The
Rev. Billy Graham, a North Carolina farmer’s son who preached to
millions in stadium events he called crusades, becoming a pastor to
presidents and the nation’s best-known Christian evangelist for more
than 60 years, died on Wednesday at his home in Montreat, N.C. He was
99.
His death was confirmed by Jeremy Blume, a spokesman for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Mr.
Graham had dealt with a number of illnesses in his last years,
including prostate cancer, hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the
brain) and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Mr.
Graham spread his influence across the country and around the world
through a combination of religious conviction, commanding stage presence
and shrewd use of radio, television and advanced communication
technologies.
A
central achievement was his encouraging evangelical Protestants to
regain the social influence they had once wielded, reversing a retreat
from public life that had begun when their efforts to challenge
evolution theory were defeated in the Scopes trial in 1925.
But
in his later years, Mr. Graham kept his distance from the evangelical
political movement he had helped engender, refusing to endorse
candidates and avoiding the volatile issues dear to religious
conservatives.
“If
I get on these other subjects, it divides the audience on an issue that
is not the issue I’m promoting,” he said in an interview at his home in
North Carolina in 2005 while preparing for his last American crusade,
in New York City. “I’m just promoting the Gospel.”
A Mass Media Megaphone
Mr.
Graham took the role of evangelist to a new level, lifting it from the
sawdust floors of canvas tents in small-town America to the podiums of
packed stadiums in the world’s major cities. He wrote some 30 books and
was among the first to use new communication technologies for religious
purposes. During his “global crusade” from Puerto Rico in 1995, his
sermons were translated simultaneously into 48 languages and transmitted
to 185 countries by satellite.
Mr.
Graham’s standing as a religious leader was unusual: Unlike the pope or
the Dalai Lama, he spoke for neither a particular church (though he was
a Southern Baptist) nor a particular people.
At
times, he seemed to fill the role of national clergyman. He read from
Scripture at President Richard M. Nixon’s funeral in California in 1994,
offered prayers at a service in the National Cathedral for victims of
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and, despite his failing health,
traveled to New Orleans in 2006 to preach to survivors of Hurricane
Katrina.
His
reach was global, and he was welcomed even by repressive leaders like
Kim Il-sung of North Korea, who invited him to preach in Pyongyang’s
officially sanctioned churches.
In
his younger days, Mr. Graham became a role model for aspiring
evangelists, prompting countless young men to copy his cadences, his
gestures and even the way he combed his wavy blond hair.
He
was not without critics. Early in his career, some mainline Protestant
leaders and theologians accused him of preaching a simplistic message of
personal salvation that ignored the complexities of societal problems
like racism and poverty. Later, critics said he had shown political
naïveté in maintaining a close public association with Nixon long after
Nixon had been implicated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in.
Mr.
Graham’s image was tainted in 2002 with the release of audiotapes that
Nixon had secretly recorded in the White House three decades earlier.
The two men were heard agreeing that liberal Jews controlled the media
and were responsible for pornography.
“A
lot of the Jews are great friends of mine,” Mr. Graham said at one
point on the tapes. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me because
they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I
really feel about what they are doing to this country.”
Mr. Graham issued a written apology
and met with Jewish leaders. In the interview in 2005, he said of the
conversation with Nixon: “I didn’t remember it, I still don’t remember
it, but it was there. I guess I was sort of caught up in the
conversation somehow.”
In
the last few decades, a new generation of evangelists, including Mr.
Graham’s elder son, Franklin Graham, began developing their own
followings. In November 1995, on his 77th birthday, Mr. Graham named
Franklin to succeed him as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. His daughter Anne Graham Lotz and his grandsons Will Graham and William Graham Tullian Tchividjian are also in ministry.
Franklin
Graham has drawn criticism since the Sept. 11 attacks for denigrating
Islam. His father, however, retained the respect of vast numbers of
Americans, enough to earn him dozens of appearances on Gallup’s annual
list of the world’s 10 most admired men and women.
