A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Troubled by these developments, several members of the ministry’s staff and board members resigned. In addition, the Grace Community Church (in the Seattle suburb of Auburn), whose senior pastor was Ned’s chief antagonist on the East Gates board, revoked his ministerial credentials and enjoined him to stop using the title “Reverend” in East Gates materials and correspondence. Instead of resigning from the organization, which his mother had helped found and which BGEA had supported generously, Ned appointed new board members, including his sister Ruth (Bunny) and his then-brother-in-law Stephan Tchividjian, and persuaded sister GiGi Tchividjian to work in the office until the crisis passed. In an even more important familial contribution to the rehabilitation of his son’s image, Billy Graham provided a statement for the East Gates website and other publicity materials assuring the ministry’s supporters that “Ruth and I are proud of and grateful to God for our son Ned.” Noting that East Gates has distributed two million Bibles to Christians in China, the elder Graham added, “Our family stands solidly behind East Gates and all it stands for and would encourage Christians interested in China to back this unique and effective ministry.” In February 2001 Ned and Christina Rae Kuo, a Chinese-American woman who is now actively involved in the East Gates ministry, were married in Ruth Graham’s bedroom at Little Piney Cove. Billy Graham performed the ceremony. During the last years of Ruth’s life, Ned spent most of his time in Montreat, caring for his mother.

  The oldest of the Graham offspring, GiGi (Virginia), though not heading a formal Evangelical institution, has nonetheless engaged in an extensive ministry of speaking and writing. She has written several well-regarded books for various Evangelical publishers and helped her mother produce Footprints of a Pilgrim, an effective recounting of Ruth’s life that uses her prose and poetry together with new anecdotes and comments from some of the many famous people the Grahams have known. As age and illness kept her parents confined more and more to their home, GiGi spent long stretches with them, living in a small residence in Montreat, where one of their sons also lived.

  GiGi has long been in demand as an inspirational speaker at women’s conferences in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and while living in Montreat took a strong interest in the children’s health center of the Mission Hospitals in Asheville. After settling in Montreat when World War II forced him to leave his beloved medical mission in China, Ruth’s father, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, joined the staff of Mission Hospital in Asheville. There he played a key role in merging four smaller medical facilities to form Memorial Mission Hospital, seeking to bring a higher level of medical care to the families of Appalachia, and to children in particular. Thus it seemed fitting that when the hospital system opened a major new health center for children in 1994 and named it for two of Asheville’s most famous citizens, Ruth’s name came first, in recognition of her father’s concern for and contributions to the health needs of people in that region. Renamed the Ruth and Billy Graham Children’s Hospital in 2001, the center can deal with virtually the entire range of children’s health problems except for open-heart surgery and burn treatment. It also sends “Toothbuses,” fully equipped mobile dental clinics, into rural areas to provide free care to children without regular access to professional dental services. “Most people simply don’t realize that many people in Southern Appalachia live in Third World conditions,” GiGi observed. “Many counties, for example, don’t have a single physician to provide obstetrical services.” Seeking to keep alive her grandfather’s and her mother’s commitment, GiGi has devoted considerable time to raising money for the institution. In 2005, to avoid confusion over funding and organizational ties, the Graham name was dropped from the center, but the Missions Hospitals website identifies them as great friends of the program, and pictures of Ruth and Billy are prominently displayed in the facility.

  In 2004, GiGi and Stephan Tchividjian surprised family and friends by ending their marriage of more than thirty years. The following year she married Chad Foreman, an ex-Marine and Florida-based private investigator. A squabble in a parking lot in June 2005 drew the attention of passersby and the police and resulted in a charge of misdemeanor domestic violence against GiGi and a night in jail, a charge and penalty she and her husband both characterized as distinctly inappropriate. After a brief flurry of public attention, the incident drew little further notice. Stephan Tchividjian, whose work included counseling, business consulting, and hosting a radio talk shown, also remarried.

