Though it was a public relations fiasco and seemed, on the surface, to lend credence to the charge that Graham was more concerned with chalking up new preaching victories than with standing up for oppressed people, the eventual resolution of the Pentecostal problem proved to be a singular example of the Graham team’s diplomatic skill and the evangelist’s unique influence in Soviet circles. During a return visit to Moscow in the summer of that year, Haraszti spoke about the Pentecostals with Metropolitan Filaret and with Georgi Arbatov; with ministers of the Soviet State Council for Religious Affairs; and with the first deputy to Boris Ponomarev, chief of the party’s International Affairs Department and the highest-ranking Soviet official Graham had met during his visit. He also discussed the situation thoroughly with the State Department and with staff members at the Soviet embassy in Washington. His message was simple and straightforward: The Pentecostal situation is a problem for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Neither side invited it, neither side wants it, but both sides have it, and negotiation through regular diplomatic channels has failed to resolve the problem. Billy Graham realizes this is not a simple case of religious persecution, but the American public does not, and public opinion is such that it will be extremely difficult for the President to start arms-reduction negotiations with the Soviets until this matter is resolved. Graham also understands that neither party can appear to yield on this issue without losing face. Therefore, as a private citizen, he offers his personal guarantee, backed by his own person as a hostage to the Soviets, if necessary—in fact, Haraszti made this offer without Graham’s knowledge or agreement—that if the Soviet Union will guarantee to allow the Pentecostals to leave the country, the United States will not use the issue for propaganda against the Soviet government.
When Haraszti carried this message to Arthur Hartman, the ambassador laughed in derision. Who does Billy Graham think he is, that the Pentecostals would believe he could persuade the Soviets to guarantee their freedom? And if Soviet authorities gave him such a promise, what reason was there to believe they would not lie to him? Haraszti went back to Ponomarev’s deputy, who told him that Soviet dignity demanded that the Pentecostals not leave the country as a result of pressure from the U.S. government. Soviet law would not allow them to apply for a visa from the U.S. embassy, because the embassy is a foreign territory. If they wanted an exit visa, they had to leave the embassy, return to their homes in Siberia and apply for a permit there. If they did that, the Deputy promised, “They will leave the Soviet Union without any delay. They must trust the Soviet government that we keep our word.” Haraszti stressed the risk to Billy Graham if he used his reputation and influence to assure both the Pentecostals and the U.S. government that the Soviet government could be trusted.
The deputy looked Haraszti squarely in the eye. “The Soviet Union,” he said, “will not lie to Billy Graham.”
“This is what we believe,” Haraszti responded. “We are sure about this. Billy Graham trusts the Soviet government. So, we have an agreement.”
“You do and we do,” the deputy said, “because we have no interest in keeping the Pentecostals if they leave the U.S. embassy. Our interest is to get rid of this issue. Our interest is to forget it and never remember it.”
This, unfortunately, did not convince Hartman, who dismissed Haraszti’s report as wishful thinking and counseled the Pentecostals to remain in the embassy. Metropolitan Filaret tried to help by writing a letter to Graham, stating that it was the conviction of the Orthodox Church that if the Pentecostals left the embassy on their own and returned to Siberia, they would be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Still, Hartman would not budge. Haraszti felt he knew the reason: “The ambassador obviously was jealous. . . . [He] did not want the Pentecostals to leave under Billy Graham’s negotiations.” Whatever Hartman’s motives—and wariness toward Soviet promises could hardly be considered a diplomatic weakness—Graham and his associates continued to press their case. Finally, during the spring of 1983, Graham wrote a letter to the Pentecostals outlining the steps he felt they should take. A few days later, on the evening of April 13, a consul from the U.S. embassy called on Alexander Haraszti in his Moscow hotel room to inform him that the Pentecostals had left the embassy and were at that moment on a plane to Siberia. Not long afterward, the two families, together with several relatives who had not been with them in the embassy, were allowed to emigrate, one group to Israel and the other to St. Louis. Billy Graham and Alexander Haraszti never received any further word of explanation from the Soviets or appreciation from the Pentecostals. John Akers claimed that Soviet church leaders informed him that Graham’s influence had been decisive but acknowledged that other groups had also claimed an influence and added, “We have to be very careful about what we claim. We’re not trying to get onto that bandwagon.” Asked in 1989 to assess his role in the incident, Graham smiled faintly and wrapped himself in the familiar and becoming old cloak of astute humility. “I think [the Soviets] eventually did what we asked them to,” he said, as if he could barely remember. “I have no way of knowing whether [what we did] was a factor or not. But I think it was.”