Repent and Be Born Again
With
a warm, courtly manner that was readily apparent both to stadium crowds
and to those who met him face to face, Mr. Graham could be a riveting
presence. At 6-foot-2, with a handsomely rugged profile fit for
Hollywood westerns, he would hold his Bible aloft and declare that
Scripture offered “the answer to every human longing.”
Mr.
Graham drew his essential message from the mainstream of evangelical
Protestant belief. Repent of your sins, he told his listeners, accept
Jesus as your Savior and be born again. In a typical exhortation, he
declared: “Are you frustrated, bewildered, dejected, breaking under the
strains of life? Then listen for a moment to me: Say yes to the Savior
tonight, and in a moment you will know such comfort as you have never
known. It comes to you quickly, as swiftly as I snap my fingers, just
like that.”
Mr.
Graham always closed by asking his listeners to “come forward” and
commit to a life of Christian faith. When they did so, his well-oiled
organization would match new believers with nearby churches. Many
thousands of people say they were first brought to church by a Billy
Graham crusade.
At the dedication of the Billy Graham Library
in Charlotte, N.C., in June 2007, former President Bill Clinton said of
Mr. Graham, “When he prays with you in the Oval Office or upstairs in
the White House, you feel like he is praying for you, not the
president.”
Mr. Graham was by no means unique in American history as a popular evangelist. George Whitefield in the mid-18th century, Charles G. Finney and Dwight L. Moody in the 19th century, and Billy Sunday at the turn of the 20th were all capable of drawing vast crowds.
But
none of them combined the ambition, the talent for organization and the
reach of Mr. Graham, who had the advantages of jet travel and
electronic media to convey his message. In 2007, the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association estimated that he had preached the Gospel to
more than 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories
since beginning his crusades in October 1947 in Grand Rapids, Mich. He
reached hundreds of millions more on television, through video and in
film.
“This is not mass evangelism,” Mr. Graham liked to say, “but personal evangelism on a mass scale.”
Ball-Playing Dreams
William
Franklin Graham Jr. — Billy Frank to his family and friends as a boy —
was born near Charlotte on Nov. 7, 1918, the first of four children of
William Franklin Graham and Morrow Coffey Graham. He was descended on
both sides from pre-Revolution Scottish settlers, and both his
grandfathers were Confederate soldiers.
Though
the Grahams were Reformed Presbyterians, and though his father insisted
on daily readings of the Bible, Billy Frank was an unenthusiastic
Christian. He was more interested in reading history, playing baseball
and dreaming of becoming a professional ballplayer. His worldliness, his
father thought, was mischievous and devilish.
It
was the Rev. Mordecai Ham, an itinerant preacher from Kentucky, who was
credited with “saving” Billy Graham, in the autumn of 1934, when Billy
was 16. After attending Mr. Ham’s revival sessions on a Charlotte street
corner several nights in a row, Billy walked up to Mr. Ham to make a
“decision for Christ.”
“I
can’t say that I felt anything spectacular,” Mr. Graham recalled years
later. “I felt very little emotion. I shed no tears. In fact, when I saw
others had tears in their eyes, I felt like a hypocrite, and this
disturbed me a little. I’m sure I had a tremendous sense of conviction:
The Lord did speak to me about certain things in my life, I’m certain of
that. But I can’t remember what they were.”
Returning
home with a friend that night, Mr. Graham said, he thought: “Now I’ve
gotten saved. Now whatever I do can’t unsave me. Even if I killed
somebody, I can’t ever be unsaved now.”
After
he graduated from high school in 1936, Mr. Graham spent the summer
selling Fuller brushes door to door before spending an unhappy semester
at Bob Jones College, then an unaccredited, fundamentalist school in
Cleveland, Tenn. (It is now Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C.)
He then went to another unaccredited but less restrictive institution,
the Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa.
