A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  The Houston crusade was notable not only for the late arrival of the Holy Spirit but also because it marked the first time that Graham was able to persuade a sitting President to attend one of his services. The President and First Lady flew over from their Texas Hill Country ranch to be present at the climactic Sunday-afternoon service, at which 61,000 packed the spectacular domed arena. Reporters noted that Mrs. Johnson paid attention, but the President, for all his putative piety, spent most of the afternoon chatting with the Astrodome’s visionary builder, Judge Roy Hofheinz, whose private box they shared. Johnson did, however, register his appreciation when Graham lambasted Vietnam protesters, comparing them unfavorably to the more religiously minded young people who had come to the dome that afternoon to show their loyalty to their Lord and their President.

  Graham’s position on Vietnam, like that of most of his countrymen, was never as definite as his stand on World War II and the Korean conflict. On the other hand, as a loyal friend and staunch patriot accustomed to giving those in authority the benefit of the doubt, he tended to take the President’s side. And even though he had toned down his anti-Communist tirades of a decade earlier, he still warned against the encroachment of “Communist tyranny,” urged his fellow Americans not to listen “to the siren song which would have us believe that the tide has turned or that communism has changed its goal for world revolution,” and insisted that it was incumbent upon the United States to maintain “the strongest military establishment on earth.” Early in 1965, during the Hawaii crusade, he asked a crowd to pray that President Johnson might obtain wisdom to help him lead the United States out of the “mess in Southeast Asia.” The President, he reminded them, had inherited, not started, the war in Vietnam, but it was his painful responsibility to do something about it, and quickly. If the United States dallied, Graham speculated, “We either face an all-out war with Red China, or a retreat that will cause us to lose face throughout Asia. Make no mistake about it. We are in a mess.” In an address to the Denver Press Club in late summer, he said, “I have no sympathy for those clergymen who [urge] the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. Communism has to be stopped somewhere, whether it is in Hawaii or on the West Coast. The President believes it should be stopped in Vietnam.” Later in the year, he pointed out that “95 percent of the Congress is back of the President,” adding that “these people know the facts.” Such statements, infrequent as they were, led many war critics to conclude that Graham was a hawk. Even he recognized the charge was not entirely unfounded. In a letter to Bill Moyers in October of that year, he complained that he was “constantly taking a beating from some of these extremists because of my support of the President’s Vietnam policy.”

  Graham had less problem with Johnson’s Great Society programs, since their aims generally coincided with his own generous impulses toward those in need. He continued to believe in the worth of industry and self-discipline, but he also felt that those more favored by ability and circumstance had an obligation to share with those of meaner estate. In a departure from the pietistic individualism that characterized much of Evangelicalism, he acknowledged that “there is a social aspect of the Gospel that many people ignore. Jesus was interested in the hungry, the diseased, and the illiterate. A great deal of his time and preaching was taken up with this aspect of the ministry. The church should be deeply concerned about the poor, the illiterate, the diseased, and those oppressed by tyranny or prejudice.” Graham understood that the problem extended beyond American shores and, more over, that America could not pretend that the poverty of Third World countries was unrelated to its own affluence. “Three-fifths of the world live in squalor, misery, and hunger,” he thundered. “Too long have the privileged few exploited and ignored the underprivileged millions of our world. Our selfishness is at long last catching up with us. Unless we begin to act, to share and to do something about this great army of starving humanity, God will judge us.”

  Graham’s clearest stand on social issues continued to be in the realm of race relations. A few months after the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and in the face of acute misgivings on the part of city officials and dissension within both black and white ministerial associations, he held a fully integrated United Evangelistic Rally in that city’s 60,000-seat municipal stadium on the afternoon of Easter Sunday. Threats of violence from both black and white racists limited the crowd to no more than 35,000 people, but that number was divided almost evenly between blacks and whites, who appeared to go out of their way to be friendly to each other. In his sermon, “The Great Reconciliation,” Graham decried the hatred and prejudice that was tearing communities apart but offered no concrete recommendations for solving the problems of segregation. A week later, however, speaking before the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, he said, “We should have been leading the way to racial justice but we failed. Let’s confess it, let’s admit it, and let’s do something about it.” In recognition of these statements, moderate as they were, the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute gave Graham its Supreme Award of Merit, citing him “for outstanding contribution to the betterment of race relations and human understanding.”

