The ominous overtone of that brief assessment pointed to the heart of the crisis both Graham and Templeton faced. After three years on the rally and revival circuit, Templeton had come to believe that the success he and the other young lions of the YFC enjoyed was illusory, that they were offering their audiences meringue instead of meat, and garnering their “decisions” by force of personal attractiveness rather than by convincing presentation of a substantial message grounded on a solid rock of understanding. Increasingly troubled, he decided to resign from YFC and his flourishing independent church in Toronto to pursue a formal education. Even without a high school diploma, he managed to gain admission to Princeton Theological Seminary and prepared to enroll in the fall of 1948. Knowing that Graham shared at least some of his feelings about the need for further disciplined study, he went to Montreat to enlist him as a partner in the venture. He said, “Bill, we are getting by on animal magnetism and youthful enthusiasm and natural talent, but that’s not going to work when we’re forty or fifty. You’ve got to come with me.” The idea intrigued Graham, but he protested that increased evangelistic opportunities, his duties at Northwestern, and the incongruity of a college president’s returning to school would make enrollment in an American seminary unfeasible. Lest his friend think these were polite dodges, however, he made a counterproposal. “I never will forget,” Templeton recalled. “He got up out of his chair and walked across the floor with his hand out. And he said, ‘Chuck, go to Oxford and I’ll go with you.” Templeton regarded Graham’s proposal to devote at least two years to graduate work at Oxford as genuine but chose to stay his own course. “It had been an enormous problem to get into Princeton,” he explained, “and I couldn’t change my mind at this stage, but if I had shaken his hand I have no doubt in the world that the whole history of evangelism would have changed. Billy would have been ruined by going to Oxford, or he would have left at midterm. It undoubtedly would have diminished him in some way. I’m not saying this in a disdainful way, but Billy was not interested in the scholarly side of things. He was not interested in reaching for conceptual or intellectual horizons.”
Graham undoubtedly valued the immediate satisfactions of packed auditoriums and crowded aisles and growing schools more than the less tangible pleasures of the life of the mind, but he did begin to read serious academic theology, some of it suggested by John Mackay, then president of the Princeton seminary. Over the following academic year, when his travels brought him to New York, he and Templeton met several times in a room in the Taft Hotel, just off Times Square, for long bouts of prayer and discussion in which he struggled to defend received belief against the attacks Templeton mounted with his newly acquired weapons from the seminarian’s armamentarium: historical and literary criticism of the Bible, theology viewed as a creative enterprise rather than scrupulous adherence to a blueprint, epistemological allegiance to the methods and findings of natural science, and the relativizing lessons of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. At one point Graham uttered what Templeton called “a declaratory sentence in the evolution of Billy Graham.” Flustered by his inability to counter Templeton’s arguments, he said, “Chuck, look, I haven’t a good enough mind to settle these questions. The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides of these questions. I don’t have the time, the inclination, or the set of mind to pursue them. I have found that if I say, ‘The Bible says’ and ‘God says,’ I get results. I have decided I am not going to wrestle with these questions any longer.” Exasperated by this unblinking abdication of the struggle that was wrenching his own soul, Templeton issued a sharp rebuke: “Bill, you cannot refuse to think. To do that is to die intellectually. You cannot disobey Christ’s great commandment to love God ‘with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind!’ Not to think is to deny God’s creativity. Not to think is to sin against your Creator. You can’t stop thinking. That’s intellectual suicide.”
Templeton’s charge stung, and Graham continued to wrestle with both conscience and intellect. His dilemma was real and threatening. If Scripture were not truly God’s inspired revelation, God’s literal Word, directly transmitted to the human agents who committed it to writing and trustworthy in every respect, how could he continue to preach it with the same assurance and power? How could he remain as president of a school founded on unquestioned faith in the absolute dependability of Scripture? Indeed, if any portion of the Bible were seen to be unreliable, how could one trust any other portion, including the central affirmations of the Christian faith? On the other hand, if the Bible were all he believed and desperately wanted it to be, why couldn’t he answer Chuck Templeton’s questions? And why did the faculty and students at the world’s best universities seem, when confronted with the evidence, to move inexorably away from the positions he held? For an honest young Fundamentalist, there could scarcely be a greater threat. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Billy Graham understood more fully than ever before the Apostle Paul’s observation that “if Christ is not risen” (which is to say, if what believers affirm about Jesus is not true) then “we are of all men most miserable.”