  Franklin’s early rebellion, its memory kept alive in story and sermon, and Ned’s divorce and problems with alcohol and drugs, not widely publicized but well known to Evangelical insiders, made it clear that Billy and Ruth Graham had not escaped the problems and heartaches that trouble millions of American families. Yet many continued to hold up their family as an ideal toward which all Christian households should strive. Armchair and professional psychiatrists alike might reasonably point to the nonconforming behavior of both sons and the teenage marriage of all three daughters as evidence of a less-than-perfect home environment. But publicly, and to a large extent privately, the five Graham siblings have seldom said anything more detracting than “we weren’t perfect,” followed by a nearly complete lack of supporting evidence or a willingness to shoulder all the blame themselves. In recent years, youngest daughter Ruth—formerly but emphatically no longer known as “Bunny”—has been more outspoken about what she regards as the disadvantages of growing up in a famous family.

  In a conversation in mid–2001, Ruth referred to an insightful Atlantic Monthly article by Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of the famed psychiatrist Erik Erikson, about the costs fame extracts from famous people and their families. Ruth obviously saw many parallels in her own life. She said, “My father’s relation with the family has been awkward, because he has two families: BGEA and us. I always resented that. We were footnotes in books—literally. Well, we’re not footnotes. We are real, living, breathing people. There is no question Daddy loves us, but his ministry has been all-consuming. And we have understood, by and large. We’ve done a good job. We have coped. We have not rejected them or Christ. We’re all involved in some form of ministry. That’s remarkable. We have done well at living up to people’s expectations, but it is a burden. We were not a perfect family and I’m tired of people saying it. I don’t want to be indiscreet, but God inhabits honesty, and I’m not good at image-management.”

  As a child, Ruth said, “I felt adopted. A TV crew came to our house when I was about nine or ten to do a program about The World of Billy Graham. I remember that the director called me ‘Sad Eyes.’” As for the Grahams’ practice of sending their children to boarding school, Ruth acknowledged that part of their motivation might have been to obtain a better education than was available locally and added, only half in jest, that her mother felt that “if the royal family sent their children away to school, it was probably a good idea. And, of course, she had been sent away as a girl.” But these, she thought, were minor factors. “Daddy was burdened, Mother was overwhelmed. It was easier to send us away. When GiGi wanted to come home, they wouldn’t let her. And then they sent her off to Europe and [helped arrange for her to marry Stephan Tchividjian] as a teenager. That was really weird.”

  Like Anne, Ruth remembers being groomed for the life of wife, homemaker, and mother. “There was never an idea of a career for us,” she said. “I wanted to go to nursing school—Wheaton had a five-year program—but Daddy said no. No reason, no explanation, just ‘No.’ It wasn’t confrontational and he wasn’t angry, but when he decided, that was the end of it.” She added, “He has forgotten that. Mother has not.” With a career ruled out, Ruth followed the path laid out for her: She married Ted Dienert, son of Fred, who handled Billy Graham’s media ministry, and Millie, who organized the prayer campaign for the crusades. “I married Ted,” she said, “because I wanted to feel special to someone. I didn’t feel that way in my family. I was too immature. I chose not to see a lot. Ted was not interested in me. He was interes
ted in Ted, in the image. It was all part of a picture. And Fred wanted it.”

  Ruth fell easily into the expected routine, rearing three children, maintaining an active personal spiritual life, and organizing women’s retreats. Later she worked part-time as an acquisitions editor for HarperCollins. Then, in the mid–1980s, after nearly twenty years of marriage, she learned that Ted had been having an affair for more than five years. Writing about this traumatic discovery, she said, “At first I resorted to my familiar pattern of denial—covering over my hurt with spiritual platitudes. I prayed. I fasted. I forgave. I claimed Bible promises. I did all I’d been taught to do. I also hid my problems from everyone, humiliated that others—especially my family—would find out.”