It was there, he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “Just as I Am,”
that he felt God calling him to the ministry. The call came, he said,
during a late-night walk on a golf course. “I got down on my knees at
the edge of one of the greens,” he wrote. “Then I prostrated myself on
the dewy turf. ‘O God,’ I sobbed, ‘if you want me to serve you, I will.’
”
“All
the surroundings stayed the same,” he continued. “No sign in the
heavens. No voice from above. But in my spirit I knew I had been called
to the ministry. And I knew my answer was yes.”
A Wife, Then a Pulpit
After
graduating from the Bible Institute, Mr. Graham went to Wheaton College
in Illinois, among the nation’s most respected evangelical colleges. At
Wheaton, from which he received a degree in anthropology in 1943, he
met Ruth McCue Bell, a fellow student whose father was Dr. L. Nelson
Bell, a prominent Presbyterian missionary surgeon who had spent many
years in China.
Soon
after marrying Ms. Bell in 1943, Mr. Graham accepted the pulpit of the
First Baptist Church in Western Springs, Ill., a Chicago suburb. (It
later changed its name to the Village Church.) He imbued his sermons
with the brand of interdenominational appeal that was to be his
hallmark.
It was also in 1943 that he was invited to take over “Songs in the Night,”
a Sunday hour of sermonizing and gospel singing broadcast by a Chicago
radio station. The program introduced him to electronic evangelism. Its
principal singer, the baritone George Beverly Shea, who died in 2013, would earn fame as a member of the “Billy Graham team.”
In
the mid-1940s, Mr. Graham became the chief preacher for the Youth for
Christ rallies organized by the Rev. Torrey M. Johnson, a radio
evangelist, and George W. Wilson, the owner of a religious bookstore in
Minneapolis and a lay leader of the First Baptist Church there. With
them, he established the Graham Youth for Christ, which found moderate
success holding “crusades” across North America and in Britain.
Mr.
Graham’s fortunes took a career-building turn in 1949, thanks in no
small measure to the power of the Hearst press. He was holding a
three-week “mammoth tent crusade” in downtown Los Angeles inside a
6,000-seat “canvas cathedral” pitched on a vacant lot. The newspaper ads
proclaimed him “America’s sensational young evangelist.” But what
really caught the attention of the aged newspaper baron William Randolph
Hearst was that Mr. Graham was preaching a fiery brand of
anti-Communism.
From his retreat in San Simeon, Calif., Mr. Hearst is said to have issued a terse directive: “Puff Graham.”
“The
Hearst newspapers gave me enormous publicity, and the others soon
followed,” Mr. Graham said years later. “Suddenly, what a clergyman was
saying was in the headlines everywhere, and so was the box score of
commitments to Christ each night.” Time, Newsweek and Life magazines
followed suit.
Flocking to his ‘Crusades’
Mr.
Graham began taking his “Crusade for Christ” on the road. In 1957, he
drew more than two million people to a series of rallies, extended to 16
weeks, at Madison Square Garden in New York. The crusades became
international: One, in West Germany, was televised live in 10 other
European countries. In 1966, he preached to nearly one million people in
London.
As
Mr. Graham’s popularity grew, so did his stature with Christian critics
who had dismissed his interpretation of Scripture as overly literal. He
told his audiences, for example, that heaven was a physical place,
though not necessarily in this solar system.
Early
on, he abandoned the practice, common among Southern fundamentalists,
of speaking only before racially segregated audiences. He refused to
“preach Jim Crow,” as he put it, and in the turbulent 1960s he made
several “visits of racial conciliation” to the South.
Mr.
Graham pledged to local church sponsors that all donations would be
used for crusade expenses, with any excess going to his Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association. His own compensation, he said, would be
limited to his expenses plus “the salary of a fairly well-paid local
minister,” or about $50,000 in 1980 (the equivalent of almost $160,000
today). The association’s books were always open to inspection.
By
maintaining fiscal integrity and personal probity — he stuck to his
rule never to be alone with a woman other than his wife — Mr. Graham
kept himself untarnished by the kind of sex and money scandals that
brought down evangelists and religious broadcasters like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the 1980s.