The resolution came at a student conference at Forest Home, a retreat center in the San Bernadino Mountains near Los Angeles. Both Graham and Templeton were featured speakers, and their conversations, joined by others asking similar questions, rekindled Billy’s doubts. In fresh turmoil, he went for a walk in the serene pine forest. About fifty yards off a main trail, he sat for a long time on a large rock, his Bible spread open on a tree stump. As he struggled once more with his doubts and his commitment, he finally made the pragmatic decision to abandon doubt and cling to commitment. With the same spirit of surrender he had shown on the eighteenth green at Temple Terrace, he said, “Oh, God, I cannot prove certain things. I cannot answer some of the questions Chuck is raising and some of the other people are raising, but I accept this Book by faith as the Word of God.” Chuck Templeton could not or would not make such a surrender, but he understood Graham’s reaction. “I could not live without facing my doubts,” he said. “Billy could not see but that doubt was sin. It flew in the face of being a southern country boy, raised in a religious family, married to a missionary’s daughter. To doubt God was to do wrong.” After completing his studies at Princeton and serving for a time as a successful evangelist for the National Council of Churches—Princeton’s dean called him “the most gifted and talented young man in America today for preaching mission work”—Templeton recognized he was no longer a believer in any kind of orthodox sense and that it was intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. Shortly afterward he left the ministry and returned to Toronto, where he pursued a multifaceted career as a newspaper columnist and editor, radio and TV commentator, novelist, and screenwriter. In sharp contrast, Graham’s conscious resolution that he would never again entertain any doubts whatsoever about the authority of Scripture galvanized his faith and, as he later observed, “gave power and authority to my preaching that has never left me. The gospel in my hands became a hammer and a flame I felt as though I had a rapier in my hands and through the power of the Bible was slashing deeply into men’s consciousness, leading them to surrender to God.” Today, at Forest Home, a bronze tablet identifies the Stone of Witness where Billy Graham accepted, once and for all, the absolute authority of the Scriptures.
Fortified with his newly refinished faith, Graham plunged headlong into the campaign that would make him a national figure. For several years, a group of laymen operating under the banner of Christ for Greater Los Angeles sponsored revivals featuring a well-known preacher who could be counted on to draw a respectable crowd of fellow Fundamentalists and perhaps a smattering of the unsaved. Jack Shuler had been the evangelist for two of their meetings, and Chuck Templeton had shared the preaching with another YFC evangelist two years earlier. For the 1949 edition, they invited Billy Graham. The sponsoring committee enjoyed good support from approximately a quarter of Los Angeles—area churches, so a respectable outing seemed a
ssured, but Graham wanted more than that, and he set about to get it. For the first time, a Billy Graham campaign began to assume what would eventually become its mature form. Nine months before the meetings began, the organizers engaged veteran revivalists J. Edwin Orr and Armin Gesswein to conduct preparatory meetings throughout the Los Angeles area. As a result of their efforts, nearly eight hundred small groups were meeting regularly to pray for the campaign long before it began in September. Then, two weeks before opening night, Grady Wilson flew in from South Carolina to organize still more prayer meetings, some lasting all day or all night, and around-the-clock prayer chains involving hundreds of people. The supernatural benefits of prayer are inherently impossible to measure, no matter what one believes about the practice, but the mobilizing of thousands into prayer groups undoubtedly stimulated their enthusiasm for the campaign and must have boosted Graham’s confidence. As further support, Cliff Barrows recruited a large choir, and Dawson Trotman, founder and leader of The Navigators, a live-wire group of young people who emphasized personal evangelism, trained counselors to help inquirers clarify their decisions and direct them into Bible-believing churches.