31
Tribulation and Triumph
Graham’s visit to the Siberian Pentecostals and his address at the peace conference made modest news in America, and the Moscow trip might easily have slipped into the historical record with little notice had it not been for the evangelist’s encounters with the press. Ed Plowman, a veteran journalist who handled Graham’s press relations on the tour, could not remember a week in which Billy spent more time with the press, and it seemed to him, from the first confrontation at the airport to the last press conference, that the primary goal of some reporters was to goad their quarry into making a headline-grabbing anti-Soviet statement. For his part, Graham did his best to stay on a tightrope between violating his conscience and irritating his hosts. His performance was wobbly at times, but an intrinsically difficult trick was made even harder by reporters who were shaking the wire.
At a press conference just before Graham left Moscow, the Charlotte reporter who had handed him the letters from the Pentecostals on his arrival asked him for his conclusions about religious freedom in the Soviet Union. His answer, as captured on Plowman’s tape recorder, involved hedging and omissions but cast a moderately favorable light. Noting that he had been in Russia only six days, nearly all of that in a small area of Moscow and all heavily scheduled, he said he could not possibly make any valid personal evaluation of the state of religious freedom throughout the vast Soviet Union. “There are differences,” he acknowledged, “between religion as it’s practiced here and, let’s say, in the United States, but that doesn’t mean there is no religious freedom.” He observed that “not one single person has ever suggested what I put in the address I gave to the congress or the sermons I preached here,” and no one had tried to stop him from presenting the gospel to everyone he had called upon during his visit. “So I have experienced total liberty in what I wanted to say.” He also mentioned that most nations place some limits on the practice of religion: In the United States, for example, “a public school teacher cannot lead her pupils in Bible study and prayer.”
Was he saying, the reporter pressed, that the purported lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union is a myth? “Not necessarily,” Graham replied. “I’m just telling you that I don’t know all about it. . . . I haven’t had a chance [to see everything].” Had he stopped there, he might have gotten off lightly, but he continued. “Saturday night, I went to three Orthodox churches. They were jammed to capacity on a Saturday night. You’d never get that in Charlotte, North Carolina [Laughter]. On Sunday morning the same was true of the churches I went to, and it seemed to me that the churches that are open, of which there are thousands, seem to have liberty of worship services.” This indicated that at least “a measure of freedom” existed in the Soviet Union, “perhaps more than many Americans think.” Also, life in Russia was not as grim as the popular impression had it.
“The meals I’ve had are among the finest I’ve ever eaten. In the United States, you have to be a millionaire to have caviar, but I’ve had caviar with almost every meal I’ve eaten.” Later, while walking with an AP reporter through a tunnel in the Moscow airport on the way to his plane, he repeated the assertion that “thousands of churches are open,” and followed up with a factually accurate but easily distortable excursus on church polity. These churches, he said in stunning understatement, “may have different relationships [with the state] than, say, they have in Canada or Great Britain. And in Great Britain you have a state church and in other countries you have state churches. Here the church is not a state church. It is a ‘free’ church in the sense that it is not directly headed, as the church in England is headed, by the Queen.”