  Her family did find out, of course, and her father strongly urged Ruth not to divorce Ted, telling her it would hurt millions of Evangelical Christians who looked to his ministry and their family for inspiration. After one crucial conversation, Ruth recalled that “Daddy put his arms around Ted and said, ‘Nothing will change.’ I saw how important the ministry was to him—and how little the family was. Things had to look right, and divorce didn’t fit.” By that time, however, she had already determined that “there was nothing to go back to” in her marriage, and she went through with the divorce. Although she spent little time counseling with her parents during the breakup, she acknowledged that both her parents were “always very loving” toward her once they realized the marriage was over. “Inside,” she said, “there was that core of love and grace and gentleness. I’m not sure Daddy could understand the hurt I felt, but he could understand broken trust. That’s where we could communicate. He has been betrayed, hurt, and gone ahead.”

  Ruth sought professional counseling to help her through her marital trials, overcoming an old bias among some Christians that resorting to a psychologist or psychiatrist was a sign of “spiritual problems.” She also acknowledged, at least to herself, that her simple faith that “if you serve God, he will take care of you” was too simple. Immersing herself in the Old Testament, she came to realize that God was not depending on her to protect his reputation. Israel disappointed God repeatedly, yet “his plans kept moving right along. . . . I’ve learned that he isn’t threatened by my anger or doubts. . . . Many Christian leaders are weighed down by this idea of ‘be perfect—or else!’ So when I finally laid this burden down, I was free. . . . In fact, when I ask questions and express doubt, it’s a sign of faith because I’m assuming God is listening and that he’s the source of the answers. As long as I’m in dialogue with God, I’m expressing faith and nurturing hope.”

  Ruth also soon learned that countless Christian families have been torn apart or severely injured by similar stresses and that, contrary to her and her father’s fears, her divorce was “barely a blip on the radar screen.” Indeed, she has used her own experiences as a way of communicating the truth that even the most famous Christians are not exempt from the problems that trouble most members of the human race. “We all,” she said, “still have to work through the mess and muck of life.”

  At age forty Ruth determined to “reinvent myself.” A significant symbolic step was to insist that she no longer be referred to as “Bunny,” a name she felt kept her from being taken seriously. Franklin has pointedly ignored her wishes in this matter, and other members of the family have acknowledged difficulty in making the switch, often electing to call her “Bunny Ruth.” None, however, fails to note how serious she is about making the change. She also went back to college and, in the spring of 2001, graduated with honors from Mary Baldwin College—the only one of the Graham daughters to finish college. Though she has left Bunny behind, she has never considered renouncing her status as a Graham. At Mary Baldwin, she wrote her senior thesis on the topic “Cross-cultural Communication of the Concept of Sin,” analyzing the spiritual depth, cultural sensitivity, and rhetorical artfulness Billy Graham manifested in addressing audiences in such disparate locales as China, the USSR, South Africa, and Alabama. He was, she offered, “a very special man. It was wonderful, as a daughter, to step outside and see the balance he had to maintain, with the whole world watching.” Commenting further on her father’s qualities, she said, “He was always a learner, never a know-it-all. He has never been dogmatic. He was able to sit down with theologians with a genuine curiosity and have real dialogue. He had an ego, but he was not egotistical. He was always amazed at what he had achieved—‘How did I get here?’”

  Ruth has participated in both of her brothers’ ministries and has established her own Ruth Graham Ministries, aimed particularly at addressing the woundedness of women whom she feels have too often been neglected by the church or met with unsatisfactory pat answers. “You can’t just slap a Bible verse over a wound and expect it to heal,” she has poignantly noted. She continues to write for Christian publications, speak at Evangelical gatherings, and hold “Ruth Graham & Friends” conferences, where she is joined by other articulate women who share their stories of coping with the pains of such troubles as infidelity, spousal abuse, divorce, illness, and addiction. Her 2004 book, In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart—Hope for the Hurting, laid bare the stories of her divorce from Ted Deinert, an unhappy and brief second marriage, a third marriage that ended in divorce, and the pain of dealing with a daughter’s eating disorder and two out-of-wedlock pregnancies. She shared the spiritual resources that enabled her to emerge from these crises and offered a series of wise and sensitive “Tips for Those Who Care” for people in pain. As in that book, her speeches also use illustrations from her own life to say that “God doesn’t love Billy Graham or his family any more than he loves you.” In two subsequent books, A Legacy of Faith: Things I Learned from My Father and A Legacy of Love: Things I Learned from My Mother, Ruth wrote of both the difficulties and blessings of being part of an often idealized but still quite human family. Yet even while insisting that her parents and family were not perfect, she spoke of them with great tenderness, “I know what their core is. That has never wavered. I respect that. I admire it. I aspire to it.”

