Billy was scarcely less moved by his encounters with Korean Christians, who were already showing the dedication that would produce explosive Christian growth over the next forty years. In Pusan, shielded from subfreezing winds by a fleece-lined parka and heavy boots, and from possible Communist attack by a phalanx of military police brandishing rifles and machine guns, he spoke for four nights from an open-air platform to several thousand Koreans and GIs who sat on tiny straw mats or stood in the mud to hear him. In Seoul he attended prayer meetings that began at five o’clock in the morning. And in Taegu and other cities, he was shamed by Korean pastors who gripped his hand in gratitude for his coming, great tears coursing down their cheeks. “I felt so humble as I stood with these men,” he said. “I was not worthy to loosen their shoe latchets. These men had suffered persecution for Christ—-their families had been killed because of their testimony for Christ—their homes were gone, they had nothing of worldly possessions—and here they were, coming to listen to me preach the Gospel and thanking me for it. They were preaching to me, but they did not know it.” He was particularly moved by two pastors he invited to speak on an Hour of Decision broadcast he was sending back to America. Neither had ever spoken on the radio and Graham noticed one turning his head to brush back a tear just before his turn to speak. “Here,” he marveled, “were men who had faced death a hundred times, and who had suffered untold agonies for Christ—afraid before a microphone. My heart was deeply touched.”
As promised, Graham spent several days, including Christmas, at the battlefront itself. Flying in small planes and helicopters through thick fog, and so close to enemy artillery that exploding shells jarred the aircraft several times, he landed at tiny airstrips, donned a helmet and flak jacket as soon as he hit the ground, and preached to hundreds of grimy, unshaven, and fully armed GIs, some of whom had just returned from combat. On one hillside he preached from a makeshift platform decorated with an enormous painting of Jesus watching over a marine who had dropped his head on his arms to get a moment of rest during a break from battle; the picture had been painted in a frontline trench and trundled forty miles undercover of darkness in time for the service. After preaching, he spent as much time as possible visiting with the men, signing their Bibles—“usually I avoid signing my name in Bibles,” he said, “but here it was a privilege. Some of these Bibles were pierced and torn by bullets or shrapnel. All of them looked used and well read”—and going into trenches and bunkers to talk with those on active duty. Without exception, Graham found the men unusually receptive to his message, which he delivered without adornment.
The brevity of his trip did not deter Graham from feeling he had obtained a good grasp of the situation in Korea. Typically, and for the most part, he was highly positive. After a visit with South Korean president Syngman Rhee, arranged with the assistance of General James Van Fleet, he judged that the president “seems to have a firm grip on the country.” Virtually every general he met impressed him as a gracious man of out standing character, and he declared he had “never seen a private organization operate as efficiently as does the army. . . . The food is excellent, and medical care is unsurpassed anywhere.” The soldiers he talked to were “the finest of American youth.” Every one was “a rugged he-man . . . a courageous, red-blooded American,” yet with such an interest in spiritual matters that he “never saw a pinup picture at the front.” Within a few days of his arrival, he blithely offered the rather damning and simplistic observation that if President Truman had taken time to visit Korea, he would have ended the war. Then, apparently to compensate for Truman’s oversight, he announced he had his own plan to end the conflict and hoped to share it with president-elect Eisenhower as soon as he returned to the United States. His plan was a national day of prayer for God’s help in finding the precise solution to the war. Eisenhower apparently decided to rely on secular military expertise; the war continued for sixteen more months.
Graham wielded greater influence in the spiritual realm. Eisenhower became the first President ever to lead a prayer as part of his own inauguration, and shortly afterward he was baptized and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. Graham insists that both these actions were at the President’s own initiative, but he quickly stepped forward to applaud them and to assure his followers that the nation was in good hands once again. “It has been my privilege during the past year to talk with Mr. Eisenhower on two occasions,” he told his radio audience. “I have been deeply impressed by his sincerity, humility, and tremendous grasp of world affairs. I also sense a dependence upon God. He told me on both occasions that the hope of building a better America lay in a spiritual revival.” He added, “Another thing that encourages me about Mr. Eisenhower is that he is taking advice from some genuine, born-again Christians.”
