THE CONVERSION OF BILLY GRAHAM
GAILLARD, FRYE
The Conversion of Billy Graham How the Presidents9 preacher learned to start worrying and loathe the Bomb BY FRYE GAILLARD On April 20,1982, shortly before his controversial and in many ways...
...And let us call the peoples of the world to prayer...
...So Graham sought to call the world's people from their old ways of thinking— their tendencies to ground policies in the worst of human nature, in suspicion, cal-' Iousness, and narrow nationalism...
...He fretted with reporters about sudden changes in his image—the publicity about his pleas for disarmament, his passionate denunciations of oppression and hunger...
...The tan was there and the elegant bearing, and he spoke in the resonant and faintly artistocratic accents that have become his trademark...
...I would urge the leaders of nations," he added, "especially the major powers, to declare a moratorium on hostile rhetoric...
...Graham traveled extensively during his post-Watergate depressions—to Auschwitz, Bangladesh, Poland, and Hungary—and he began to feel a greater urgency about suffering in the world, a passion for global issues such as hunger and the threat of war...
...But at the last possible moment, with an ill-defined guilt surging violently inside him, he walked hesitantly up the aisle and asked Jesus to forgive him...
...Nixon resigned in the throes of scandal, and Graham—who had supported him with more ardor and affection that he had felt for any other political figure— found his own reputation severely tainted...
...But his Harvard speech was not like that at all...
...Perhaps he will retreat to the safety of his predictable crusades, the familiar mass rituals in which he calls people forward...
...He was bewildered...
...I am not a pacifist...
...It'll only take you a moment to come...
...Even ministers and theologians began to denounce him...
...It should give us all some courage," says Harvard's Harvey Cox, "that a person in his sixties can grow in this way...
...He acknowledged that the process is difficult and far beyond his own expertise—and so he offered no plan, no concrete proposals for the negotiations...
...I often spoke on the wonderful little story in the Tenth Chapter of Luke where Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan, teaching us our social responsibilities...
...As the conversation bounced from topic to topic— from nuclear war and hunger to capital punishment—he revealed some attitudes he had not displayed before...
...I did not know how...
...All this for a preacher—and an evangelist at that," he beamed in 1971, when 12,000 people, including Nixon, turned out in Charlotte for a day in his honor...
...I would like to say some things informally about my own pilgrimage and my own witness," he said...
...But the gift of an evangelist is a very narrow gift...
...He has come to understand that the flaws of human nature are more terrible, finally, than he had ever imagined...
...And that was when," explains Grady Wilson, Graham's associate evangelist for more than thirty years, "Mr...
...You may be an elder or a deacon in a church, but you come...
...I'm concerned about what it can do for you, for a person's life...
...It is also a journey that he does not have to take...
...I'm praying right now while I'm talking to you...
...We detain people in the United States if we catch people doing things that are wrong...
...And when he confronted tricky subjects—chief among them the Soviet Union's treatment of religious dissidents—he stumbled badly...
...the first time I met him, I did not expect to like him...
...Graham was stunned, perhaps even frightened, by the sudden and unrelenting attention...
...I'm praying, 'Lord, let me say the right thing to that person before me.' " A more reflective Graham now feels a greater urgency about suffering in the world, about hunger and war But there was another major component to Graham's appeal, one that caught the attention of some powerful people and thrust him suddenly into superstardom...
...Mothers, fathers, young people too...
...No longer, they noted, did Graham define evil in the world as the debaucheries and excesses of individual people...
...I think it's possible," he said...
...Particularly the threat of war...
...On the other, we see Western culture, with its foundation in the Bible, the Word of God...
...I have to be careful what I say about a great many things...
...On the one side," he said, "we see communism...
...But he made no altar call, issued no invitations to easy salvation...
...But there are those who argue that his current message is immensely significant— that he has moved from the staid predictability of mass-market evangelism toward a public position that may come to resemble, say, that of Martin Luther King Jr...
...And the flattery has come from the highest of places, beginning with Hearst and Luce, spreading to presidents of the United States...
...First there was a private reception, featuring Danish lobster tails and cross-shaped sandwiches and a thirty-pound cake in the shape of a Bible...
...It is all part of what Graham calls his pilgrimage—a painful, public journey involving admissions of mistakes made in the past and the obvious risk of more failures in the future...
...Graham says today that he almost didn't go...
...I plan to spend the rest of my life," he says, "doing two things—preaching the gospel and working for peace...
