A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Inside the stadium, 80,000 people—at least 20,000 from East Germany—sang Protestant hymns where Nazi war anthems had once been raised, and the banner that hung in the swastika’s place proclaimed Jesus’ assertion, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The tremendous turnout and the strong response to the invitation—stadium officials would not permit people to come forward out of the stands, but thousands filled out cards asking for an opportunity to discuss the Christian faith—was a victory for Graham and his message. Having failed at keeping people away from the rally, the Communist press tried to discredit Graham by reporting that he had taken his team to East German nightclubs, where he had ordered liquor by the case and then been thrown into jail for trying to sneak out without paying the bill, but the story received no more credibility than it deserved.

  In 1955 Graham returned to both the United Kingdom and the Continent. His tour of the UK included a six-week stand in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall as well as a week-long stint in Wembley Stadium in London, and was, by any normal standard of measurement, a success. A Good Friday service, for example, was broadcast from Kelvin Hall by both BBC radio and television—the first time any preacher used the combined networks for a religious program—and reached a larger audience than any program in the history of British television, save for the Queen’s coronation. Yet some of the bloom had faded from the Evangelical rose since Graham told U.S. News & World Report shortly after Harringay that Great Britain was at “the beginning of what could be the greatest spiritual awakening of all times.” Despite record crowds, the public impact of this second tour simply did not compare with the first. Several factors contributed to the lessened enthusiasm, including disillusion among Church of England clergy about the long-term results of Graham’s approach, as well as the simple fact that Billy Graham was now old news. Nevertheless, Graham did see thousands respond to the invitation and no doubt took personal pleasure from his association with the highest social stratum in Anglo-American society, the royal family. Queen Elizabeth and several members of the family had viewed the Good Friday broadcast from Kelvin Hall, and it was rumored that Princess Margaret had attended at least one service at Wembley. Whether true or not, she and the Queen Mother did entertain Billy and Ruth at Clarence House, and on the Sunday following the crusade, Graham preached to the queen and other members of the family in the royal chapel at Windsor Great Park. This was the first time an American preacher had been accorded this honor.

  After the Wembley crusade, Graham made another whistle-stop tour of twelve European cities, where he experienced what was becoming the standard response: opposition or foot-dragging resistance from established clergy claiming his message and methods were unsound and too unsophisticated to appeal to Europeans, and stadium-packing crowds who seemed not to have realized they were above this sort of thing. The longest of these ventures was a four-day effort in Paris, the first time Protestants had mounted a major evangelistic effort in modern France’s history. Reminiscent of the flap over the “socialism” calendar in England, Graham stirred a small controversy by declaring at a press conference that “France is like a watch without its mainspring. It has run down. The French just sin and sin, and get weaker.” Americans accustomed to being damned by preachers may have taken such an assessment in stride, especially when coming from one of their own; self-assured Frenchmen were less willing to be so harshly judged. When called to account for his unflattering assessment, Graham resorted to an increasingly familiar ploy: He claimed these were not necessarily his own feelings, but that he had been quoting the remarks of a Far Eastern diplomat, that he regretted very much that anyone had misconstrued his statement, and that he wished the papers had quoted the many wonderful things he had said about France at the same press conference. In any case the damage was minor. Crowds were surprisingly good for a country that was largely either Roman Catholic or openly secular, and the prestigious newspaper, Le Monde, counseled Parisians not to mock the “American style of such a religious manifestation” but to “bow before [Graham’s] spiritual dynamism. His technique may offend European intellectuals, but the fact remains he is successful. French Protestants who, despite some reservations, did not hesitate to ask him to come to our country, made no mistake.”

  Later that same year, Graham returned to England to conduct a brief mission at Cambridge University. The customary resistance to his message in such settings was increased by the fact that he came at the invitation of the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union (CICCU, pronounced “kick you”), an aggressively Evangelical organization noted for its buttonholing tactics and lack of cooperation with other Christian groups. Most of the college chaplains and theology professors expressed open skepticism or outright opposition to the Fundamentalism they believed he represented, and an exchange in the London Times made the visit and the nature of Fundamentalism itself a matter of some national debate, particularly in religious circles. Graham, ever insecure about his lack of advanced theological education, dreaded the meetings and feared that a poor showing might do serious harm to his ministry and affect “which way the tide will turn in Britain.” Had he been able to do so without a complete loss of face, he would have canceled the meetings or persuaded some better-qualified man to replace him. “I am scared stiff about preaching at Cambridge,” he told Stephen Olford, who counseled him “not to get involved in a philosophical approach or to try to do something that was out of his depth, lest he be discredited for inaccuracies,” and to remember that he was preaching not to students but to sinners, and should keep things simple.

