by Billy Graham
Back to Argentina
The trip concluded with an eight-day Crusade in Buenos Aires, one of the most beautiful cities in Latin America (and the largest in Argentina). Two thousand people had been trained as counselors—Charlie Riggs had taught them standing in a boxing ring, the best facility available—and in spite of a severe economic crisis in Argen-tina (some government workers hadn’t been paid in months), the Crusade’s full budget was raised in advance; no offerings needed to be taken. (In fact, we took no offerings anywhere in South America, to avoid any hint of financial motivation.)
I was invited to meet with members of the Argentine cabinet, because the relationship between the United States and Cuba was reaching boiling point. Argentina’s defense minister asked me if I would come into his office. “I want you to convey to the President of the United States that we have two aircraft carriers,” he told me, “and we will put them both at the disposal of the United States if it comes to war. It would be a tragedy if Castro should move any further than he has. His popularity is such that it affects us here.”
Shortly after my return to the United States, I was invited to the White House to see President Kennedy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was there as well. They wanted me to brief them about my tour of the Latin American countries. Needless to say, I relayed the offer made by Argentina’s defense minister, but I never learned what use, if any, was made of the information.
What did I learn from the South American tours?
First, everywhere we went, we sensed a deep spiritual hunger and a yearning for a personal relationship with Christ. We came away committed to further ministry there.
Second, we came away with a new sense of the importance of Latin America and of its potential for the future. At the same time, I was struck by the widespread poverty we saw almost everywhere, and by the sharp division between the wealthy and the poor. I could see the potential for explosive social change and even chaos.
Since that trip, we’ve returned a number of times to various areas, eventually visiting almost every country in South America. (My doctors advised me against attempting to preach in La Paz, Bolivia; its altitude of twelve thousand feet was too high for my voice.)
In 1974 we returned to Brazil for a five-day Crusade in Rio de Janeiro. A quarter-million people gathered for the concluding meeting in Maracanã Stadium, a record for that facility. During the service, I could hear people beating on the locked doors as tens of thousands more tried to get in. The closing meeting was televised on all the networks across the country on the orders of the president; Crusade director Henry Holley was told that up to 50 million people saw the program. When we were ready to leave the stadium, the police escort was reluctant to open the gates for fear the crowd, in their enthusiasm, might riot.
MEXICO
Also memorable was our Crusade in Mexico in 1981. The organizers in Mexico City, our first stop, had been given permission to use the Olympic Stadium for the meetings; it seated 80,000. At the last minute, however, permission was withdrawn by the authorities. We were forced instead to use a much smaller basketball arena in the center of the city, which had no parking facilities. It was damaged in the earthquake a few years before and had not been used since, but the authorities assured us it was safe.
To make matters worse, publicity had already gone out directing people to the other stadium. But somehow word of the change got out, and even on the first night there was an overflow crowd of thousands. We then scheduled two services each day; people exited out one side of the arena as the second crowd entered from the opposite side.
We then went to the city of Villahermosa, a booming oil town near the Guatemalan border. It had an old western frontier feel about it; the people still carried guns in their belts. The church leaders there were some of the kindest people we have ever worked with. The meetings were held in a baseball stadium. Every night on our way there, we passed scores and scores of farm trucks on their way to the Crusade, jammed with people standing tightly packed in the truckbeds. When we gave the Invitation each night, so many people came forward that we couldn’t get off the platform until the counseling was completed.
Our 1991 Crusade in Buenos Aires—a decade after the Mexico visit just described—marked a milestone of a different sort, with an extensive outreach to millions, via satellite and video, in twenty Spanish-speaking countries in Central and South America as well as Mexico and the Caribbean.
Since then, I have rejoiced in the many signs that God is still at work in that part of the world.
20
First Steps Behind the Iron Curtain
Moscow 1959, Poland 1966, Yugoslavia 1967
And again we need to go back in time, this time to trace our initial foray behind the Iron Curtain.
MOSCOW
In 1959 a close friend of mine on the West Coast, a Los Angeles businessman by the name of Bill Jones, invited Grady and me to go to the Soviet Union as tourists. He had been there a number of times and came back with remarkable stories of quietly taking Bibles into Russia and discreetly meeting with Christians.
I had been in Australia for several months. Ruth and Grady’s wife, Wilma, joined us in Paris, and we flew to London. After a few days of relaxation, Bill, Grady, and I flew to Brussels, where we were to catch an Aeroflot plane to Moscow. I was a little hesitant to go on their airline, but Bill thought it would be wise to do so. We filled out our forms and got on the plane.
The stewardess was a pleasant, sturdily built Russian woman. “Please fasten your seatbelts,” she announced in heavily accented English, “and if we get airborne, you can unfasten them!”
We arrived safely at the airport in Moscow. While we were going through immigration, a young woman with a bright smile inspected my passport. Then, looking around to make sure no one was watching, she silently pointed upward, giving the Christian One Way sign.