...His lasting impact was as a prophet—compelling Americans to confront the unsettling principles of brotherhood and addressing, with a kind of righteous Baptist certainty, the collective sins of his country...
...I also felt that this applied to my relatives and friends and immediate neighbors...
...I don't want to get sidetracked," he said, "and have the press always building me up as the leader of some peace movement...
...As he stared out at the crowd, sun-tanned, blue-eyed, with the lingering innocence of an aging surfer, you could almost see him in the familiar stance at the center of a great stadium, pleading with the multitudes in a voice strong and gentle: "You come forward now, men and women, black or white...
...His strong words on peace became lost in other shadows...
...We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive...
...He is a man of transparent conviction and very great decency...
...Throughout his speech and the interviews that surrounded it, Graham was trying to drive home the point that our highly politicized and nationalistic ways of thinking have failed us, that they are attached to a technology where one miscalculation or a single excess of cynicism can lead to Armageddon...
...Why did a trip that began with such promise end in a controversy that shouldn't have arisen at all...
...But I never thought of it in terms of corporate responsibility...
...While insisting that he was somehow neutral on the Vietnam war, he poured forth innumerable statements in support of U.S...
...I looked upon him as the possibility of leading this country to its greatest and best days...
...He planned to deliver a speech at an international religious conference on nuclear disarmament, hoping, he said, to "make whatever small contribution I can to the cause of world peace...
...But how...
...Something's happening, and I don't know what it is...
...During a Los Angeles crusade in 1949, he proclaimed that the planet is divided into two camps...
...Where is the hard-headed political blueprint by which the arms race can be ended...
...He spent weeks with his yellow legal pad, drafting and redrafting his disarmament speech, until it represented, finally, a dramatic culmination of his change of heart and mind...
...Reporters and editorial writers began dashing off essays about his growth as a Christian—the enlargement of his vision, his new and broader definition of sin...
...But even if that happens, it will leave him with much influence, for Graham is, without doubt, one of the most popular men in history—having preached the gospel to more people in more places than anyone who ever lived...
...We live in a time of horrible and hideous crimes...
...But one of the hesitations I've had is that so many more black people are executed...
...That may seem implausible right now...
...Before long, you could find him on Charlotte street corners, preaching to pedestrians, charging them to repent before it was too late...
...It is possible, I think, that Graham's constituency will shrink somewhat—that the easy admiration he has known in the past will diminish before a message that is now more provocative...
...But King's greatest successes were not as an organizer or militant tactician...
...His awareness of that gift has defined his life—ever since his sixteenth year, when, as a handsome, thoroughly ordinary teenager given to mischievous transgressions with girls and fast cars, he and a buddy decided to take in a revival in Charlotte...
...Graham generally responded softly, simply submerging himself—with a kind of gee-whiz overflow of modesty and gratitude—into the stream of acclamation that still came his way...
...Such hedgings have always been characteristic of Graham...
...Maybe not probable, but possible...
...But it has a peculiar flipside—a lingering need to justify himself, which has left him susceptible to flattery...
...They would be the first battlefield...
...view of the gospel...
...That would be suicide...
...I would urge the leaders of the world to take specific steps to increase trust and understanding among nations and peoples...
...In 1971, for example, in his birthplace of Charlotte, North Carolina, all the city's powerful gathered in his honor...
...Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon— even the urbane John Kennedy—all recognized the benefits of cordiality with Graham...
...They winced at the ferocity of the presiding evangelist, but they moved forward tremulously at the altar call...
...And for millions of the world's people, he added, Armageddon is here—for they exist day-to-day on the brink of starvation, while the world's powerful nations, those with the resources to make a dent in suffering, squander billions instead on weapons of mass destruction...
...I once accused him of being the court prophet to Richard Nixon," says Campbell...
...There are too many people knocking our institutions...
...Graham called once again for negotiated arms control, with the ultimate aim of total disarmament...
...Luce ran a three-page color spread and story...
...In 1949, he proclaimed that 'Communism has declared war against God, against Christ, against the Bible' My main focus is the gospel, he explains with some urgency...
...He was flattered by the charm and attentions of his Soviet hosts—just as he had been, at other times in his life, by the solicitations of powerful Democrats and Republicans...
...It rarely occurred to me in my childhood to think about the difficulties, problems, and oppressions of black people...
