Billy Graham: A Man of Integrity for Yesterday's World When I was a young teenager, carrying The Charlotte Observer, the final house in my paper route had the name "Graham Brothers' Dairy" written on its rural mailbox. In this era local dairies delivered their milk in glass bottles, in which cream rose to the top, to the homes of their customers. The Graham family was well known in that area because one of the children of that family, William Franklin Graham, Jr., was making a reputation for himself as an itinerant preacher. He was a tall, lanky young man that people called Billy, who already possessed great oratorical power. He spoke in the attractive drawl of his region and reflected the familiar cadences of the southern preacher. The Grahams were originally members of my mother's church in Charlotte known as Chalmers' Memorial Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. At one time in its recent past, my mother's Uncle, Eli Griffith, a pulpit pounding, hellfire preaching minister , was its pastor. He was succeeded by Dr. Walter Lindsay, a sweeter version of Uncle Eli, who both baptized Billy Graham and married my mother to my father. The demons against which Dr. Lindsay preached were smoking, drinking and gambling. To him a deck of cards was nothing but "the play things of the devil." This congregation sang no hymns other than the book of Psalms, for only God's words were allowed in their liturgy. In his late teen years Billy Graham came under the influence of Mordecai Ham, a well known southern evangelist. Responding to his call to "give yourself to Christ" at a Ham revival, Billy was converted. It was a life-defining moment in which he found his call to preach. Changing his church affiliation to Southern Baptist, he moved toward that vocation. He went first to Bob Jones University, a rigid Bible college then located in Tennessee. When that school proved to be too strict, he transferred to Florida Bible College seeing himself as a moderate in evangelical circles. The only academic degree he ever received was a Bachelor of Arts from Wheaton College in Illinois, a conservative church-related school. Even though his major was anthropology, his literal view of the creation story was not challenged. Darwin was dismissed on this campus as a hoax. While still an undergraduate Billy began preaching at a Baptist church near Wheaton. He then became a featured speaker at Youth for Christ rallies on college campuses and gradually emerged as the successor to Dwight Moodey and Billy Sunday in American evangelical circles. During a crusade in Los Angeles the Hearst Press decided to lift Billy Graham into public consciousness with a series of high profile pieces. The response of the crowds at these Los Angeles meetings also indicated that this young Tar Heel had touched a nerve in the American psyche. He rode the post-World War II religious boom to become America's best-known Christian pastor of any tradition. During his career he conducted Crusades in almost every American city. His radio program, "The Hour of Decision," was heard across America. His newspaper column, "My Answer," was syndicated in many local newspapers. He led revivals in England, Germany, Africa, and was the first western evangelist to preach in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. He was the confidante to presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton. These politcal contacts inevitably opened him to the charge of being used, for he gave respectability to various presidential policies. The Nixon tapes indicated exactly how this "using" was accomplished. President Bush had him as a guest in the White House on the night that he ordered the bombing of Iraq. Bush, an Episcopalian, needed religious cover for this initiative since that same night his own presiding bishop, Ed Browning was outside the White House marching in a protest against the bombing. Yet, I always admired this man. I admired his honesty, his integrity and his sincerity. Scandal never touched his life. He managed the finances of his profession as few itinerant preachers have ever done. The Billy Graham Evangelical Association had a board of directors that oversaw the operations and paid their star evangelist a fixed monthly salary. Their books were regularly audited and were open to public inspection. Billy Graham was also a force helping remove the roadblocks to an open society. He refused to preach to segregated audiences, his choirs were integrated and he had black clergy as "associate evangelists." In the fifties and sixties it was a rare and powerful public witness to a fearful southern working class white population, who constituted his primary audience. I have recently read Billy Graham's autobiography and was amazed at how many common experiences we have had. His community and early schooling were also mine. It was fascinating to read of Billy's struggles with doubt about the literalness and accuracy of Scripture. He too could not escape the gnawing questions about whether or not the excessive claims for biblical inspiration would hold up under scrutiny. His solution was to use an old evangelical trick quoting the Bible to prove the truth of the Bible. It worked for him and, putting this turmoil behind him, he based his career upon the "Word of God" that he believed he read in every Bible passage. I moved in exactly the opposite direction. Billy Graham possessed the enormous power present in the conviction, or the delusion, that he had in his possession the ultimate truth of God, enabling him to assume the reality of that ultimate divide between the saved and the unsaved. His passion was to elicit from his hearers a decision to "accept Christ," and to act that out by coming forward at the time of the altar call. Lives indeed were changed and Billy Graham has certainly been a force for good. I read his story with respect and admiration, but I was finally both unimpressed and unmoved by his personal witness. I could not see that any of the last 150 years of critical biblical scholarship had even brushed this man's consciousness, nor had any of the great theological questions of our generation arisen in his not always open mind. Billy Graham envisions God as a supernatural parent figure guiding the weather patterns for the sake of his crusades. He viewed a kidney stone that almost rendered him incapable of continuing one of his crusades as a counterattack by the devil who was being routed by his preaching. A better explanation might have been this dairy boy's adult love for milk which has created many a kidney stone in others. He saw God as intimately involved in human affairs, curing illnesses of faithful Christians in answer to prayer. He seemed not to notice that cures did not happen to others who prayed just as fervently. He constantly put God on trial by setting up tests for God and had an amazing capacity for claiming that God had validated his own conclusions. He clearly believed he spoke for God who led him in every critical decision including where to study, who to marry and which door to enter. I am confident both that he was sincere in these convictions and that this is the kind of pre-modern, religious conviction that will never carry the day in this world. Modern hearts cannot worship that which modern minds reject and I do not believe it is possible for an educated person to accept the Bible today as the literal word of God. Even if I did I could never worship the God who is defined by many of those literal words. I have seen the literal Bible quoted, and quoted accurately, to condemn Galileo, to ridicule Darwin, to support slavery, segregation and apartheid, to keep women in second-class citizenship and to oppress homosexual people with unthinking, yet hostile, religious proclamations. I do not believe that God is a Being sitting above the clouds pulling strings so that our personal desires are met. I do not believe that human beings are born evil and that only those who come to God through the "blood of Jesus" will be saved. I believe that the holy God calls Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists into the fullness of their being through the traditions of their birth. I am not impressed with the capacity of born again Christians to love anyone outside of those who share their religious perspective. Billy Graham could not move beyond these assumptions, so reading his story saddened me, for his day has passed and the familiar religious themes he articulated cannot possibly be the basis for proclaiming Christ in the next century. I honor his contribution and give thanks for his ministry, but do not believe his message or his influence will endure. I only hope that those who will be the Christ bearers and the Christ proclaimers in the next generation will be people whose lives are marked by the kind of integrity displayed by Billy Graham. If Christianity is to survive into the future, it will have to evolve radically beyond the images employed by Billy Graham. It will be forced to become something new and different. It will have to surrender its claims to miracle, magic and exclusiveness. It will be judged by its ability to help citizens of the real world penetrate into the depths of Being and to engage the spirituality that is before us. A radically reformed Christianity will have to rethink the traditional understandings of Jesus who will become not a rescuing divine savior who paid the price of sin on the cross of Calvary, but the God-intoxicated life who can become our doorway into the mystery of God, experienced not as a manipulative or invasive deity, but as the Ground of Being, the Source of Life and the Source of Love. After reading Bill Graham's autobiography, I am newly convinced that reformation is the only choice Christians have for survival. The next generation will not be a time for the Christian Church to practice business as usual. Those who settle into such a path will be voting to die. --Return to Contents