The Grahams lived on a 200-acre mountain retreat in Montreat, N.C. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham,
died in 2007. He is survived by his sons, the Rev. William Franklin III
and the Rev. Nelson Graham, known as Ned; three daughters, Virginia
Tchividjian (known as Gigi), Anne Graham Lotz and Ruth Graham McIntyre;
and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A Kinship With Presidents
Recognizing
his influence, presidents made a point of seeking friendly relations
with Mr. Graham; Lyndon B. Johnson did so assiduously. Mr. Graham was a
frequent guest of Ronald Reagan, and in January 1991, George H. W. Bush
invited him to spend the night at the White House the day before
American-led forces began bombing Iraq. Mr. Clinton asked Mr. Graham to
offer prayers at his inauguration in 1993.
President
George W. Bush said that it was after a walk with Mr. Graham at the
Bush family’s compound in Kennebunkport, Me., that Mr. Bush, as a
younger man, decided to become more serious about his faith and quit
drinking. President Barack Obama visited Mr. Graham at his North
Carolina home in 2010.
Former
President Jimmy Carter released a statement on Wednesday saying that he
had counted Mr. Graham among his advisers and friends, adding that the
minister had “had an enormous influence on my own spiritual life.” And
President Trump tweeted: “The GREAT Billy Graham is dead. There was
nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A
very special man.”
Of
the presidents, Mr. Graham was most closely associated with Nixon. The
two had met in the early 1950s, when Nixon was a senator from
California. As vice president, Nixon addressed a capacity crowd at
Yankee Stadium for the closing meeting of Mr. Graham’s New York crusade
in 1957.
In
the 1960 presidential campaign, Mr. Graham, a registered Democrat, was
strongly sympathetic to Nixon, a Republican, and offered him advice in
his campaign against Senator John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic. At one
point, concerned that a Kennedy administration would be influenced by
the Vatican, Mr. Graham invited more than two-dozen Protestant leaders
to a meeting to discuss ways to defeat him.
He
went on to endorse Nixon in the 1968 presidential race and allowed that
endorsement to be used in television commercials. He gave the
invocation at Nixon’s 1969 inauguration and came to be described as
Nixon’s unofficial White House chaplain.
Mr.
Graham said he had been “innocently unaware” of the storm gathering
over Watergate. But when the extent of the scandal became known —
disclosures of the break-in and the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by
the White House — Mr. Graham tended to look the other way, his critics
said.
In
1982, Mr. Graham displeased the Reagan administration when, after a
visit to the Soviet Union, he spoke in favor of universal nuclear
disarmament. He also visited Russian churches, and his comment that he
had seen no evidence of religious repression by the Soviet authorities
created a furor among conservative church members in the United States.
It
was during this period, in his sixth decade as an evangelist, that Mr.
Graham and his organization experimented with new technologies. In 1986,
in Paris, he used direct satellite transmissions to carry his sermons
to about 30 other French cities. With his crusade in San Juan, P.R., in
1995, he expanded his satellite reach more than sixfold.
Mr.
Graham also broke ground by going to places where religious activity
was officially restricted, including China and North Korea. The first of
his 30 books was “Peace With God,” published in 1953; his last was “Nearing Home,” in 2011.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association continues to organize crusades. It also produced Mr. Graham’s “Hour of Decision” global radio program and prime-time television specials, trains thousands of evangelists and missionaries, and publishes Decision magazine. A rapid-response team deploys chaplains to disaster areas.
Why
it all came about remained a puzzle to Mr. Graham. In his
autobiography, he wrote: “I have often said that the first thing I am
going to do when I get to Heaven is ask: ‘Why me, Lord? Why did You
choose a farm boy from North Carolina to preach to so many people, to
have such a wonderful team of associates, and to have a part in what You
were doing in the latter half of the 20th century?’ ”
“I have thought about that question a great deal,” he added, “but I know also that only God knows the answer.”
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