...And Will Campbell, a Southern Baptist preacher, author, and civil rights activist, put it even more strongly...
...Perhaps it is beyond the power of one man's eloquence to effect such a change, and perhaps it is especially beyond Graham's—for his skills have often failed him when he enters the treacherous realm of politics...
...It was a misty June Sunday in 1979, and he meandered into the living room of his spacious log home, hidden away on a mountain near the North Carolina town of Montreat...
...A more reflective Billy Graham understands now that evil can lurk beneath benign exteriors...
...And execution makes the imperfection final...
...We need to repent as nations and as people over our past failures—the failure to accept each other, the failure to be concerned about the needs of the poor and the starving of the world, the failure to place top priority on peace instead of war...
...Then he added, to the applause of the crowd, "We also had the problem of rats...
...Later, there was a public ceremony for an audience of 12,000, during which he offered inflated recollections of boyhood hardships: "We also wrestled with poverty, if you go by today's standards, except we did not know we were poor...
...I also feel it is important for the leaders of the world to get to know one another personally through personal contact...
...Graham has a genuine, deep-rooted, almost awesome humility—a rigorous understanding of his own ordinariness—that remains intact after thirty years in the limelight...
...That was among my first acts of conscience on the race question...
...And he would bring to the podium assorted young U.S...
...But he believes he has an answer, and I doubt he will cease to proclaim it...
...At the core of his message was a familiar quote from Albert Einstein: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking...
...There, in the suburbs of Tampa, the young evangelist took on the first hints of polish...
...His faith seemed to deepen, and as his preaching gained momentum in the 1940s, the crowds were caught up in his natural, vibrant decency...
...The ushers will show you...
...Hearst gave the order to 'puff Graham.' " What Hearst ordered, his editors quickly did...
...Conservative columnist George Will, writing with customary spite, called Graham "America's most embarrassing export...
...But Graham has shown courage on occasions when he has been certain that he was right, and despite his missteps in Moscow, his trip to the Soviet Union was undoubtedly a brave act...
...But I believe in risks for peace...
...There is no perfect system of justice on this Earth...
...The vicious cycle of propaganda and counter-propaganda, charge and counter-charge, must somehow be broken...
...He hates controversy...
...And I believe there has to be a certain amount of trust on both sides, because we are dealing with the existence of the human race...
...So I am for anything that would bring about the destruction of nuclear weapons, any step toward that...
...Is it too much to hope for a summit meeting in which the leaders of the major powers do not come together just to sign a prepared document, but simply to get to know one another as human beings...
...But I am for the destruction of nuclear, biochemical, laser—all the weapons of mass destruction...
...That is not who Graham is or what he is about...
...There is just too much negativism," he would say...
...Perhaps having tried and been burned, he will never try again...
...Suddenly, Graham's picture was splattered across the pages of some of the nation's largest papers—soon prompting Time-Life's Henry Luce to get into the act...
...Other critics were at least as harsh, and in the midst of it all, something got lost: Nobody seemed to remember the original purpose of Graham's trip, or to notice the powerful, prophetic speech on nuclear disarmament that he delivered on May 11...
...He has written extensively about Billy Graham for his own newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Constitution, Tar Heel magazine, and a number of other publications...
...The system has always been too one-sided, and many of the people on death row are poor people who couldn't afford good lawyers...
...Then he went off to college—first to hard-bitten, ultra-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, where he was miserable, then on to Florida Bible Institute, where the atmosphere was more pleasant, more relaxed...
...The experience left him with an exalted sense of propriety, a tendency to scold his friends for the most minor transgressions...
...It is a complicated story, with mixed results...
...He had come to recognize pervasive social ills— poverty and war and the nuclear arms race—as collective symptoms of the sinful human heart...
...He listened to the White House tapes, with all the vulgarities and sinister plottings, and two years later he told his biographer, Marshall Frady: "I just couldn't understand it...
...He did not, as the press widely reported, proclaim that the Soviet Union was a place of religious freedom...
...But that does not mean that his thoughts are mushy...
...In high school, I began to question some of the practices, but it was not until I'd actually committed my life to Christ that I began to realize that if I were a Christian, I had to take a stand on the race question...
...And all those people around him, they seemed so clean, family men, so clean-living...
...Because I know that they feel that in the case of a nuclear exchange, they would be wiped out...
...I had no real idea that millions of people throughout the world lived on the knife-edge of starvation and that the teachings of my reference point demanded that I have a responsibility toward them...