  Not all black clergy agreed with the Carver Institute’s assessment. Most accepted Graham’s desire for racial harmony and understanding at face value, but many felt that his tepid support of Martin Luther King, his disavowal of protest tactics, and his skepticism about legislative solutions to racial problems, including the monumental Johnson-engineered Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked him as something less than a champion of their cause. It did not help his or white Evangelicalism’s ratings in black circles that Christianity Today had not given its endorsement to the civil rights act. One of the magazine’s editors, Frank Gaebelein, wanted to offer strong editorial support for the bill when it was under discussion, but Nelson Bell demurred, sticking to his hard-line insistence that true social change could come only with genuine spiritual conversion. Graham declined to take a definite stand on the civil rights act when he addressed the NAE meeting, excusing himself by claiming he had not had time to study the bill’s provisions adequately. But he had said that “Evangelicals are going to have to give an account to God for our stand on the racial crisis,” and the normally cautious organization adopted a resolution favoring the legislation then before Congress.

  Such perceived half measures did not persuade Graham’s black critics. A columnist for a black newspaper in Chicago called him “the most magnificent phony in America” and mocked his prescription of “‘kneeling at the cross,’ waiting for a miracle to transform our souls.” Graham would not walk with protesters or call for open housing or desegregated churches, the journalist jabbed, because “he’s too busy praying.” These charges stung, and Graham tapped his top troubleshooter, Robert Ferm, to investigate the possibility of organizing a crusade especially for blacks and other minorities on Chicago’s South Side. After a week of visiting church leaders in that troubled quarter, Ferm reported that it was “one of the most explosive situations I ever got into” and seemed ripe for an outbreak of serious violence. Many black churchmen, including some who participated in the 1962 crusade, now found Graham guilty of tokenism and other half measures, evincing little more commitment to racial justice than other representatives of the exploitative “white power structure”—a label, Ferm noted, that “they have borrowed from Communist ideology.” Graham’s deputy told of the tension he felt in one meeting as blacks shouted angrily at him and at each other and admitted that he had never appreciated just “how serious a situation we have confronting us in interracial relations” in large cities. Any crusade, he concluded, would have to originate from the black community itself, and that seemed an unlikely prospect. Apparently sobered by Ferm’s evaluation, Graham scuttled plans for a South Side crusade.

  Blacks may have found Billy Graham ineffectual, but Lyndon Johnson did not. When violence broke out in Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South in the spring of 1965, Johnson di
spatched 4,000 troops to protect freedom marchers, then encouraged Graham to visit the troubled state and use his influence to restore a measure of calm. Graham canceled meetings planned for Great Britain to comply with the President’s request, and for a brief moment it appeared he was coming to appreciate Martin Luther King’s advocacy of civil disobedience. “It’s true I haven’t been to jail yet,” he conceded to students in Honolulu, but added, “I underscore the word yet. Maybe I haven’t done all I could or should do.” Then, when he returned to the mainland, he told the New York Times that “I never felt that we should attain our rights by illegal means, yet I confess that the demonstrations have served to arouse the conscience of the world.” When he addressed the situation in Alabama, however, his observations were of the nonconfrontational, blame-diffusing sort that black and white civil rights activists so resented. Alabama had its problems, he conceded, but so did other parts of the country, and using Alabama as a whipping boy diverted attention “from other areas where the problem is just as acute.” Further, as he had been saying all along, only “a spiritual and moral awakening” could solve such problems. In the meantime, all parties should obey all laws, “no matter how much we may dislike them. If the law says that I cannot march or I cannot demonstrate, I ought not to march and I ought not to demonstrate. And if the law tells me that I should send my children to a school where there are both races, I should obey that law also. Only by maintaining law and order are we going to keep our democracy and our nation great.”