In 1953 Graham conducted crusades in half a dozen American cities, the most successful a four-week effort in Dallas, at whose climactic closing service he filled the 75,000-seat Cotton Bowl in the largest evangelistic meeting ever held in America to that point. (In what would become a regular practice, he sent Eisenhower a report on the crusade, noting that the record-breaking crowd had lit matches and asked God’s blessing on the President. He then asked, in what would become a typical gambit, if it might be possible “to have a short chat with you about a matter of great importance.”) This crusade was also notable in that it marked the occasion of Graham’s formally placing his membership with the First Baptist Church in Dallas. His reason for maintaining membership in a church so far from his home in Montreat was disarmingly simple: “If I belonged to a Baptist church in the neighborhood, they would continually be asking me to work in church affairs. When I’m at home I attend my wife’s Presbyterian church and naturally they don’t ask me to do anything.” He did not mention that the Dallas church was also the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world. That year Graham also published Peace with God, an extended statement of the theology and social thought contained in his sermons. A Christian Century reviewer declared that “as writing, it is just the dullest in a long, long time. The great evangelists wouldn’t have been caught dead preaching this pedestrian stuff. It never gets off the ground and so help me I can’t see how any amount of triple-fortissimo sincerity ever gives it flight.” He also predicted that ministers who had welcomed Graham’s crusades would withdraw their support after seeing what he really believed. In an ironic coincidence, the same reviewer praised a book written by Charles Templeton, describing Graham’s old friend as “alone in the Billy Sunday line in the verve and vitality of his preaching. The great ones were original and repeatable and quotable and aphoristic. Among the headliners today only Templeton is that . . . he is by himself in the grand tradition.” Despite such criticism, Peace with God, “written not for the theologians and philosophers but for the man in the streets,” and subsequently translated into thirty-eight languages, has sold more than two million copies and remains a useful compendium of the essential content of Billy Graham’s theology and preaching. He sent one of the first copies to President Eisenhower.
As he would throughout his life, Graham struggled with his fame and success. He realized he was achieving near-iconic status in the minds of a great many people. Near the conclusion of his Greensboro crusade, he told his audience, “I know you are going to be attached to this place. When this tabernacle is torn down a month from now, thousands of you will cry, and you’ll come in here and pick blades of grass to keep in your Bibles as souvenirs. I know you will. I have seen it happen.” Allowing his associates and others to refer to him as “Dr. Graham” on the grounds that the honorific title was useful in “appealing to a higher type of social strata” reflected his striving for human approbation, just as his soon-expressed preference for “Mr. Graham” or simply “Billy” reflected his concern that such striving was inappropriate. His currying favor with presidents and other notables made it clear that at some level not far beneath the surface, he relished the publicity and prestige he attained, but he passed ov
er handsome opportunities to capitalize on them as fully as he might have. He rejected an opportunity to play Billy Sunday in a feature film, and when NBC offered him a million dollars a year to host a regular television program, he turned it down with scarcely a second thought, observing that he would not be willing to trade with the richest man on earth if it meant detracting from his work as an evangelist.
While Billy built his career as an itinerant evangelist, Ruth worked with comparable intensity to construct a stable homelife for their growing family. A third daughter, named Ruth but known from birth as Bunny (“because she looked like a rabbit”), had arrived late in 1950, and in 1952 the Grahams finally got a son, William Franklin III—“I’d have loved another girl,” Billy said, “but every man needs a son.” With the aid of the Bells, who lived across the street and served as full-time grandparents, Ruth gave the children a great deal of nurturing attention, but Billy’s long absences from Montreat could not but take a toll. Once, when Ruth brought Anne to a crusade and let her surprise her father while he was talking on the telephone, he stared at the toddler with a blank look, not recognizing his own daughter. In a turnabout a few years later, young Franklin greeted his father’s homecoming from a crusade with a puzzled “Who he?” The rest of the world, however, knew who he was, and that inevitably impinged on the family’s privacy. “We were on the sight-seeing tour,” Ruth recalled. “If the cars just kept going, we thought they were probably from the Episcopal center. If they just slowed down, we thought they were probably Presbyterians. The ones that actually stopped, got out of the bus, came down and looked in the bedroom windows and wandered all over—we knew they were from Ridgecrest,” a Baptist conference center on the other side of Black Mountain. “It got to be a joke. Bill said I was prejudiced against the Baptists, but that’s the way they were. They were so friendly—too friendly.” Displaying a bit of their father’s enterprise, the children capitalized on the attention. GiGi and Anne once stretched a rope across the road and demanded a dollar from those who stopped to look at their home. Bunny used a more subtle form of extortion. When Ruth commented that she always seemed to have more money than her allowance would warrant, Bunny innocently told her, “Just watch the next time a bus stops.” Ruth recalls, not without some pleasure, that “we watched, and she had her little red pocketbook on her arm and she wandered up to the gate where the bus was parked with her wistful little face and the pocketbook on her arm, and the inevitable happened. I put a stop to that.”