...Suddenly, the ranks of his critics increased dramatically...
...I was born and reared on a small farm in southern America...
...The Conversion of Billy Graham How the Presidents9 preacher learned to start worrying and loathe the Bomb BY FRYE GAILLARD On April 20,1982, shortly before his controversial and in many ways ill-fated trip to Moscow, Billy Graham made a stop at Harvard...
...But I've come to see in deeper ways some of the implications of my faith and the messages I've been proclaiming...
...Graham echoed the sentiment: "We need a new breakthrough," he declared, "in how the terrifying problem of nuclear war is approached...
...I began to feel that Christians have a responsibility to speak out about it," he says, "and so I took the position about three years ago, four years ago maybe, of SALT X. To me, SALT X would be the destruction of all nuclear weapons...
...It took us ten years to get to SALT II from negotiations...
...He talked instead about himself, and as the words tumbled out he delivered one of the most effective orations in his career as an evangelist...
...Seeing those people in Poland, Hungary, and all over Europe who are hoping and praying for peace...
...He still lunged about the pulpit and lashed at the air with his pointed forefinger, still warned them urgently of the ravages of hell...
...I thought he was a man of integrity...
...In many circles, the speech drew acclaim...
...He remembers that he telephoned a colleague and told him, "You better get out here...
...Some people can be detained for all kinds of reasons," he said...
...I would say, 'Let's spend that period of time getting SALT X.' "I think any agreement would have to be verifiable—and there are means of verifying...
...I am not for unilateral disarmament...
...It's way beyond me...
...causing disturbances, and they have been taken away by police...
...They praised him publicly and courted him privately, and Graham returned the admiration...
...He talked especially about the arms race, calling for negotiations that would lead to destruction of all nuclear weapons...
...They had ropes so that black people had to sit behind those ropes...
...But somehow I doubt it, for there has been an epic change in the heart of Billy Graham...
...My perception of him had crystallized during his bursts of public certitude, in the heat of the 1960s amid all the national agony over Vietnam...
...On domestic moral issues, he was equally shrill...
...There may be issues that are distantly related to the gospel, or perhaps they are deeply related...
...But this is a very imperfect system...
...It is difficult to say what the effects of it will be...
...Then, in what seemed like an instant, it was all gone...
...The unending and escalating cycle of relying on deterrents should also be defused...
...Our purpose is to rise above narrow national interests," said Graham, "and give all humanity a spiritual vision of the way to peace...
...What he did offer was the ringing conviction that arms negotiations will not succeed, and can never succeed, unless we work to change the climate in which the negotiations occur...
...But there was an undeniable air of compassion about him, then as now, when he stood before the people at the altar invitation and told them softly: "I have no power to save anybody, to forgive anybody, to heal anybody...
...Sometimes, when I look back on it now, it has the aspects of a nightmare...
...Certainly it's unlikely that Graham will lead marches in the streets or expose himself to the risk of attack dogs and fire hoses, or spend time in jail in defense of his principles...
...And when a young Russian Baptist was led away from one of his speeches, having unfurled a banner denouncing Soviet oppression, Graham defended the police who arrested her...
...Even in the cloister of his Montreat home, he seems inescapably aware that he is an institution...
...So Billy Graham decided to take his own risk for peace by traveling to Moscow, dismissing warnings from fundamentalist leaders and from the Reagan Administration that he would wind up being exploited as a tool of Soviet propaganda...
...He tried not to give offense, and he came off in the process as gullible or even cynical— oblivious or indifferent to the oppressions of Soviet life...
...God will have it at the judgment...
...But I have to say he's God's prophet now...
...If the peoples of the world would turn to God and seek his will in prayer, it would have a tremendous impact on the issues that face us...
...I've had people come to my services in the U.S...
...It soon became clear in those bitter days of the 1960s—despite careful hedgings and disingenuous denials—that Graham had planted his feet on a particular side of the chasm...
...Nobody," says former Johnson aide and protege Bill Moyers, "could make Johnson feel he was right quite like Billy Graham could...
...I'm sure," he added graciously, when asked about the crowds, "they are coming to see the President, not me...
...A year and half later, in 1936, he and a friend, Grady Wilson, graduated from high school and set off to South Carolina for a summer of traveling, selling Fuller brushes, and witnessing for Jesus whenever the opportunity arose...
...He was troubled, he said, by the resumption of capital punishment, the taint it could inflict on American justice...