Graham may have surrendered his doubt and pride at Forest Home, but he did not relinquish his faith in publicity. On the contrary, he pressured a wary committee into spending $25,000 for posters, billboards, radio announcements, and newspaper ads urging Los Angelenos to “Visit the Canvas Cathedral with the Steeple of Light,” to hear “America’s Sensational Young Evangelist,” and enjoy old-fashioned revival services featuring a “Dazzling Array of Gospel Talent.” The Canvas Cathedral, a Ringling Brothers circus tent pitched at the corner of Washington and Hill streets and sporting a garish midway-style picture of Graham on a long cloth marquee, was itself a grand attention getter. Billy’s fascination with celebrities and his keen appreciation for the role they could play in lending both legitimation and panache to a cause blossomed in this city of radio and movie stars. Through Henrietta Mears, a wealthy and flamboyant woman who grew up in W. B. Riley’s church in Minneapolis, founded Forest Home, and taught a Sunday school class of several hundred members at the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, Graham gained access to the Hollywood Christian Group, an organization of mostly minor actors and other media personalities he hoped would lend their names and influence to the campaign. One of the best known but least devout, Stuart Hamblen, agreed to plug the meetings on his popular western-flavored radio show. Graham also cultivated high-level official support and won public endorsemerit from the city’s mayor. Filling a 6,000-seat tent remained a daunting task, but a good meeting seemed assured.
Two years of campaigning had helped the Graham team evolve a style that toned down the gaudier aspects of the YFC rallies while retaining enough enthusiastic flash to attract and hold attention. Cliff Barrows played his trombone and led the singing with a cheerleader’s vivacity, but the hymns were familiar, designed to reassure the timid that despite the circuslike trappings, the services themselves were much like those in the churches in which most had been reared. Barrows kept applause to a minimum, and if guest performers ever crossed the line of propriety and good taste, Bev Shea’s dignified renditions always restored a sense of seriousness before Graham entered the pulpit. Billy (Cliff was now introducing him as “Dr. Graham”) still spoke with great intensity and fervor, but he never slipped into the wild hysteria or demagogic rantings that drew unfavorable attention to some of the stars of the Pentecostal healing revival, and he told reporters that “I want to do away with everything that is criticized in mass evangelism. We believe it is a spiritual service. We don’t believe it is a concert or a show.”
Whether traceable to his Forest Home experience or simply to the realization that never before had he possessed such an opportunity, Graham preached with a force and authority that impressed even his colleagues. Standing behind a pulpit with a plywood facade cut to suggest a giant open Bible, he began most of his sermons by reading a lengthy passage of Scripture and launching immediately into a ringing litany of what would happen if folks did not heed the clear lessons contained in that portion of God’s Word. Throughout virtually the entire performance, he stayed in motion, using a lapel microphone that gave him freedom to stalk back and forth across a long platform while Cliff Barrows played the cord in and out to keep him from getting tangled in it. Some observers calculated that he walked at least a mile per sermon, and some found his pacing a distraction, but it kept attention riveted on him, and it made listeners in all sections of the tent feel he was speaking directly to them at least part of the time, particularly when he stopped suddenly, leaned forward with both hands on his knees, and announced with glowering ferocity the judgment of God upon them, their city, and their nation. Little of this was accidental. Graham acknowledged that he not only rehearsed his sermons but sometimes listened to a wire recording of previous presentations to make sure he had every nuance down pat, and he was clearly aware of the importance of nuance. “I’ve learned to look straight at them,” he explained. “Say I’m preaching to an audience of three or four thousand. I can look straight at them, and I can tell when a man way back in the auditorium blinks his eyes. When he does that, I know it’s time for a change of pace, or I’ll lose some of the people. That’s what I’ve trained my voice for. It’s a change of pace that’s the secret. I speak in loud tones—oh, not boisterous, but good and loud—and then I soften the voice. It’s that difference in delivery that holds them.” The more turbulent aspects of his style would eventually disappear along with his hand-painted ties and bright argyle socks and the voluminous double-breasted suits that hung on his bony frame like a scarecrow’s garment, but films from this campaign show the trademark gestures that already connected speech and sinew in easily recognizable patterns. He shaped his hands into pistols and fired his accusations into the transfixed crowd. His arms became machetes as he hacked his way through the jungle of contemporary sin. His clenched fist descended with such power and fury that none could doubt he had made the wrath of God his own. And over and over, again and again, as he held the limp-backed book high overhead or drew his hands down like lightning to where it lay open on the pulpit, he declared that his words should be heeded not because they were his but because “the Bible says . . . !”
