness for jokes and stories expressed the South's emphasis on orality. “Next to fried foods,” quipped the North Carolina-born journalist Walter Hines Page, “the South has suffered most from oratory.” At the same time, if Southerners were talkers, they also were writers. No one would accuse Graham of being a great one, but he was prolific, and he esteemed the conversionary power of sentences clearly crafted.Footnote ¹⁶

Graham was a Southerner in a second sense. He took care to present himself as a simple country boy, toughened when he was growing up by a daily pre-dawn milking regime. That rustic image, furthered by admiring journalists and biographers, formed a big part of his appeal. Graham's natal family fit the image. His parents, married for life, represented stable, hard-working, churchgoing, Psalter-singing Presbyterians—the center of the center of the Southern Protestant mainline. In a cover story on the South, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham aptly observed that the South tended “not to contradict but to exemplify, if sometimes in an exaggerated way,” what much of the nation thought and felt. As Americans hurtled toward a metropolitan future, Graham seemed to remind them of a receding world of small towns, summer nights, and stable values.Footnote ¹⁷

Graham was a Southerner in a third sense. He inherited the region's prevailing assumption that the private and the public realms overlapped. That notion certainly was not unique to the South, but it remained especially conspicuous in the area. Despite—or perhaps because of—a long tradition of subaltern violence, most folk supported a Christian social order policed by orderly Christians. In the “Christ-haunted South,” in Flannery O'Connor's famous phrase, Christians, both white and black, presupposed their right to serve as its moral custodians. One especially clear case is Graham's view of church and state. Though at one level he supported separation, at a deeper, more culturally encoded level, he advocated prayer and Bible reading in the public schools and posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings. When the prayer meeting let out, he knew how to play political hardball.Footnote ¹⁸

Graham represented his region in one additional respect. He perennially assumed that the best way to get things done was to work with, not against, established authorities. To be sure, that notion reflected his genial temperament, but it also reflected the compatibility of his class location with that of the folk who ran things—two slices from the same pie. In the South, the most influential voices spoke from the pulpits and occupied the pews of the mainline churches. Think of First Baptist in Dallas (where Graham was a member for 55 years). Or Myers Park United Methodist in Charlotte. Or Hillsboro Church of Christ in Nashville. Or perhaps the (African American) Wheat Street Baptist in Atlanta. In those redoubtable institutions, respectable people worshiped in respectable ways on Sunday and ran respectable enterprises the rest of the week. The Southern mainline was broadly evangelical, but it was still mainline. It countenanced no extremism, theological or otherwise. It removed the welcome mat when millenarians, snake handlers, and Unitarian pacifists came to town. Its partisans were mannered, neighborly, and well connected. They aimed not to see their name in the newspaper.Footnote ¹⁹

Graham was part of the club. So was his wife, the decorous and quick-witted daughter of a conservative Southern Presbyterian surgeon. One might say, with a wink, that she taught her husband which fork to use at the state dinner with the queen. It is no surprise that Graham—the official unofficial chaplain to the nation's power brokers—carried himself so effortlessly in the corridors of power.Footnote ²⁰

When, in 1940, Graham left Florida Bible Institute and headed north to Wheaton College, he rode the expansionist wave that bore millions of Southerners North and West. He later remembered that he felt out of place and alone. He may have been out of place, but he was not alone. He took the South with him.Footnote ²¹

III. America's Voice

Graham masterfully adapted his old-fashioned message to new media. He knew that the journalism giants William Randolph Hearst and Henry L. Luce had helped launch his career, and he never forgot the lesson. In an age increasingly given to hurried interviews, sound bites, and visual images, Graham took care to deliver his ideas in crisp and compelling forms. Reporters and academics endlessly and, one suspects, enviously analyzed his very smart print, radio, television, satellite, Internet, and advertising moves. Sympathetic observers touted them and unsympathetic ones lamented them, but no one doubted them. Standing behind it all was the well-oiled Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Executives traveled to its Minneapolis headquarters to examine its operations. A small army of professionals and staffers mediated Graham's message and image with consummate skill and aggressive protectiveness.Footnote ²²

The same savvy marked the crusade meetings, which were, after all, studio exercises in the communication arts. The services were orderly affairs, marked by few tears and considerable decorum. But not too orderly. Graham also knew how to put on a good show. Toe-tapping music and heart-warming testimonies made for a fine evening out—or, for that matter, home by the radio or television. The testimonies served a deeper purpose, too. They placed individuals' spiritual struggles in the longer story of Christ's redemption of the world. Graham remembered what many seminary-trained pastors forgot: that the arbiter of truth was not the theology textbook but the personal narrative.Footnote ²³