  Graham found Olford’s advice hard to accept. In the first two or three meetings he tried to be at least somewhat intellectual but found his sermons falling flat. Finally, midway through the series, he abandoned the effort and addressed them as if they had gathered at Harringay or Kelvin Hall, not the hallowed university church. Neither approach got high marks from the Cambridge dons who bothered to attend the services, but he did generate an enthusiasm among students that some compared to D. L. Moody’s historic visit in 1882. At one address a divinity professor who introduced him pointedly noted that he “could not agree with his doctrinal views.” Graham countered this chill-inducing remark with a warm smile and observed that he did not pay great attention to theological differences. “We are all Christians,” he said, “and we love one another.” With that as a basic foundation, soul winning is more important than hairsplitting. “A minister is not a minister,” he asserted, “unless he is winning men for Christ. If theological students don’t think they can do that, they should quit studying for the ministry.” The students, many of whom were preparing to be ministers, applauded him for a full three minutes.

  With repeated successes in Great Britain and on the Continent under his belt, Graham decided to challenge the Far East. During the 1955 Wembley crusade, he met with Jack Dain, an Anglican who spent many years as a missionary to India and was intimately familiar with the religious situation in that country, and asked him to help set up a month-long tour. Dain quickly sketched a map of India on a breakfast napkin, scribbling in the cities they should visit and the route they should follow. With his typical trust in the expertise of his advisers, Graham accepted Dain’s recommendations completely and asked him to take charge of the campaign. Dain had seen what Graham had wrought in London and Scotland, and the prospect of similar triumphs in his adopted homeland excited him mightily, but his faith was not boundless. “The Christian Church is such a small minority in India,” he noted. “We had never considered, ever, anything like a citywide evangelistic crusade. Those of us who knew Billy knew what God was doing with him, but I think I’ve got to be honest and say that we had our doubts as to whether this could happen in India.” But when Dain spread the word that Graham was willing to come, invitations from his many contacts in India poured in, so that the tour, while technically at the invitation of Indian Christians, was able to follow the exact route he had sketched on the napkin.

  Graham faced the trip with his usual mixtur
e of trepidation and boldness, fearing he could fail miserably yet believing the tour might mark a turning point in the history of Indian Christianity. He carried with him the good wishes of Church and State alike. Harold John Ockenga, still the dominant figure of Evangelical Christianity, reminded him of God’s words to young Joshua when he assumed the leadership of Israel: “As I was with Moses, so will I be with thee.” President Eisenhower sent him an encouraging telegram shortly before he departed, and John Foster Dulles, whose enthusiasm for Graham apparently matched Eisenhower’s, invited him to his home for an hour-long briefing on world affairs. Dulles, a minister’s son who had often sounded the need for a “righteous and dynamic faith” to counteract the quasi-religious zeal of dedicated Communists, commended him for not watering down his message in foreign lands but also gave him a bit of political advice, perhaps hoping Graham would not make statements that ran counter to U.S. foreign policy. The secretary referred to the evangelist’s recent recommendations that American farm surpluses be sent immediately to needy peoples, pointing out that such a policy would have negative effects on the agricultural economy of such nations as Australia and Argentina. He also brought him up to date on the relationship between the United States and India, which were experiencing some tension over Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s attempt to carve out for his young democracy a then-unheard-of position as a nonaligned nation. The Eisenhower administration did not believe such a position was tenable, and many suspected Nehru of using this approach as a rather transparent front for a tilt toward Russia—a recent visit by Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin had drawn large and enthusiastic crowds. Dulles thought it crucial to bring India into the U.S. camp to prevent other nations from adopting a similar nonaligned stance and seemed to think Graham might be an effective advocate for U.S. interests. According to Graham, the secretary told him that one of India’s greatest needs was for someone like him to proclaim the Christian message of discipline and authority to its masses, particularly at this time, when the favorable memory of the Russian leaders was still fresh. Graham apparently saw no conflict between the roles of soul saver and semiofficial representative of American foreign policy. Whatever was bad for communism and good for capitalism must obviously be a plus for Christianity.

  Thus prepared, Graham set sail for India. When he arrived, the country obviously astonished and enchanted him, its exotic nature gratifying his lifelong desire to visit strange lands and stimulating the curiosity about other cultures that his anthropological studies at Wheaton had encouraged. At times he was simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Indian population and its problems. He tried to keep a vow, made back at Florida Bible Institute, to sign autographs for anyone who asked him, but crowds he could never have imagined as he roamed the streets of Temple Terrace made it impossible. The poverty he saw on every hand tugged at his compassion. “Beggars were all around in Bombay,” he wrote to Ruth, who had stayed behind in Montreat, “some men with their legs gone, others with their arms that had been eaten by disease, and blind men everywhere, all asking for money. It was one of the most heartbreaking scenes that I had seen since I left Korea. I wanted to give every one of them the message of Christ and give them all money.” Ignoring the warnings of missionary friends, he did give some of them money, distributing “as many rupees as I possibly could to as many people as I saw in need” until he found himself engulfed by a teeming whirlpool of beggars screaming and fighting for more, forcing him to concede that his advisers were right—he could not, by him self, alleviate poverty in India.