These statements, which reached the United States before Graham reached London, created a furor in America. Problematic enough on their own, they were more often than not twisted just enough to make them sound incredibly naive. It was frequently reported Graham had said that there was no religious repression in the Soviet Union, that religion was more fervent in Moscow than in Charlotte, and freer from state control than in England. He was also roundly chastised for having preached on Romans, chapter 13, implying that Christians should not resist religious intolerance by the authorities. Did Billy Graham not realize that the “liberty” he “personally experienced” was no more generally available to Soviet citizens than were the caviar he ate or the Chaika limousine that shuttled him around the city while other delegates to the conference rode in buses? Did he not count the Siberian Pentecostals he had visited or the 147 imprisoned religious workers as tangible evidence of religious repression? Had no one pointed out that the churches were filled not only because there were so few of them but also because it was the anniversary of V-E Day, when Soviets celebrate what they regard as a virtually unaided Russian victory over Hitler’s army? And was he truly so credulous as to believe that by complimenting his hosts in public he would be in a stronger position to press the case for religious freedom in private? Christianity Today quoted an unnamed but leading newsman who charged that “mouthing the gospel to Soviet leadership and privately urging them to act contrary to their basic convictions was an utter waste of time. Of course, he could preach his gospel and tell them in private to relax their restrictions against religion. But do you think Graham will convert those Communists or move them to lower their tyrannic grip? Of course not. Graham was a fool to think so. He was duped by them to fit into their propaganda and their Marxist program for nothing in return.” Even the New York Times, which Ed Plowman admitted had been “a towering exception” to what he regarded as rampantly inaccurate and biased reporting, observed that “heaven only knows what Mr. Graham wanted to accomplish with his misguided denials of Soviet repression.” And at Wheaton College, approximately fifty peaceful protesters milled and marched outside the Billy Graham Center, carrying signs that proclaimed BILLY GRAHAM HAS BEEN DUPED BY THE SOVIETS and GRAHAM EATS CAVIAR AS RUSSIAN CHRISTIANS SUFFER IN JAILS.
Graham was astonished at the reaction. Interviewed from London by satellite on This Week with David Brinkley, he complained with good reason that the press had distorted his statements in Moscow. He attended the peace conference, he said, “totally because I wanted to preach the gospel of Christ in atheistic Russia.” Of course, he was aware that his visit and his statements might be used for propaganda purposes, but “I believe my propaganda of the gospel of Christ is far stronger than any other propaganda in the world.” Confronting him in the interview were United Methodist minister Edmund Robb, who charged that whatever his intentions, Graham had been manipulated to lend credibility to a rigged conference, and Soviet dissident Mark Azbel, who stated point-blank that “people in Russia . . . think that you’ve betrayed their hopes. They think that you are not knowledgeable enough to bring the message about the situation with religion in Russia.” When Graham freely admitted he was not an expert on the situation, Azbel shot back, “Then keep out of the discussion.”
Immediately upon his arrival in New York a few days later, Graham held a press conference and gave interviews in which he tried to explain himself once again, with scarcely better results. He expressed deep regret at his failure to cite the plight of the Siberian Pentecostals and the 147 imprisoned religious workers as evidence of formal religious repression. He pointed out that his sermon at the Baptist church had been on John chapter 5, and conceded that the reference to the thirteenth chapter of Romans had been a mistake, lamely contending that when he called on citizens to obey authority, he had meant “the authority of Christ,” and that “it never occurred to me until after I preached the sermon that somebody might take it as applying to that situation there. (He had tried to make that same point on the Brinkley show, visibly befuddling both Sam Donaldson and George Will.) He patiently explained that he had used free church in the technical sense of “lacking state support,” and would “never in a million years” have suggested that churches had greater freedom in the Soviet Union than in Britain. And he repeatedly denied that he had pulled his punches in the hope of gaining permission to hold a full-scale crusade in the Soviet Union but counted it significant that he had met more “top Soviet officials” than he had ever dreamed possible and had told each one how he had been saved and what the Bible says every man must do to be saved. It was in these meetings, he insisted, that he had said the things the press and his detractors wanted him to say in public: “There’s a diplomatic language in public, but behind the scenes, you get tough.” He also asserted that at least part of the reason for the outcry over his visit was “an irrational fear” many Americans felt toward the Soviet Union, a fear that made it impossible for them to believe that he could establish cordial and sincere relationships with Soviet leaders. “They are not all alike any more than we’re all alike,” he said, and such outmoded stereotypes constitute a barrier to peace.