This was my first encounter with one of the countless silent believers in the Soviet Union. One time I stood with a crowd on Victory Day watching the people lay a wreath at their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A stranger wearing a whole string of medals on his chest came close to me. Without speaking a word, he used the tip of his cane to scratch a cross in the dirt at our feet.
Another time I was standing in front of our hotel in a cold drizzle when a bus pulled up. A woman looked out the bus window right at me. Then, on a foggy patch on the window, she rubbed a cross with her finger.
Many things impressed me on our taxi rides and walks in Moscow: the general cleanliness of the city, the lack of outdoor advertising signs (although propaganda posters were common), the intellectual reading matter at the newsstands. Looking at the symbolic red star rising high above the Kremlin, I was startled to see also the Cross of Christ topping the spires of former churches—buildings that in 1959 were serving largely as museums. Visiting Lenin’s Tomb, I pondered how his embalmed body could inspire endless lines of viewers. The inspiration for my faith was the empty tomb of the risen Christ.
In the popular playground and propaganda platform of Gorky Park, I saw one poster in which the hammer and sickle had crushed Uncle Sam, depicted with his ever-present dollar sign.
One of the people I got to know on that trip was American reporter and writer Harrison Salisbury, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times. He was kind enough to accompany us a great deal of the time; he explained the things we were seeing and commented on the things we were doing. The Soviets frowned on public displays of sex, he said. I thought of Harvard professor Pitirim Sorokin’s warning that an obsession with sex could destroy the United States faster than Communism.
I had tea with some students at Moscow University. Work meant more to them than play, I learned; 10 million Russian youth were studying English. At the crowded Baptist church—the only Protestant church for Moscow’s 7 or 8 million people—my companions and I attended three two-hour services and heard six strong biblical sermons through interpreters! The authorities would not let me preach, the pastor explained apologeticall
y. (Baptists and other Protestant denominations had been forced by Stalin to unite, and they were all called Baptists, although there were still theological tensions within the Baptist Union.)
This was not my first contact with Baptist leaders from the Soviet Union. In late July 1955, I met a Soviet Baptist leader who was representing his church at a meeting of the Baptist World Alliance in London. In October 1955, I responded to his invitation to preach in his church in Moscow, suggesting December of that year—or, if that date was not suitable, sometime in 1956.
“Naturally, I shall not mention political matters while visiting your great country,” I wrote to him. “I shall come to preach the Gospel and to promote better relations between the American and Russian people. It is my prayer that such a trip would contribute to the prospects and possibilities of world peace.”
No invitation arrived in response.
My intentions were good, but I naively thought going to the Soviet Union from the United States was as simple as going from the United States to the United Kingdom. Nor did I fully realize then the extent to which churches in such societies were forced to cooperate with government authorities; no church could issue such an invitation without their approval.
Lenin Stadium, named after V. I. Lenin, the founder of the Communist Soviet state, was empty the day Grady and I wandered in as tourists. A scratchy recording of Rosemary Clooney was being played over the loudspeaker system. The sight of the empty arena—the location of so many showcase events for the Soviet system—moved me deeply. As we sat gazing out over its vast expanse, I bowed my head and prayed that someday God would open the door for us to preach the Gospel in Moscow and elsewhere in eastern Europe.
And yet for decades, it seemed as if that was one prayer God would never answer, an unrealistic pipedream that could never come true. The barriers were too great, the wall erected by Communism against religion too impregnable. Not that Communist officials would have welcomed me anyway, for I was an avowed and vocal anti-Communist, blasting Communism in one 1953 sermon as “the greatest enemy we have ever known.” I did not preach many sermons specifically on the subject, but when I did refer to Commu-nists or Communism from the pulpit, I branded them as enemies of the Gospel.
About that time in Washington, D.C., Senator Joseph McCarthy was holding sensational hearings about alleged anti-American subversion. McCarthyism entered the American vocabulary as a word describing the making of unsubstantiated charges against alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers. I think McCarthy tried to contact me once, but I never had any correspondence with him, I never exchanged telegrams with him, and I never talked to him on the phone. Nor did I want to. I was shocked at some of his tactics, even though at the time I agreed that bona fide Communists needed to be exposed. But McCarthy went too far: in many quarters, the paranoia and panic engendered by the rigor of his investigation spread unfounded suspicion and slander.
In those tense times, I frequently mentioned and preached on the various social and political problems plaguing our country, and I probably spoke about Communism more than most others. I believed that the leaders of Communism, especially in the Soviet Union, had vowed world conquest; many of their published statements said as much.
Like millions of others, I honestly feared the spread of Communism to the United States and elsewhere, whether by a fifth column inside society or by armed aggression. After all, the West was still reeling under the knowledge that the Soviet Union had duplicated the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
For all of my early anti-Communist diatribes, however, I certainly did not see myself as a crusader against Communism like Senator McCarthy or Father Charles Coughlin, the vocal Catholic priest who had a national radio program during the 1930s and was often criticized for his extreme right-wing political views. But I couldn’t preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ without clashing head-on with the various philosophies and ideologies that were vehemently opposed to Christianity—especially Communism. I quoted Lenin: “There will come times when we talk peace, there will come times when we talk war, but always toward world revolution.”