The content of Graham’s sermons also foreshadowed his later preaching. At the opening service, he ran through the catalogue of problems—adultery, divorce, crime, alcohol abuse, suicide, materialism, love of money, and general moral “deteriation”—that marked Los Angeles as a “city of wickedness and sin” and warned that the only choices before it were “revival or judgment.” These, of course, were evangelistic evergreens, safely transplantable in any urban soil. During this campaign, however, Billy alarmed his audiences with a brand-new threat: atomic-powered communism. A year earlier he had ventured an opinion that the Soviet Union had the bomb and was prepared to use it on America or any other country that dared defy it. Now, reality replaced speculation. Just two days before the campaign began, President Truman announced that the Russians had successfully tested an atomic bomb and for two years had been building a nuclear arsenal that would drastically alter the imbalance of power America had enjoyed since the end of World War II. Graham seized upon this stunning revelation and hammered it home throughout the campaign. Reminding his audiences that he had visited a devastated Europe six times since the war, he declared that “across Europe at this very hour there is stark, naked fear among the people. . . . An arms race, unprecedented in the history of the world, is driving us madly toward destruction!” The line had been drawn, he thundered, between communism and Western culture, and no accommodation was possible. “Western culture and its fruits had its foundation in the Bible, the Word of God, and in the revivals of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Communism, on the other hand, has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. Communism is not only an economic interpretation of life—Communism is a religion that is inspired, d
irected, and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.” The fire of that war, he warned, would fall directly upon them, because “the Fifth Columnists, called Communists, are more rampant in Los Angeles than any other city in America. . . . In this moment I can see the judgment hand of God over Los Angeles. I can see judgment about to fall.”
The only hope, the prophet said, was repentance and revival. “It is the providence of God,” he declared, “that he has chosen this hour for a campaign—giving this city one more chance to repent of sin and turn to a believing knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . This may be God’s last great call!” And who would issue that call? “Let me tell you something,” Graham said. “When God gets ready to shake America, He may not take the Ph.D. and the D.D. God may choose a country boy. God may choose the man that no one knows, a little nobody, to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day, and I pray that He would!”
Graham’s preaching drew fair crowds and produced acceptable conversion rates, but at the end of the three scheduled weeks, little other than expense distinguished the revival from those of previous years. The weather was unseasonably cold, attendance was flagging—workers spaced the seats to make the crowds appear larger than they actually were—and Billy was out of sermons. It was customary to extend a successful revival, but several committee members thought it time to bring this one to a close. After some discussion, one man suggested they “put out a fleece” and let God decide. If the cold weather continued, they would end the campaign; if a warm front blew in by the time the services ended that same evening, they would take that as a sign God wanted the meetings to continue. Weather miracles are hard to count on or certify, and no record exists to indicate whether or not the gentleman had already checked the forecast for that day, but a few hours later, while Graham preached, committee members on the platform noticed a flutter in the audience as people began to fan themselves with programs and song sheets. Soon, Billy himself noticed the heat and asked ushers to raise the flaps on the west side of the tent to let in fresh air. The committee had its miracle, and when the sermon ended, the man who had challenged God to show his hand happily announced that the services would continue on a week-to-week basis.
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