A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Those who shared those moments still speak of the miracle of Kottayam, but the most powerful sense of supernatural forces at work was unleashed at Palamcottah, deep in southern India. Graham had read and seen enough of Hindu religion to be aware of its ability to incorporate new beliefs and deities into its fantastically elaborate mythology. Indeed, he was quite aware that Hindus, who could co-opt both Christ and Buddha into their system, were far more likely to attend his meetings than were Muslims, who regarded the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divinity as blasphemy. He also knew of their reverence toward holy men of varied stripe, and had become somewhat accustomed to having villagers gather at the windows of his street-level rooms in primitive hotels to peer wordlessly through tattered curtains at the tall white figure who prayed and read his strange limber book till far into the night. Still, he was not prepared for the response at Palamcottah, where the crowd’s response to his personal power reached new heights.

  The evening service did not begin in promising fashion. The huge crowd, estimated at over a hundred thousand people, had trouble settling down, and a cranky loudspeaker system made it difficult for many people to hear. Some began to shout and scream until the missionaries feared a riot might erupt. Frustrated by the lack of attention, Graham resorted to the one weapon he hoped would work: prayer. “I bowed my head,” he wrote, “and prayed a prayer I have not prayed in a long time. It was almost a prayer of commanding, a prayer of authority. I remember I opened my hand as though to come down upon the crowd, and I said, ‘Oh God, stop the noise; quiet the people now.’” For whatever reason, the power possessed by charismatic leaders manifested itself dramatically. “Immediately a deathlike hush came on the crowd, and it became the quietest, most reverent meeting we have had in India yet. It was like the breath of God had suddenly fallen. You couldn’t hear a sound.” Graham preached to the suddenly silent crowd for about an hour, feeling a “tremendous power and liberty.” Then, he recalled, “Pentecost fell. People began to run forward and fall upon their knees. Some of them began to scream to God for mercy; others were saying, ‘Jesus, save me, Jesus, save me,’ until about 3,000 to 4,000 people had come, and we had to stop the invitation because there was no room for anyone else. They were falling on their knees like flies. It was almost as if they were being slain by the Lord.” Inquirers outnumbered trained counselors by at least ten to one, so that long after the formal service ended, the meeting ground twinkled with the light of lanterns whose flames struggled with the darkness, providing just enough light to allow counselors to read from the Bible to the little groups of seekers huddled around them across the hillside. In his room that evening, Graham wrote, “Certainly tonight’s demonstration of the Spirit is the deepest and greatest that I have ever sensed. . . . It is almost like something you read about in the ministry of Charles Finney.”

  Word of the evangelist’s presence and power spread quickly through the countryside around Palamcottah. The next morning, when he arrived at the cathedral to address a meeting of women, he found the sanctuary jammed with 5,000 people. At least an equal number stood outside, clamoring to squeeze inside, and the streets were lined with still others trying to get at least a glimpse of the man who had created such excitement. “As we got to the Cathedral,” he recalled, “the press of the crowd was so great that our car could not get through. The people were pressing and fighting. I almost thought the car would overturn, they were pushing it, grabbing. Many of them were trying to touch us. . . . Jack Dain is fearful that many of the Hindus are beginning to accept me as a god. Many of them fall down and practically worshipped me as I come by. Many of them try to get in my shadow.” The looming specter of a jealous deity who does not share his glory filled Graham with a frantic compulsion to disavow whatever illicit thrill the moment may have provided. If seeing his name in lights made him uneasy, seeing himself treated as a god absolutely terrified him. “I told them time after time, very much as Peter, that I am not a god but a man; but the word is spreading all over the southern part of India as to what God is doing, and people are coming for miles to see and hear the revival.”

  Despite denying he had a political agenda, Graham made his customary attempt to forge links with his host country’s most powerful and prestigious leaders. He liked to say that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross,” but the VIP section of the sprawling canvas-covered and neon-lit shamiana (a kind of flat-topped sideless tabernacle) featured armchairs for ambassadors and embassy staff members, while others sat or squatted on the ground. Prominent local government officials had been gracious toward the evangelist in most cities, and in Bombay the head of Nehru’s Congress party had met him at the airport, informed him that he often quoted him in his speeches, and announced his intention to attend all his meetings in that city. But the real prize was an appointment with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had maintained a polite distance, perhaps waiting to see how Graham would comport himself.

  As always, Billy had behaved in public in an almost painfully gracious manner, making every effort not to offend any segment of the population and taking scrupulous care not to utter any public criticism of Hinduism. While privately abhorring much that he saw—in his journal he described the spectacle of priests laying offerings before phallic sculptures in a Benares temple, a scene he said made him aware of “the powers of darkness and heathenism more in Benares than in any city in which I’ve ever been”—Graham remained a model guest throughout his tour. Nehru may have appreciated Graham’s gentlemanliness, but his close identification with America and the Republican administration made the prime minister wary. He had accompanied Khrushchev and Bulganin on their tour of the country and had closed schools and government offices in an effort to swell attendance at their appearances. The word in unofficial channels was that it troubled him a bit to see Graham visiting many of the same cities without government sponsorship, yet attracting larger crowds than he and the Soviet leaders had drawn. The prime minister agreed to see the evangelist not from any strong personal curiosity but because Dulles and Richard Nixon, working through Ambassador John Sherman Cooper, had urged him to. Striving to maintain a delicate balancing act of remaining poised between the two superpowers, Nehru evidently felt receiving Graham was a requirement—a testimony to the political clout Billy had acquired—but he made no particular effort to make him feel welcome.