  Unable to countenance any kind of unseemly behavior, and equally unable to denounce his fellow southerners as peculiarly wicked people, Graham nevertheless took a firm position on the side of civil rights and racial integration. Behind the scenes, he met with hundreds of pastors, laypeople, civic leaders, and even with Governor George Wallace, repeatedly calling for tolerance and understanding and confidently reporting signs of “great progress” on every hand. If blacks found this too tame, segregationists found it too radical, but Graham received an enthusiastic rating from the man who sent him to the troubled region. In a warm and effusive letter, President Johnson assured him that “you are doing a brave and fine thing for your country in your courageous effort to contribute to the understanding and brotherhood of the Americans in the South.” He stressed how much the evangelist’s support and prayers meant to him and urged him to visit in person whenever he could: “Please know that this door is always open—and your room is always waiting. I hope you will come often.”

  With the coming of summer, Graham continued to assert that if the Klan would quiet down and civil rights extremists would give southerners a chance to get used to the new laws and court orders, and if politicians would quit trying to exploit the situation for their own selfish ends, Alabama and other southern states would not only make peace but would provide a model for the rest of the country to follow. In the meantime, those who pointed accusing fingers at the South should take care, because his own observations indicated that racial violence could easily break out in dozens of cities far from the Deep South. Before that long hot summer was over, Graham’s dire prophecy came true in a manner more terrifying than he had dreamt possible. When a routine police encounter in a black district of Los Angeles one stifling August evening erupted into a days-long conflagration that made it forever impossible to think of Watts without thinking of riot, Graham flew to Los Angeles. After donning a bulletproof vest and taking a reconnaissance helicopter flight over the swirling, smoking turmoil, the appalled evangelist declared what seemed to him obvious, even in the absence of concrete evidence. The rioters, he announced, were “being exploited by a small, hard core of leftists.” He felt sure that 97 percent of the rioters were not Communists, “but it cannot be overlooked that this kind of disturbance is being used by those whose ultimate end is to overthrow the American government.” It was, he believed, “a dress rehearsal for a revolution,” stimulated by the “hate literature of the right and the left.” Then, apparently feeling black rioters were not as susceptible to the reformation by evangelism he recommended for white racists, Graham called on Congress to devise “new tough laws . . . to curb this kind of thing.” He also urged Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been walking the streets of Watts in an effort to restore a semblance of peace, “to call for a moratorium on demonstrations for the time being.” The Christian Century blasted his “fervent generalities” as “a vague emotional outburst [by] a man who knows something is dreadfully wrong but who hadn’t the slightest idea what caused it,” but Graham’s hometown Charlotte News observed that “in the entire country, only one national figure of substance seems concerned enough to suggest corrective steps and to travel to the scene to offer his help.”

  Graham appealed to President Johnson to identify publicly those “who are teaching and advocating violence, training in guerilla tactics and defying authority” in the apparent hope that once these troublemakers had been exposed and branded, black folk would settle down and wait patiently for converted white people to open the doors they had deliberately held shut so long. His views on campus antiwar protests and widespread relaxation of conventional norms regarding sex and drugs took similar form. In commenting on disruptions in American universities, he revealed an unmistakably conformist and anti-intellectual strain. “You see some guy on every campus,” he said disdainfully, “and he usually has a beard. I’d like to shave a few of them. And he has a cigarette dangling out of one side and he’s got a book by Jean-Paul Sartre under the other arm. And he’s called an intellectual. . . . Now, who are the intellectuals? Usually the intellectuals are somebody who is sort of an extreme left-winger and he’s considered an intellectual especially if he smokes a pipe and has horn-rimmed glasses and sits in an ivory tower in a university.” Graham’s suspicion of the nontraditional extended beyond the university campus to high art and popular culture. “We can judge our times by the paintings produced by some modern artists,” he asserted. “We see indiscriminate splashes of color with no recognizable pattern or design. The incomprehensible mixture of pigment merely denotes the confused minds and values of our day. Many of the playwrights, novelists, and scriptwriters for television and movies give us unadulterated doses of violence, sex, and murder. Ours indeed is a sick generation in need of salvation.” Young people, he warned, were particularly vulnerable to the loss of structure and authority. “Drinking fathers and drug-dancing mothers are breeding a generation of unstable youngsters,” with the result that “one out of twelve college students is under some kind of psychiatric care.”

