Billy Graham, for good or ill

I heard Billy Graham in London, 1965.

My denomination did not approve of him. They were peeved because his organisation did not refer converts to "Bible believing Chuches".  One woman in my local Church did not like him because she said  "he has very cold eyes" (based on a photograph!)

Nevertheless some of we younger folks went up to London to see and hear him.  Here is where memory is tricky. The 1965 Crusade was held at the Earl's Court Exhibition hall, but my memory is of being at the (old) Wembley Stadium.  Maybe we were there for the final night which was at Wembley.

I was distinctly unimpressed with his sermon.  It was long, rambling and boring.

But at the end, when we all sang "Just as I am" hundreds streamed forward to "accept Christ".  We have no idea of what percentage were "off the street" unbelievers, and what percentage were existing Church goers.  We do know that the Graham Organization were past-masters at marketing the Gospel, and at persuading hundreds of local Churches to send bus loads of members to the Crusades.

We have no idea of the percentage of converts who were recidivists  and "back slid" on their spur of the moment decision to accept Christ.

(It's a bit like A.A. which boasts about the 10% who stay sober as a result of attending meetings, and is mute about the 90% who are not able to maintain sobriety).

Graham was successful in marketing cheap grace, and a total failure in teaching the cost of discipleship.

Shouldn't would be converts be required to first learn about the cost of discipleship, and then and only then to become a Christian by repentance, faith and baptism?

In the interests of truth I confess that I have been a peddler of  cheap grace in my ministry as an Episcopal Church Minister.

Graham sought the approval of every President from Truman to G.W. Bush.  (Did St. Paul seek the approval of the Roman Emperors?!).

Billy Graham was a great fan of Richard Nixon.  I have heard the tape of Nixon's 'phone call to Graham on the former's last night in office.  Nixon was clearly in his cups.

Billy Graham said  "Ruth"  (his wife) "thinks this is all a communist plot". So much for Billy Graham's political naivety. 

Many reliable sources peg Billy Graham's net worth at his time of death at $25 million.  Not bad for a farm boy from North Carolina.

It's not that I want to damn Billy Graham,  but neither will I lionize him.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

George Will, a very conservative American columnist, has this to say about the Revd. William F  Graham.    He is "on to something".

Opinions

Billy Graham was no prophet

 1:45

How the Rev. Billy Graham became a preacher with a worldwide following

Billy Graham, the evangelist who attracted a worldwide following for more than six decades, was found dead at his home on Feb. 21 at age 99. (The Washington Post)

By George F. Will Opinion writer February 21 Email the author

Asked in 1972 if he believed in miracles, Billy Graham answered: Yes, Jesus performed some, and there are many “miracles around us today, including television and airplanes.” Graham was no theologian.

Neither was he a prophet. Jesus said “a prophet hath no honor in his own country.” Prophets take adversarial stances toward their times, as did the 20th century’s two greatest religious leaders, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II. Graham did not. Partly for that reason, his country showered him with honors.

So, the subtitle of Grant Wacker’s 2014 book, “America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, ” is inapposite. When America acquired television and a celebrity culture, this culture shaped Graham. 

Wacker, of Duke University’s Divinity School, judges Graham sympathetically as a man of impeccable personal and business probity.

Americans respect quantification, and Graham was a marvel of quantities. He spoke, Wacker says, to more people directly — about 215 million — than any person in history. In 1945, at age 26, he addressed 65,000 at Chicago’s Soldier Field. The 1949 crusade in Los Angeles, promoted by the not notably devout William Randolph Hearst, had a cumulative attendance of 350,000.

In 1957, a May-to-September rally in New York had attendance of 2.4 million, including 100,000 on one night at Yankee Stadium. A five-day meeting in Seoul in 1973 drew 3 million.

Graham’s effects are impossible to quantify. His audiences were exhorted to make a “decision” for Christ, but a moment of volition might be (in theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s phrase) an exercise in “cheap grace.” Graham’s preaching, to large rallies and broadcast audiences, gave comfort to many people and probably improved some.

Regarding race, this North Carolinian was brave, telling a Mississippi audience in 1952that, in Wacker’s words, “there was no room for segregation at the foot of the cross.” In 1953, he personally removed the segregating ropes at a Chattanooga, Tenn., crusade. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, Graham abandoned the practice of respecting local racial practices. Otherwise, he rarely stepped far in advance of the majority. His 1970 Ladies’ Home Journal article “Jesus and the Liberated Woman” was, Wacker says, “a masterpiece of equivocation.”

The first minister with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame for his preaching was an entrepreneurial evangelical Christian who consciously emulated masters of secular communication such as newscasters Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and H.V. Kaltenborn. 

Wielding the adverbs “nearly” and “only,” Graham, says Wacker, would warn that all is nearly lost and the only hope is Christ’s forgiveness.

Graham frequently vowed to abstain from partisan politics and almost as frequently slipped this self-imposed leash, almost always on behalf of Republicans. Before the 1960 election, Graham, displaying some cognitive dissonance, said that if John F. Kennedy were a true Catholic, he would be a president more loyal to the pope than to the Constitution but that he would fully support him if elected.

Graham’s dealings with presidents mixed vanity and naivete. In 1952, he said he wanted to meet with all the candidates “to give them the moral side of the thing.” He was 33. 

He applied flattery with a trowel, comparing Dwight Eisenhower’s first foreign policy speech to the Sermon on the Mount and calling Richard Nixon “the most able and the best trained man for the job probably in American history.” He told Nixon that God had given him, Nixon, “supernatural wisdom.” 

Graham should have heeded the psalmist’s warning about putting one’s faith in princes.

On Feb. 1, 1972, unaware of Nixon’s Oval Office taping system, when Nixon ranted about how Jews “totally dominated” the media, Graham said, “This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country is going down the drain.” He also told Nixon that Jews are the ones “putting out the pornographic stuff.” 

One can reasonably acquit Graham of anti-Semitism only by 

convicting him of toadying. When Graham read transcripts of

 Nixon conspiring to cover up crimes, Graham said that what 

“shook me most” was Nixon’s vulgar language.

Of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops, Graham said, “we have all had our My Lais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.” 

Speaking in the Washington National Cathedral three days after 9/11, he said “it’s so glorious and so wonderful” that the victims were in heaven and would not want to return.

Graham, Wacker concludes, had an attractively sunny personality and was “invincibly extrospective.” This precluded “irony” but also “contemplativeness.”