In Graham's hands, the conversion experience, the centerpiece of the revival tradition, pivoted on classically American understandings of the importance of rational decisiveness. Graham told the story of his adolescent conversion countless times. It involved no special feelings, just a clear choice to stand up, walk to the front, and make a decision for Christ. To be sure, at the end of his crusade sermons, familiar, low-keyed hymns packed with nostalgia accompanied the invitation to step forward. And Graham allowed that for some, conversion might entail a measure of emotion. Nonetheless, audiences heard little cajoling, just the imperative, “Come. We will wait. You come.” Significantly, he called his weekly radio program The Hour of Decision. Premiering in 1950, it soon ranked as one of the mostly widely heard religious broadcasts in the country. Similarly, he named his monthly magazine Decision. Launched in 1952, it soon ranked as one of the most widely received religious periodicals in the country. The program and the magazine spoke the language of Heartland America.Footnote ²⁴

The extraordinary planning that went into the crusade meetings sometimes obscures the obvious. Graham's preaching remained the centerpiece. Faith, after all, came by hearing. He was not a great preacher. He knew it and almost everyone else did too, including his wife. Learned exegesis was not expected, and neither was eloquence. “Homiletically,” said W. E. Sangster, a leading cleric in England, “his sermons leave almost everything to be desired.” Noting that the average person sported a working vocabulary of 600 words, Graham spoke plainly, using vernacular terms, short sentences, and brief paragraphs. He also spoke directly. In a telling metaphor, Graham said that in his early work with Youth for Christ, “We used every modern means to catch the ear of the unconverted and then we punched them straight between the eyes with the gospel.” Nonetheless, he possessed the gift—The Gift—that elusive combination of voice, gesture, timing, vocabulary, organization and, above all, authority that proved inimitable.Footnote ²⁵

The typical sermon merits brief examination. After a couple of warm-up jokes, Graham invariably rehearsed a laundry list of statistics and anecdotes about the dire state of the world. This litany made everything feel more urgent. Graham's legendary ability to win converts—“inquirers,” he called them—rested on a more fundamental ability to capture an audience's attention. He instinctively appreciated the evangelist Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's recipe for rabbit stew: first, “you have to catch the rabbit.” In addition, Graham's drumbeat quoting of the exact words of the King James Bible bestowed the power of immemorial tradition on his preaching. (He literally cut and pasted Bible passages into his skeletal sermon outlines.) The preacher's self-deprecating humor helped seal the deal. He liked to tell about the man in an elevator who looked him up and down for about thirty seconds and said, “My, what an anticlimax.” And of the woman who strolled over to his restaurant table and alleged, “You look like Billy Graham.” To which he drolly responded, “Yes, people often say that.” The evangelist knew his audiences.Footnote ²⁶

Finally, and most important, whatever the stated text, the actual text of every sermon was John 3:16: “whoever believes on him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” All messages demanded a decision. There was nothing new here. For two centuries, the call for a clear choice, up or down, had served as the evangelist's stock-in-trade. Yet Graham sensed, better than most, the importance of pressing his hearers to stand up and walk to the front for all to see. Critics charged that the seemingly endless lines of inquirers, streaming forward from all parts of the crusade stadiums, betokened superficiality at best and mass suggestibility at worst. The preacher thought otherwise. Publicly declaring a new direction for one's life implicitly acknowledged that things had gone wrong and that it was time to make them right.Footnote ²⁷

Taken together, Graham's taped and published sermons, stretching over nearly six decades, reveal the perennial clarity of his message. Critics, of course, judged it not clarity but simplemindedness. That is what Reinhold Niebuhr said: too simple for a complex age. Yet partisans prized his focus on the evangelical essentials of human sin and divine forgiveness. In the approaching darkness (or glorious light) at the end of history, there was, he insisted, no time to trifle with subtleties or fuss about matters in dispute. Corny jokes and butchered facts, always part of the deal, harmed Graham's reputation about as much as they harmed Lyndon Johnson's and Ronald Reagan's—which is to say, except in Cambridge, Berkeley, and Chapel Hill, not much at all.Footnote ²⁸

IV. America's Entrepreneur

No one person created the modern evangelical insurgence, but Graham, more than anyone, should be credited—or blamed, according to one's mood—for channeling its explosive force and vitality. The Cold War and Vietnam eras formed the backdrop. The fears of the 1950s and the ruptures of the 1960s produced a yearning for consensus. Millions of Heartland Christians shared that yearning, and so did Graham. Weary of bony denominational structures and toxic theological debates, he pursued new ways to achieve old ideals. Graham's constructive efforts manifested themselves in the leadership of parachurch evangelicalism and of cooperative evangelicalism.Footnote ²⁹