  Graham knew it would be hard to make a strong impression on Nehru, and his confidence was not increased by the behavior of Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary general of the United Nations, whose appointment with the prime minister immediately preceded his own. As Hammarskjöld crossed the room on his way out, he looked at Graham but did not speak, either not sure that he recognized him or not interested in meeting him. When Graham entered Nehru’s office, his host greeted him cordially but then fell silent, leaving the conversational shuttlecock in the evangelist’s court. At Dulles’s suggestion, Billy spoke of how much Americans admired and respected India and its great leader. Nehru did not respond. Graham volunteered that his tour had given him a much better appreciation for India’s problems. Still no response. Graham later acknowledged his uneasiness, perhaps unconsciously fingering the reason for Nehru’s reticence: “When I got through what I considered a rather pleasant speech, he didn’t say anything. He just sat there with a letter opener in his hand, twiddling it.” Then, when he began a recital of the high points of his tour, the prime minister stared at the ceiling. “I had never had an interview quite like it,” Graham recalled, so he fell back on the one topic with which he felt entirely comfortable, regardless of the reaction it stirred. “I decided I’d tell him what Christ had done for me, and I told him in no uncertain terms . . . how He had changed me and given me peace and joy, and how He had forgiven my sins. Then immediately, he began to be interested. He began to ask some questions.” Graham pointed out that he had no interest in preserving Christianity as an outpost remnant of British imperialism; indeed, he had repeatedly told his audiences that Jesus was an Asian like thems
elves, with skin a bit lighter than theirs but darker than his own, and had urged them to make their churches indigenous and self-supporting. Nehru warmed to that line of conversation and said he had no objection to Christian missionaries in India as long as they refrained from political activity. He conceded that Graham’s presence in India seemed to have a salutary effect and offered to help in any way he could during his sojourn in New Delhi. Once again, Graham’s simple, sincere testimony, cut loose from State Department cant, melted a potential opponent’s icy reserve and won for himself, if not a friendship, at least an attitude of tolerant respect.

  Graham reported that even though Nehru had said nothing when he ventured that peace would come only “when people turn by faith to Christ,” he sensed the prime minister was “pro-Christian.” But Billy frequently divined in people, particularly those in positions of power, sentiments that may not have been present. He seemed to assume, in the absence of compelling counterevidence, that deep down most people saw the world much as he did. His belief in the universality of the deepest human needs and characteristics bespoke a large and admirable spirit but made it difficult for Graham to accept the brute fact that human cultures and the people they comprise can differ radically over quite basic issues. Throughout most of his public ministry, he had hammered away at the Satanic nature of communism, and yet when he met real Communists, he found it hard to believe they understood what they were ostensibly espousing. When he saw Indian Communists marching in the streets, waving Communist flags, shouting Communist slogans, and singing Communist songs, he walked along beside them and directed his photographer to take pictures. “We marched along for about three or four hundred yards with one group,” he reported. “I would wave at them and smile, and they would smile back, because of course most of them, even though they were in red shirts, waving the hammer and sickle, did not know what it was all about. I am convinced that the average Communist in India doesn’t know what it’s all about.”

  The positive side of Graham’s attitude was that he believed, and some times demonstrated that openhearted friendliness could overpower ideology. On hearing of the hospitality and warmth the Indians extended to Khrushchev and Bulganin, and experiencing a similar response himself, he observed that “if Eisenhower came to India, he would get the most overwhelming reception of his life, and it would do America a whale of a lot of good. They don’t care two hoots for all the money we give them, but they are thrilled to death when we come in person to visit them.” Graham’s intuitive grasp of the fact that a symbolic gesture may do more to win a people’s allegiance than more substantive measures was accurate, but it led him to make a foreign-policy recommendation that must have had diplomats in both capitals groaning. At the airport in Bangalore, he had seen a beautiful plane the Russians had given to Nehru to commemorate their leaders’ visit. “We give fifty million dollars in economic aid to India,” he wrote, “and it appears on the third page. Mr. Nehru is given an airplane costing probably a million dollars and it’s front-page news and people talk about it everywhere. There is a showmanship in the way the Russians give that puts all of our giving in the shade. I thought: wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if we gave to India perhaps a beautiful new air-conditioned train; or we might give to Mr. Nehru a white air-conditioned Cadillac. This would cause the people of India to talk more than all of our economic aid put together.”