Ruth practiced a somewhat more lax form of discipline than Billy Frank and his siblings had endured. Despite Billy’s occasional comments on the benefits of corporal punishment and the children’s memory of frequent spankings, some acquaintances from this period remember that the Graham youngsters were less than models of decorum in their behavior at church and other public gatherings. Few, however, would criticize the children’s spiritual development. Motherhood and other domestic demands had not altered Ruth’s lifelong devotional bent. She usually kept an open Bible out on a counter and sometimes carried one in her hand to read while she vacuumed the floor. She saw to it that the children observed a daily “family altar,” similar in form and content to those on which she and Billy had been reared, though she always kept it short, lest the children come to resent it. She also took special pains to make her husband’s absences seem normal, following the advice of an old black man who had told her, “Make the least of all that goes, and the most of all that comes.” Leave taking was always kept unemotional, as if it were no more significant than a trip to the hardware store, and if the children commented on their father’s absence, they were told he had “gone somewhere to tell the people about Jesus.” GiGi remembered that “Mother never said ‘Daddy’s going away for a month.’ Instead, she would say, ‘Daddy will be home in a month. We’ll do such and such before he comes back.’” She also noted, particularly when she was younger, that “I thought everyone’s daddy was gone. And my granddaddy was such a father figure for us that it never hit me that it was all that unusual.” Whether perceived as unusual or not, the children did notice their father’s absence. Once, Ruth saw one of the girls sitting on the lawn, staring wistfully at an airplane in the distance and calling out, “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Daddy!” A plane meant Daddy was going somewhere. “How much we missed him,” Ruth said, “only each one knows.” She read Billy’s letters aloud, guided the children as they prayed for their father and his work, and, on Sunday afternoons, gathered them together to listen to his voice on the Hour of Decision broadcast. Afterward, he usually called to talk with each of them. It was not easy, but both Billy and Ruth were determined not to let his career exact the kind of painful price the children of evangelists too often paid. “I like to think,” Graham reflected, “that we learned something about satisfying a growing child’s need for a father, even though he was so often away from home.”
10
Trust and Obey
In keeping with his modest aspiration to know nothing “save Jesus Christ and him crucified,” Billy Graham’s theology was anything but abstruse. The heart of his preaching was and would ever remain a short list of straight forward affirmations. A sovereign God has revealed his will to humans in the Bible, his inspired, accurate, and fully dependable Word. Humans are sinful and corrupt, but if they accept God’s offer of grace, made possible by the redeeming work of the crucified, risen, and living Christ, their sinful nature can be supernaturally transformed—“born again”—and after death they will live forever in heaven. Without question, the simplicity of this scheme helps account for the widespread and enduring popularity of Evangelical Christianity. It is easily understood and, despite its negative view of human nature, essentially optimistic; though it may not be easy, humans can readily do what they need to do, God will do the rest, and the rewards are infinite. To many, many people, that is indeed “good news.”
Later in his career Graham would devote entire books to such subjects as the Holy Spirit, angels, and the problem of suffering, but during these early years, in his sermons, newspaper columns, and Peace with God he simply delivered this kerygma (the Greek word for “proclamation,” often used to describe the bare-bones gospel message) with little attempt at elaboration or defense. His task, as he had understood it since the day he knelt by the rock at Forest Home, was not to ask hard questions of Scripture but to follow the advice of the old revival hymn, “Trust and Obey.” If a skeptic asked how he could be sure of the existence of God, he answered guilelessly, “I spoke to him this morning,” or told the story of a boy whose kite had disappeared in the clouds but who knew it was there because “I can feel the tug.” Such answers did little to help inquirers who were truly struggling with theism, but they were sufficient for the many in his audience who needed only a one-liner or an anecdote to make them feel they had wrestled with the world’s doubt and won handily. As Creator and Sustainer of the universe, God is able both to raise up individuals and nations, and to bring them down if they betray the purpose for which he has exalted them. He also intervenes, as it pleases him, in the minutest aspects of everyday life. Graham did not doubt that God acts directly in human affairs, or that diligent, disciplined prayer would be rewarded with discernible blessings, but he was realistic enough to admit that the correlation between request and benefaction is imperfect. During the Washington crusade, when asked if he believed God had stopped the rain to allow the rally on the steps of the Capitol to proceed, he replied, “I believe God does intervene. I also believe that God did intervene today, as he has in days gone by when we have prayed concerning the matter of the weather.” Then, with a slight smile, he added, “But in all fairness, I have to remember that we prayed once out in Portland, Oregon, and it poured down.” Overall, Graham’s view of God during the early years of his prominence emphasized justice and wrath more than grace and mercy. “[God] is not a jolly fellow like Santa Claus,” he warned. “He is a Great Bookkeeper. And he is keeping the book on you! I am a Western Union boy! I have a death message! I
must tell you plainly—you are going to Hell! You listen! Don’t you trifle with God! Don’t you think you can barter! You are a sinner! You have come short of God’s requirements! Your punishment is sure!”
Graham also believed in an equally real Satan who stands in cosmic opposition to God, battling for control of the universe and the allegiance of every human soul. His own obsession with avoiding temptation was based in large measure on enormous respect for Satan’s powers and prowess. “The devil,” he wrote, “is a creature of vastly superior intelligence, a mighty and gifted spirit of infinite resourcefulness. . . . His reasoning is brilliant, his plans ingenious, his logic well-nigh irrefutable. God’s mighty adversary is no bungling creature with horns and tail—he is a prince of lofty stature, of unlimited craft and cunning, able to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself, able to turn every situation to his own advantage. He is unrelenting and cruel.” Fortunately, since God possesses three qualities the Prince of Darkness lacks—omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence—-the Almighty will ultimately defeat the Enemy, as Scripture teaches, but his power and craft are so great that only those safely inside God’s mighty fortress, the Church, will be able to resist him and escape eternal damnation.
A Prophet with Honor Page 22