By the late 1930s, the trans-denominational coalition that historians later called parachurch evangelicalism was well established. Graham fell in step. At Florida Bible Institute, he rubbed shoulders with freelance paladins from a variety of traditions. At Wheaton College, he met future champions of the independent foreign missions network. Graham gradually moved to the front of the pack. By the 1960s, he decisively and permanently had eclipsed all others. Over the years, he invested his considerable organizational skills and financial resources in the founding or support of a host of parachurch institutions. Besides his own Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, some of the more important ones included (in chronological order) Youth for Christ, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christianity Today, the Living Bible, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Samaritan's Purse.Footnote ³⁰

If for Graham parachurch identification meant much, denominational identification meant little. The Southern Baptists ordained him when he was 21, but he always worshiped indiscriminately. (In this respect, he differed from his wife, who remained Southern Presbyterian to the end. He also differed from his lifelong associate, Grady Wilson. When a reporter asked Wilson what he would be if he were not Baptist, Wilson shot back, “I'd be ashamed.”) As early as 1963, Graham told Newsweek's Ken Woodward that he found himself most comfortable in the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church. That outlook endured. In his sunset years, he asked the Reverend Richard Bewes, the rector of All Souls in London, to help officiate at his funeral.Footnote ³¹

Graham's parachurch instincts led to a growing openness toward other traditions—an openness that the historian Michael Hamilton aptly called “cooperative evangelicalism.” Graham started out, as the historian George Marsden put it, as a “purebred fundamentalist.” But he did not stay there. Virtually from the day Graham graduated from Wheaton, he began to pull away from the hard hitters on his right. He led the soft hitters like himself to a more open-minded attitude toward other traditions and toward the surrounding culture. Indeed, he soon grew uneasy with the combative connotations of the label “fundamentalist” and opted instead for the accommodative connotations of the label “evangelical” or, simply, “Christian.” The move was heartfelt, but it was also shrewd. Graham knew that millions of evangelically inclined believers warmed the pews of non-evangelical churches.Footnote ³²

From the early 1950s, Graham proved eager to work with believers anywhere. In 1990, he proudly told Time magazine that in 1981—back when Protestant-Catholic relations were just beginning to thaw—Pope John Paul II had grasped his thumb and said, “We are brothers.” When the pope died in 2005, Graham judged that the pontiff had been the “most influential force for morality and peace in the world in the past 100 years.” The venue for Graham's remark was as significant as the remark itself: the nightly television talk show Larry King Live, a microphone to the world. Graham exhibited the same openness toward over-scrubbed mainliners on his theological left, under-scrubbed pentecostals on his theological right, and many folk who did not fit on any conventional theological map, including the Orthodox. He led millions of evangelicals to embrace the Christian world beyond their door, a globe filled with vibrant Anglicans in Britain, fervent Catholics in Poland, and exuberant charismatics in Africa. Jews too. Finding that he and Jewish leaders held much in common, Graham forged enduring ties with many of them at home and abroad. Repeatedly he said he would work with anyone who would work with him as long as they did not ask him to change his message. Many people saw Graham, but, as historian Sarah Johnson observed, it also is true that he saw many people, and they left their mark.Footnote ³³

In 2006, The New Yorker journalist Peter Boyer perceptively argued that Graham “triangulated” American Protestantism. Until he came along, Boyer contended, two high-profile combatants dominated the landscape: liberals and fundamentalists, locked in mortal combat. Yet the preacher sensed that many Christians had grown weary of that antagonism. They were rooted in a deeper and wider but less conspicuous tradition of irenic evangelical conviction. They desired a faith that took seriously venerable theological affirmations and modern social needs. By the middle 1950s, he had determined to fly his flag as a cooperative evangelical. His fundamentalist friends never forgave him. Their attacks still rage on the Internet, suggesting the bitterness of an abandoned lover. Graham too suffered wounds, but he never looked back.Footnote ³⁴

A theological rationale undergirded cooperative evangelicalism. Though Graham was not a theologian and never pretended to be, he thought seriously about things that mattered. In the process, he changed. Official Graham sources rarely admitted any revising, let alone compromising, of evangelical cornerstones, yet it is easy to see the preacher softening some of the hard edges—most notably, his refusal to speculate on the final fate of the earnest non-Christian. In his maturity, Graham came to feel that his job was simply to preach the Good News and leave the rest to the wideness of God's mercy.Footnote ³⁵

V. America's Counselor

Finally, as Graham grew older, the nation's expanding social vision powerfully influenced him, but that development was a long time coming and followed a zigzag path. To be sure, one thing never changed: his conviction that individual conversion formed the only firm foundation for enduring social progress. Yet two things did change: his growing conviction that the movement from individual conversion to social reform required intentional implementation, and that the gospel, fully realized, required structural as well as spiritual solutions.