  Before leaving the country, Graham took steps to preserve and extend the achievements of the campaign by making outreach to India an official element of BGEA activities. To do this he conferred the mantle of leadership he had been weaving upon Dr. Akbar Abdul-Haqq, a Methodist scholar who had been his interpreter in New Delhi. A formal and formidable man, Abdul-Haqq had been lukewarm about Graham’s visit, but the experience of holding a large throng in absolute thrall, even if the words belonged to another man, had their effect. After only one sermon, he confided to Graham that “I believe God has called me tonight to be an evangelist.” Graham persuaded Abdul-Haqq to come to America to learn the trade of evangelism by pointing out that part of his own success in drawing great crowds stemmed from the novelty of his being an American, but that would fade. “I’m not the man to be used for spiritual awakening here,” he told Abdul-Haqq. “It has to be an Asian. I think you are the man.” Eight months later, after a visit to Graham’s crusade in Louisville, Kentucky, Akbar Abdul-Haqq held the first of a still-continuing string of crusades in North India.

  Apart from the initiation of this ongoing effort, the impact of Graham’s Indian campaign is difficult to assess. Without question, it stood out as a brief, shining moment in the life of the Indian church in the regions he visited. It demonstrated that it was possible to conduct large-scale evangelistic crusades in India, a hypothesis that had not been rigorously tested. It also lent encouragement to scattered bands of believers who, like the prophet Elijah, may have imagined that they alone had not bowed the knee to Baal (or Siva or Krishna or Vishnu). They could now see some strength in the cause they espoused and could continue in the face of ridicule or persecution from relatives and fellow villagers.

  Unfortunately, much of whatever goodwill Graham generated by his attempts to be a gracious guest was erased by an apparent failure to recognize that India, though far away from the United States, was not completely insulated from Western media. A few months after the tour, Chattanooga Free Press reporter George Burnham, an Evangelical journalist who chronicled Graham’s British and European tours and traveled with the team to the Far East, published a book that included such condescending observations of his own as “a majority of the economic problems now suffered in India could be wiped out overnight if they would eat their cows instead of worshiping them.” It also contained unflattering comments Graham had recorded in his diary or in letters to Ruth and had unwisely allowed Burnham to quote. The book drew heavy fire from the Indian government and the religious community, both of which felt the evangelist had dissembled by displaying apparent openness to Indian culture while in fact regarding it as decidedly inferior to that of the West. Deeply chagrined that he had offended his hosts, Graham wrote an abject apology for the Madras Sunday Standard, noting somewhat lamely that although he had written an introduction to the book, he had not taken the time to read it and therefore had not been aware of Burnham’s ethnocentric bias. Ultimately, since several of the offending quotations were from his own hand, all he could do was pledge to himself not to repeat his mistake in the future. “I have learned a lesson,” he ruefully admitted to Jack Dain, “and it will never happen again.” It is difficult to know exactly what other lessons Graham learned on this tour, how his first exposure to a culture so deeply different from his own affected his view of life and the world. His abhorrence of Hindu rituals involving sexuality and his shock over the crushing poverty he saw must have strengthened his beliefs in sexual reserve and the American economic system, just as his exposure to the deep spirituality of the Indian people may have contributed to a gradual widening of his vision and a loosening of the bonds of Fundamentalist separatist dogma. But in large measure, it appears Graham came away relatively unscathed by whatever reflections he entertained. Near the end of the trip, in a tone one observer perceptively likened to that a boy might use in capsuling a good summer-camp experience, he observed that “everything has been absolutely perfect. I have not been sick one single day. I do not have any cold, sore throat, or stomachache. . . . I have not lost my temper once and try to wait patiently on everybody.” In the same vein, he reported on returning home that “I don’t think that in any place I’ve ever been they’ve had finer platforms for me to speak from, better amplification systems, and finer arrangements.”

  While Billy stumped the world preparing people for an eternal home, Ruth stayed back on Black Mountain building an earthly one. As their children grew and their privacy diminished, she set about to construct an environment that suited both her uncompromising aesthetic tastes and her preference for solitude. In 1954 the Grahams had the chance to buy a hea
vily wooded 150-acre cove between two hogback ridges rising up behind Montreat. This was at a time when more people wanted to move into town than out to the country and two mountain families offered the land for sale at $12.50 an acre. The narrow, steep, and winding clay road was barely passable, and Billy wondered at the wisdom of trying to build a home on the side of a mountain, but he left the decision to her. To his mild alarm, she made it. While he was on a trip to the West Coast, she borrowed the money from the bank and bought the land. She fixed up a pole cabin one of the mountain families had abandoned, and the family used it for a time as a weekend retreat from tourists. Then, while Billy was in Europe and the Far East during 1955 and 1956, she scoured the North Carolina mountains, bouncing her red jeep up and down back roads and into remote hollows, popping into gas stations and little grocery stores with bread signs stenciled into the screen door to ask if anybody knew of a log cabin she could buy. Some of the citizens found it hard to believe the feisty creature in blue jeans and army jacket was the wife of their state’s most famous citizen, or that she was serious about wanting to buy old houses, but her scavenging turned up five cabins and several truckloads of lumber, well-weathered bricks, cords of crooked fence rails, and a yard sale’s worth of rough-hewn rustic authentica.