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  The Last Days

  All the Graham offspring acknowledge that their father had a difficult time growing old. During the summer of 2001 GiGi observed that “it has been very difficult for Daddy. He has the impression that he is sort of a has-been, that he is no longer in control of anything—especially his work. In many ways, he has retired, but it’s real, real hard for him to turn loose. He’s used to having people talking to him, asking his advice, seeking his counsel, and it’s just not the same anymore.”

  Daughter Ruth noted some of the same things. “The other day I was at the house,” she recalled, “and Daddy had been watching [an old video] of himself preaching on TBN [a Christian television network]. He said, ‘I watched myself. I wonder what it felt like to have that power. I don’t have that power and strength now.’ I think he underestimates himself. He underestimates the power of gentleness. There is a power in gentleness that is not in fire and brimstone.” Ruth also noted the greater vulnerability her parents had shown as age and illness overtook them, but thought they had been true to their natures. “Mother was always sweet,” she said. “There’s never a problem. It’s all sunshine. She won’t talk about herself. And that gets worse as she gets older. She’ll never tell you how she feels. It’s always been that way, but it has intensified. She’s not supposed to lift anything, but she’ll get up from her chair and walk slowly across the room to put a log on the fire when I’m right there by the fire. One of the nurses told me that she checked on her late one night and found her kneeling by her bed in prayer. She had every excuse not to kneel—her broken body, hurting and aching—but nothing would stop her from worshiping her Lord, and that’s how she has done it. That’s Mom.”

  Her father, Ruth noted (as others did through the years), had played the sick role in a different manner. “Daddy complains all the time. When he had shingles, he was in so much pain and he would say, ‘I’m dying,’ and we’d all rus
h to his bedside. And then he’d get better. Finally, Mother said, ‘Would you please just hush up and die like a Christian?’ But it’s so sweet to see him toddle in to kiss her goodnight and she raises her face to him, her eyes just sparkling to receive his kiss. Daddy is a clay pot that has allowed God to fill him with his grace.”

  Anne Lotz also showed appreciation for her father’s increased vulnerability and for the opportunity to be of service to him as his earthly life drew to a close. She spoke with obvious gratitude at his request that she be with him at the Mayo Clinic when, in June 2000, a shunt was placed in his brain to reduce the pressure from hydrocephalus. Within a day of returning to North Carolina, she learned that the procedure had not worked as hoped and that additional surgery was required. She quickly booked another flight to Minnesota. “It happened to be on Father’s Day,” she recalled. “I got there and was sitting in the chair. Daddy was asleep, and I just started to cry, because his head was now totally shaved and he had this little green cap on, and he looked so frail. I asked God to help me get hold of myself, and he did. When Daddy woke up, I was fine. I was under control. He looked at me, and his eyes focused, and he said, ‘Anne, what are you doing here?’ and I told him, ‘Happy Father’s Day.’ I couldn’t remember a Father’s Day when I knew where he was, much less be able to be with him. I told him I was on my way to New York [to be on the Today show] and wanted to spend Father’s Day with him. He just grinned and said, ‘Anne, this isn’t on the way to New York.’ We both got really emotional. I stayed with him once again until I knew he was out of the woods. It is one of the most precious blessings I feel God has ever given to me.