My own comment was this: “We are dealing with a treacherous and vicious enemy who has the supernatural forces of evil behind him.”
The scant reliable information that got out to the world through what Sir Winston Churchill first called the Iron Curtain was enough to terrify all of us. Often Jews and Christians were special objects of oppression and persecution in the Soviet bloc. Most abhorrent to me was its current militant atheism and its antireligious policies and persecutions.
Atheism as official policy was openly organized to stamp out religion. As one Soviet commissar of education put it, “We hate Christians; even the best of them must be regarded as our enemies.” I knew that my fellow Christians in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were forbidden to declare their faith publicly or to give religious instruction to their children privately. When they defied Communist policies about religion, they often were exiled to Siberia, interned in the Gulag, or killed for their faith.
On the other hand, I have always admired the Soviet people. Nothing I said, even in my most intemperate denunciations of Communism, was intended to be a wholesale condemnation of the Russian people who bravely endured so much. As I was careful to point out, “Pure Communists were only a minority wherever they operated; most of the people under Communist rule were victims rather than disciples.”
While in Moscow on that first visit as a tourist, I noted the haunted, tired look on people’s faces, along with fear, insecurity, and what I interpreted in some settings as spiritual hunger and emptiness. Those in the churches, though, showed devotion and determination. They had to; it was not easy to join an evangelical congregation. Anyone eighteen and over seeking membership was put on probation for eighteen months to three years and could not be a smoker or drinker. Although I had little direct contact with the Russian Orthodox Church during the 1959 trip, I knew that many Orthodox believers also paid a price for their commitment.
I left Moscow in 1959 with a dream, a hope, and a prayer that someday I, along with many others, might proclaim the Gospel throughout that vast country. At the same time, I had to admit that, humanly speaking, it seemed impossible. As it turned out, a visit to the Soviet Union would have to wait until after a series of visits many years later to other central and eastern European Communist countries, including Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia.
POLAND
Poland in the mid-sixties seemed to us to be wide open to a visit. Its religious life had remained comparatively strong under Commu-nism, due to the determination and courage of Poland’s Roman Catholic majority. The year 1966 marked the millennium of Po-land’s nationhood and of its Christianity, rooted in the conversion of Mieszko I in a.d. 966.
In the August issue of Decision magazine, an optimistic preview of our trip specified the dates (September 28 to October 5), gave the names of sponsors and committees, and listed the locations where we would appear. It mentioned publication of five thousand copies of a special edition of my book Peace with God for Polish distribution. It said we would pay a visit to the infamous concentration camp at Auschwitz, as a mark of respect for the millions who were put to death there and in similar camps in World War II.
Only twenty-four hours before our scheduled departure, we learned that we could not go after all. Internal political tangles among the Polish government, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, and Polish evangelical leaders had resulted in the denial of our visas from the Polish Embassy in Washington. The advance publicity we had released had undoubtedly worked against us as well.
Two lessons emerged from that disappointment.
First, we realized that the emissaries of Christ’s kingdom needed to be as careful and thorough in their research as any earthly government when approaching a foreign power. By acting on inadequate information, we put ourselves in a humiliating position and worked a real hardship on the evangelical Christian community in Poland.
Second, we were confirmed in our belief that God had not given up on Communist Europe. There was still a core of vital believers there. Although this visit collapsed, many people were fervently praying that someday the door would open for us.
YUGOSLAVIA
Less than a year later, in July 1967, I preached for the first time inside a Communist country, although technically it was not behind the Iron Curtain. Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, which had maintained a feisty independence from Moscow’s domination of eastern Europe, presented an image of relatively enlightened socialism. Although restrictions and repression prevailed for the twenty years following World War II, things began to loosen up in that country.
After a week-long Crusade at Earls Court in London, which ended on July 1, 1967, we stopped for a one-day rally in Turin, Italy, then crossed over by car to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where we had been invited by a committee of Yugoslavian Protestant churches. The contrast-rich landscape—from the long Adriatic coastline, across the rugged mountains, to the rich interior farmlands and forests of the Danube plain—symbolized the diverse groups who would attend the meetings.
The Catholic Church in Zagreb generously allowed us to use a field they owned; it overlooked an army hospital they operated. This outdoor location, while open to the elements, was large enough to handle the crowds we were expecting. Remarkable too was the shared presence on the platform of both Orthodox and Catholic leaders.
The sponsoring group’s chairman, Dr. Josip Horak, who was also president of the Yugoslavian Baptist Convention, was exuberant: “Never before have gathered so many Protestants, and it is the first open-air meeting since the war,” he said as he welcomed us. “We couldn’t dream that something like this can happen in our country.”