...I just don't know," he said...
...None of that, of course, puts Graham on the cutting edge of social change or theology...
...He is sixty-three years old, and for more than thirty of those years he has been praised and admired for delivering a much safer, blander message...
...I still can't...
...But then he added, in an odd little de-murral, "Of course, I have never taken a stand on capital punishment...
...I went down and personally and physically pulled the ropes down...
...Communism, on the other hand, has declared war against God, against Christ, against the Bible...
...That experience brought him up short and forced him to confront some complexities of human nature he had never considered before...
...He's doing good...
...We did not have sociologists, educators, and newscasters constantly reminding us how poor we were...
...Even the daily press, which is customarily indifferent to matters of religion, seemed to catch a glimmer of what Graham was driving at...
...Those are the sorts of proposals that make political reporters—those who covered the story in Moscow—lay aside their pencils and notebooks and simply shake their heads, Where are the specifics...
...But he did say, "I think there is a lot more freedom here than has been given the impression in the United States, because there are hundreds, thousands of churches open...
...Peace does not grow in a climate of mistrust, in which each side to a greater and greater degree is constantly accusing the other of false motives and hidden actions...
...Obviously, it isn't there...
...Perhaps he will leave peace and politics to more facile spokesmen...
...Let us call the nations and leaders of our world to repentance...
...Graham went on from there, acknowledging his mistakes and affirming that his "pilgrimage" is not yet complete...
...So just as he was winning applause from unaccustomed quarters, Graham set out for Moscow...
...I suppose going to Europe so many times had something to do with it...
...For more than three years now, a plea for nuclear disarmament has been part of every crusade or major speech he has given...
...Marines, crew-cut and earnest, to explain how God had helped them kill communists...
...The only difference between then and now is we didn't call on the Federal Government to kill them...
...It is, perhaps, his most touching trait...
...His relationship to American politics and culture—his understanding of America's "mission" in the world—is not what it was...
...That message sounded straight and true to William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate...
...you come, hundreds of you...
...To understand the answer, it helps to travel back through Graham's own history—his sudden rise to prominence in 1949, his Cold War rhetoric, his easy conviviality with men of great power, his fall from grace during the Watergate scandal, and finally, the epic introspection into which all this thrust him...
...My basic commitment as a Christian has not changed, nor has my Frye Gaillard is an editorial writer and columnist for the Charlotte Observer...
...And Johnson, of course, was in need of that, for like Nixon after him he was presiding over war and national disarray—the ungluing, as Moyers noted, of the veneer of consensus that held the country together...
...Do we have ten years to get an agreement on a freeze...
...Harvard theologian Harvey Cox summed up the sentiments of many of his colleagues when he smiled and said, "I'm very cheered at ole Billy...
...Later, as I traveled and studied the Bible more, I changed...
...It would be easy and tempting to overstate the change...
...His identity is tied to his sense of mission, and he will let nothing—absolutely nothing—jeopardize his calling...
...From the very beginning, I felt that if I came upon a person who had been beaten and robbed and left for dead that I'd do my best to help him...
...From the moment his plane touched down in Moscow, descending through the clouds toward the onion domes of the city, he seemed unsure and off-stride...
...Thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison...
...he wasn't very good at those things...
...Back home in the United States, Graham took a battering for such statements...
...He moved with a slouching, good-natured gait, his arms dangling loosely at his sides...
...He seemed quite unlike his television persona—vastly more vulnerable, and even shy...
...And as Wilson remembers it, "Mr...
...He would pound at the pulpits during his television crusades, inveighing against the storms of youthful rebellion...
...But you cannot deny it— not if you sit down with him in his Montreat office, during a break from all the pressures of his massive organization, and listen to him talk about the things he now believes...
...Such feelings of inadequacy are characteristic...
...Certainly, in the end, they failed him in Moscow...
...Often we are suspicious of each other because we do not know each other...
...But even as he was leaving, an old reluctance showed itself...
...it tears at the essential gentleness of his nature...
...Perhaps Billy Graham will never be bold enough to play such a role...
...He had blown it somehow—had provided his critics with an easy way to write him off...
...policy...
...But in 1952,1 was holding a series of meetings in a southern city...
...Protesters began showing up at his speeches and crusades...
...But eight years later, in the reassuring privacy of an afternoon conversation, he sounded a wholly different note about the social implications of Christianity...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