  At first, the campaign itself seemed in danger of being overwhelmed by the tumultuous country, as Graham arrived in the midst of wild riots and turmoil caused by the government’s redivision of Indian states. An American reporter, whose dispatches from the tour would become a laudatory book later in the year, dismissed the upheaval with the observation that “authorities agreed that the riots were inspired by Communists, who brought in goon squads,” and noted that a young man who was asked why he was throwing stones had answered, “I don’t know. Somebody told me to.” Whatever the degree of Communist involvement, the riots clearly had nothing to do with Graham, and he felt remarkably unthreatened by them. “All people will respond to a smile and affection,” he later observed. “In Bombay, rioters were throwing rocks at each other, but as I passed, I smiled and they smiled back.” He could not, it seemed, conceive of the possibility that a riot might be an expression of justifiable discontent and anger rather than the work of evil conspirators, nor could he move beyond his conviction that all problems, and their solutions, are ultimately individualistic. However deep-seated it may or may not have been, the turmoil was sufficient to compel cancellation of a large stadium rally slated for Bombay. Several small indoor services and a large meeting with ministers went on as scheduled, and Graham received wide public exposure through a press conference at which he spent most of his time explaining the basics of Evangelical Christian belief rather than answering the questions about American political issues he had expected to receive.

  As Graham and his small band of associates moved southward, the tour finally assumed its hoped-for contours, including crowds far larger than anyone had publicly predicted. In many respects, the rallies and crusades during this portion of the tour resembled those in America and Europe, a circumstance aided by the fact that most were scheduled in the Indian Bible Belt, where the majority of the nation’s Christians were concentrated and could be counted on to generate a good turnout for the meetings. In each city the sponsoring committee followed standard operating procedures and launched a publicity barrage that included advertising sheets nailed to trees and loudspeaker trucks that rumbled through cities and villages inviting people to hear the dynamic young Christian from America. Wherever he went, Billy preached the same things he had preached from the swamps of Florida to the venerable halls of Cambridge University: Belshazzar’s Feast, John 3:16, and the Second Coming. In Madras attendance over three days exceeded 100,000 with 4,000 to 5,000 inquirers, a response that swamped the counseling corps and moved Billy to marvel that “all you could hear was just the tramp, tramp, tramp of bare feet and sandaled feet as they were coming forward quietly and reverently. This was God. Yes, the same God that was with us at Wembley and Harringay and Kelvin Hall has been with us here in India.” His basic crusade, Graham learned, in a lesson that would be crucial to his career, could be packaged and delivered with amazingly little alteration to a land whose history and culture could hardly differ more strikingly from those of North Carolina, particularly if he restricted himself primarily to areas already familiar with the Christian message.

  But despite this apparent success, even Graham admitted that the enormous crowds resulted in part from the novelty of his being an American, and it seems clear that some non-Christian observers were baffled by what they heard and saw. One Indian reporter marveled at the strangeness of his message. Graham, he wrote, “propounds the theory that the reproductive act, for instance, is in itself sinful, ‘the whole business being a legacy from Adam and Eve.’ He insisted that his son, age three, was a liar, and asserted that he himself had wallowed in ‘evil’ pleasures until, at the age of seventeen, a ‘voice’ had asked him to spread the divine message.” The reporter acknowledged, however, that these peculiarities notwithstanding, “Dr. Graham can be dreadfully effective.”

  The high point of the crusade as a whole, however, came at Kottayam, a city of only 50,000 located in the heart of India’s largest Christian population. Aware that no existing setting would accommodate the anticipated throngs, local church leaders commissioned the construction of a massive temporary amphitheater around the athletic field of a school belonging to the Church of South India. Using small hand tools and baskets, a corps of young girls labored for hours carving terraces into a hillside to provide seating areas for worshipers, segregated by sex as was customary, with women sitting at levels lower than those occupied by men.

  Graham’s host in Kottayam was Bishop Jacob
, spiritual leader of the Church of South India and vice-president of the World Council of Churches. Upon the evangelist’s arrival, the bishop told him, with a straight face but perhaps with an inner smile, that just a week earlier, snake charmers had captured twenty-six cobras in the front yard. He assured him, however, that “very rarely do the cobra come in the house,” and that even though people were bitten every day, “many of them survive.” Given this bit of intelligence, Graham may not have slept well that night under any circumstances, but when a strange communal buzz awakened him at 4:00 A.M., he looked out a window in his room to see an amazing sight: Five thousand worshipers had already assembled and were conducting a massive prayer service, entreating God to bless the American evangelist’s visit to their country. This was only the beginning. Throughout the following day, Billy and his team watched in wonder as little knots of pilgrims, all dressed in white and many with large Bibles under their arms, drifted in from every direction and found places, sitting on palm leaves to protect themselves from the ground’s slight chill. More than half had traveled at least ten miles; some had walked fifty or sixty miles. All day, they continued to arrive, filling the amphitheater until the crowd had grown to an astounding 75,000 by the time Graham spoke that evening, their garments gleaming in the glare of the powerful arc lights, a dazzling company of Christians larger than any the region had ever seen. Though most were Christians and almost worshipful in their attitude toward him, Graham admitted to some anxiety. “When I leave the platform at night,” he wrote to Ruth, “the Bishop always takes me through the milling crowd. It’s in a sense a terrifying experience with the crowd pressing in close with their dark faces peering at you, trying to get us in view; and you could imagine that anything could happen if they became excited.”