Three sets of events defined Graham's posture toward social engagement. The first was the Vietnam War, the second civil rights, and the third a cluster of issues broadly concerning global justice. The first ran from the middle 1960s to the middle 1970s; the second spanned his career; and the third extended from the late 1970s to the end of his active ministry. We might sum up most Americans' verdicts on the three as, respectively, bad, mixed, and good.

Though Graham's view of the Vietnam War was tangled, and the public's perception of his view was equally tangled, several overall comments seem warranted. First, he moved from clear support for the administration's policies in the middle 1960s to professed uncertainty by the time it ended in 1973. Yet many Americans doubted that his uncertainty ran very deep. Into the 1970s, he made statements that appeared to minimize if not trivialize the human cost of the fighting, and he refused publicly to challenge the controversial invasion of Cambodia in 1970 or the even more controversial Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. Second, Graham oscillated between noninvolvement and involvement. On one hand, he actually spoke very little about the geopolitical details of the conflict, effectively saying that as a preacher the question was above his pay grade. On the other hand, in public, with rare exceptions, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Presidents Johnson and Nixon. The title of a 1969 New York Times Magazine article spoke volumes: “The Closest Thing to A White House Chaplain.” Graham never seemed to suspect that his close personal and pastoral relationships with the two presidents might have influenced his judgment about their judgment. Finally, by the late 1970s, Graham acknowledged that in times past he had fallen into political partisanship, especially during the Nixon years. Repeatedly he said he regretted it.Footnote ³⁶

Graham's civil rights record, in contrast, won both censure and praise. Unsympathetic observers charged that he dithered on the integration of his Southern crusades; that in the middle 1960s, he urged firebrands on both sides to quiet down as if their causes were morally equivalent; that he never marched in the streets, went to jail, or threw his power and prestige behind fundamental structural reforms. Sympathetic observers, on the other hand, noted that he moved to integrate his crusades before Brown v. Board of Education; that he experienced threats on his life, the loss of friends, and the wrath of White Citizens' Councils; that he forthrightly endorsed Martin Luther King, Jr. (until King attacked the Vietnam War); and that he won the support of prominent African American associates, numerous black pastors, and multitudes of minority lay followers. Politicians split, too. In Graham's closing years, Jesse Jackson lamented the paucity of his efforts for racial justice. At the same time, Bill Clinton lauded him for taking a stand when he did not have to. One thing is clear: how Americans evaluated Graham's relation to the civil rights movement depended on the criteria they deemed most important. If they placed priority on prophetic words and bold actions, he fell short. If they placed priority on the steady witness of a half-century of integrated crusades, he walked tall.Footnote ³⁷

Graham's work for global justice represents a third posture, winning the praise of all but the most obdurate critics. His increasingly progressive record on health care, the environment, world hunger and poverty and, especially, the arms race, which he called “insanity, madness,” placed him near the front of evangelical Christians' social conscience. As the evangelist's vision widened to see the world and its suffering as one, the line between insiders and outsiders blurred. He sidestepped the Christian Right and largely avoided public association with discordant figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell. In December 2005, television journalist Larry King asked Graham what he thought about his son, Franklin, calling Islam “evil and wicked.” Graham responded, “Well, he has [his] views and I have mine. And they are different sometimes.” No one should have been surprised. The previous June, The New York Times's Laurie Goodstein asked Graham whether he anticipated a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam. His response was telling: “I think the big conflict is with hunger and starvation and poverty.” That same month, Graham preached his final crusade—fittingly, in Flushing Meadows, one of the most ethnically mixed sections of New York City. The diversity of the meeting's counselors symbolized just how much his ministry had changed in sixty years. They represented more than 20 language groups, including Arabic, Armenian, Korean, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Tamil, and Mandarin Chinese.Footnote ³⁸

The mature Graham's expanding social vision grew from an underlying conviction that people deserved a second chance. That ideal—not to be confused with conservative notions of can-do entrepreneurialism or with liberal notions of social reconstruction—simply said that all people should receive an opportunity to make more of themselves than their genes and circumstances might portend. With few exceptions, the thousands of letters that made their way each week to “Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota” spoke of suffering—husbands calling it quits, kids gone astray, jobs lost, and loneliness. Above all, loneliness. In historian Heather Vacek's words, “Graham was a public figure holding private pain.” That role may have been his most enduring legacy. The letters make clear that he helped many wayfarers find fresh water in dry wells. Here, he drew on deep-running streams in the American tradition. Sister Aimee, the flamboyant evangelist of the preceding generation, had well understood the power of the promise of a second chance. And so had the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan. Nothing was more American than believing that things old and broken really could become new and whole.Footnote ³⁹