Not all of Graham’s problems, however, stemmed from misquotation or misconstruction by American reporters, and not every use of his words by the Soviets was innocent of deceit. A BGEA press release of May 19, 1982, quoted him as saying, “In the Soviet Union there are an estimated 20,000 places of worship of various religions open and each year hundreds of permits are granted for new churches.” That statement, apparently based on information furnished Graham by his hosts, was inaccurate. A 1987 statement by the chairman of the Soviet State Council for Religious Affairs revealed that the actual number of religious organizations operating in the Soviet Union in 1981 was 15,687 and that the number of registrations had dropped by approximately 7,000 during the previous two decades and continued to drop until 1986. Moreover, long after Graham had tried to explain his statement to Western reporters, Soviet commentators were proclaiming them as gospel truth. On an August 1982 Radio Moscow broadcast, the program’s host responded to an inquiry concerning religious freedom by noting that his own words, or those by any representative of Radio Moscow, might be distrusted. For that reason, he said, “I will instead quote the testimony of unimpeachable witnesses. The latest of these has been the American evangelist, Dr. Billy Graham, whom no one in his right mind would suspect of sympathizing with the Soviet system. At the conclusion of his visit to the Soviet Union earlier this summer, Billy Graham said he had found more religious freedom in the Soviet Union than in Britain, with its established Church of England.”
Graham’s explanations and apologias neither convinced nor silenced his critics. A gang of seventeen members of the radical Jewish Defense League ransacked the New York offices of the World Council of Churches, demanding that the WCC renounce Graham’s visit. Dan Rather asserted that Soviet bloc immigrants and Graham’s Evangelical friends alike believed that the evangelist, “to put it bluntly, was had—deceived and used.” And the author of a letter to Christianity Today claimed that “one of the world’s best informed commentators on Soviet religious life,” following a visit to Russia shortly after Graham’s remarks were publicized, “did
not find a single believer who was not numbed and shocked by Graham’s apparent lack of sensitivity to the persecuted.” Clicking off a list of Soviet abuses during a CBS News commentary, former Baptist minister and old friend Bill Moyers said, “Religious freedom is tolerated, as long as you don’t exercise it. Billy Graham did not miss this, so much as he ignored it, partly from Southern courtesy, partly for tactical reasons, partly as the price of celebrity. He’s a popular and pleasant fellow who doesn’t like offending his hosts, whether in Washington or Moscow. But it’s never easy to sup with power and get up from the table spotless. That’s why the prophets of old preferred the wilderness. When they came forth, it was not to speak softly with kings and governors, but to call them to judgment.”
Once again, as he had done when challenged to be bolder on civil rights and Vietnam, Graham took refuge in his role as evangelist. He acknowledged he could understand how some could view him as a self-aggrandizing opportunist—“It looks that way to the outsider and probably looks a little bit that way to me”—but insisted that “wanting to preach in Russia is not my ego; it’s my calling.” He had been shocked and shaken by the reaction to his visit and comments, he said, but now he had “a feeling of serenity” about the whole episode. “I have the greatest sense of peace that I was in the will of the Lord. . . . There might have been one or two little things I would have changed, like that verse of Scripture . . . but I believe the whole thing was of God.”
Much as Graham and his colleagues hoped, his behavior at the Moscow conference convinced Soviet authorities that he was no apparent threat to public order or political stability. Before 1982 was out, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Czechoslovakia, two countries with which Haraszti had been negotiating for several years, allowed Graham to make carefully controlled but satisfying visits. The GDR was the tougher of the two to crack. During the five years Haraszti and Sandor Palotay had negotiated with Imre Miklos over the invitation to Hungary, the governments of East Germany and Romania were the only two Communist regimes to disapprove of the 1977 visit. The reasons behind East German reticence were political—and quite understandable. At least partly because many church and Communist party leaders had come to know and respect one another while imprisoned by Hitler as enemies of the Third Reich, believers in East Germany enjoyed a fair amount of freedom—Christian books and periodicals were available in religious bookstores, religious programs were aired regularly over state-run radio and television networks, the state-supported Lutheran Church operated six university-level seminaries, the government paid the operating expenses of the Church’s numerous social agencies, and more than fifty full-time Lutheran evangelists were allowed to proclaim the gospel as long as they adhered to certain tolerable restrictions. That accommodation, however, had been strained as large numbers of young people began to show interest in religion. A monthly service in Karl Marxstadt, for example, regularly drew between 5,000 and 10,000 young people, some of whom admitted that attending church was a way of making a statement against the government when few other such expressions would be tolerated. To counteract this trend, the state had begun to bar young people from universities and good jobs for no apparent reason other than their status as active Christians. In addition, many East Germans longed for reunification with West Germany. If Billy Graham visited the GDR and rallied young people to the church or further stirred up already-restive dissidents, the results could be unfortunate.
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