  The only dependable guideline for restoring order and sanity to a troubled nation was, of course, to be found in Scripture. “I have a deeper conviction than when I began,” Graham insisted, “that the Bible has the answer to every moral situation known to man.” He conceded that Scripture might not provide a foolproof formula for settling every dispute, and that honest Christians might disagree over some issues, but he insisted that race is a different matter: “When it comes to specific moral issues that we can really pinpoint, like the race question, let’s say, I think our duty is clear.” Even so, he sometimes despaired that human effort, even when informed by Holy Scripture, would be able to wrest order from the chaos of the midsixties, and speculated that the only conceivable denouement to the tragic drama being played out on the national stage was a deus ex machina. “On the dark horizon of the present moment,” he confessed, “I see no other hope. There is really no other possibility I see . . . for solving the problems of the world than the coming again of Jesus Christ.”

  20

  Second Comings

  In the midst of distracting turmoil, Graham scheduled only three major events in 1966, but each was significant in its own way. The first, a crusade in Greenville, South Carolina, now the home of Bob Jones University, underlined the permanence of his separation from Fundamentalists. The second, a monthlong return to London, revealed that the kind of overwhelming spirit of revival that prevailed during the Harringay meetings could not be summ
oned at will, even by an organization whose technical skills were far more developed than they had been twelve years earlier. The third, a gathering in Berlin of Evangelical leaders from over a hundred countries around the world, set in motion a spirit and enthusiasm that played a significant role in the worldwide resurgence of Evangelical Christianity over the next two decades.

  Had it not divided people who should have been friends and erected barriers where encompassing circles would have been more appropriate, the Southern Piedmont Crusade in Greenville could have been enjoyed as an amusing example of the ability of intransigent Fundamentalists to pollute almost any stream, all in the name of purity. In typical egocentric fashion, Bob Jones fulminated that the only conceivable reason Graham would come to Greenville was to attack and embarrass him. But the charges did not stop there. By consorting with Catholics, having fellowship with “rank, unbelieving agnostics,” and attending conclaves of the World Council of Churches (which Jones identified as the forerunner to “the kingdom of Antichrist”), Graham had, according to Dr. Bob, “led thousands into compromise and alliance with infidelity and Romanism” and was “doing more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man.” Jones warned his faculty and students that any who dared attend even one of Graham’s services would be fired or expelled. He acknowledged that he could not control what people did when they knelt by their beds in the privacy of their rooms, but if they wanted to speak to God on behalf of Billy Graham, he recommended they recite the following prayer: “Dear Lord, bless the man who leads Christian people into disobeying the word of God, who prepares the way for Antichrist by building the apostate church and turning his so-called converts over to infidels and unbelieving preachers. Bless the man who flatters the Pope and defers to the purple and scarlet-clothed Antichrist who heads the church that the word of God describes as the old whore of Babylon.” Dr. Bob’s warning fell mostly on deaf ears. Billy, Cliff Barrows, and the Wilson brothers, all of whom Jones attacked as BJU products gone dreadfully wrong, professed to feel disappointment at their erstwhile mentor’s attitude, but they had long since given up on winning his favor and rested content with the response that had always served them so well. Over a ten-day meeting, the Greenville crusade chalked up an aggregate attendance of 278,700, of whom 7,311 answered the invitation.