One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham

When I hear the word ‘evangelist,’ the first face I imagine is always that of Billy Graham. And when I think of careful analysis of Graham’s monumental reshaping of the world religious landscape, the only name I can imagine is that of renowned historian Grant Wacker. In this illuminating book, Wacker demonstrates why Graham was a distinctive voice at a determinative time. This book steers away from both sentimentality and cynicism in ways that can equip generations to come to learn from one who was, arguably, the most significant Christian evangelist since the Apostle Paul.

— RUSSELL MOORE, author of The Storm-Tossed Family:

How the Cross Reshapes the Home

This fast-paced biography cuts through Billy Graham mythology to reveal who the great evangelist really was as a human individual. Wacker guides us behind the banner headlines, blockbuster revivals, and White House visits to explore the psychological depth, historical contingency, and internal contradictions that made Billy Graham one of the twentieth century’s most effective preachers—with a complex legacy that his fans and his critics still debate today.

— MOLLY WORTHEN, author of Apostles of Reason:

The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism

Wacker’s portrait of Graham is as warm and engaging as his subject, but it holds Graham to account for his mistakes and misjudgments. Easily the best short biography of Billy we are likely to get.

— KENNETH L. WOODWARD, author of Getting Religion:

Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age

of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump

This is a beautifully crafted, eloquent, and deeply illuminating account of Billy Graham’s unparalleled evangelistic career, penned by one of the most eminent American religious historians of our time. Structured as historical ‘scenes’ interspersed with lively and insightful ‘interludes’ about the man himself, this is the best single overview of Graham’s ministry to date. Highly recommended for general readers and scholars alike.

— R. MARIE GRIFFITH, John C. Danforth Center

on Religion and Politics

Grant Wacker is the finest Billy Graham scholar in the world today. The writing is vintage Wacker: clear, concise, and brilliantly articulated. Wacker makes Graham and his remarkable career in the pulpit come alive for readers at all levels. It is a must read for anyone interested in the amazing story of evangelical revivals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

— HARRY S. STOUT, Yale University

LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY

Mark A. Noll and Heath W. Carter, series editors

Religion shapes every story. Regardless of our beliefs, the cultural influences and religious commitments that surround us help forge our deepest convictions. And in religious biographies, we see these dynamics at work in the lives of influential people throughout history.

The Library of Religious Biography is a series of original biographies that bring to life important figures in American history and beyond, showing the sometimes surprising influence of religion on these subjects and the world they inhabited. Grounded in solid research, these volumes link the lives of their subjects to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. The authors are respected historians, each a recognized authority in the period of religious history in which his or her subject lived and worked.

Marked by careful scholarship yet free of academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.

Titles include:

A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards

by George M. Marsden

Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson

by Edwin S. Gaustad

The Miracle Lady: Katherine Kuhlman

and the Transformation of Charismatic Christianity

by Amy Collier Artman

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President

by Allen C. Guelzo

Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister

by Edith L. Blumhofer

George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire

by Peter Y. Choi

For a complete list of published volumes, see the back of this volume.

ONE SOUL AT A TIME

The Story of Billy Graham

Grant Wacker

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

© 2019 Grant Wacker

All rights reserved

Published 2019

25 24 23 22 21 20 191 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7472-6

eISBN 978-1-4674-5736-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For Nathan Hatch, Laurie Maffly-Kipp,

George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Skip Stout.

God is everywhere, soulmates aren’t.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost,

something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

BILLY GRAHAM

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Landscape of a Life

Part One: Young Barnstormer

1.Southern Farm Boy

2.College Years

3.Youth for Christ

4.England Calls

5.Becoming Billy Graham

6.Mears and Templeton

7.City of Angels

8.Beantown

9.Wins and Losses

10.Launching the Ship

11.Korean War

12.He Liked Ike

13.Pulling Down the Ropes

Part Two: Leading Evangelist

14.Core Message

15.Harringay

16.Christianity Today

17.Big Apple

18.Flesh Became Words

19.Preacher at Work

20.Art of the Crusade

21.Other Players

22.Critics in the Pulpit

23.Critics in the Crowd

24.Man in the Arena

25.Wounded Souls

26.Grateful Friends

Part Three: Priestly Prophet

27.Cross and Crucifix

28.Kennedy versus Nixon

29.Enter LBJ

30.Racial Justice

31.Civil Rights and Civil Order

32.Great Society

33.Endless War

34.Twisted Path to Peace

Interlude: Myth and Icon

35.Man for All Seasons

36.Billy Graham, Inc.

37.Perils of Power

38.Ford, Carter, and Reagan

Part Four: Senior Statesman

39.World Conferences

40.World Crusades

Interlude: American Abroad

41.Sin of Total War

42.Fallout at Home

43.Parson and Pope

44.Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II

Interlude: Why So Many Presidents?

45.Nation’s Chaplain

46.Fractured Saint

47.Modern America

Interlude: The Reverend Doctor Graham

48.Second Chances

49.Seasoned Soldier

50.Mrs. Billy Graham

51.Gentle Patriarch

Conclusion: What Manner of Man?

Epilogue: They Called Him Billy

Appendix on Letters

Appendix of World Preaching Events

Notes

Further Reading

Permissions

Index

Preface

When I entered my small Methodist church one Sunday morning last winter, Bob Maddry, a retired truck driver and old chum, walked over. I lost a dear friend this week, he said. Billy Graham brought me to Jesus. He saved my life. Bob paused, then added, I never shook his hand.

A couple of weeks later I asked Bob if he remembered where and when his conversion had taken place. He answered immediately and precisely. Raleigh. Wednesday night, September 26, 1973. At that moment I knew that Bob spoke for countless others, salt-of-the-earth folk, everywhere. They never personally met Graham, but his ministry had remade their lives.

Graham had died quietly in his sleep in his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on Wednesday, February 21, 2018, four days before I talked with Bob. The preacher was ninety-nine. On Saturday the hearse bearing his body motored the 130 miles from Montreat to Charlotte. Along the way the highway patrol blocked the on-ramps with wooden barricades and yellow tape. Fire trucks parked on overpasses, and cars in the oncoming lane pulled over. Officers saluted, grievers dabbed their eyes, and simple well-wishers quietly waved handkerchiefs.

The following week Graham’s body would rest in three places. First up was Graham’s childhood home, rebuilt on the grounds of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. On Monday former president and first lady George W. and Laura Bush visited. On Tuesday former president Bill Clinton paid his respects. On Wednesday the body was moved to the Rotunda of the United States Capitol, where it would lie in honor for two days. Graham was the fourth civilian and first religious leader in American history to be honored this way. On Thursday the body was moved back to the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte for the funeral and interment the next day.

The service was an evangelical version of a state funeral. It unfolded under a 28,000-square-foot tent reminiscent of the one that had sheltered Graham’s breakout revival in Los Angeles in 1949. The event attracted President and First Lady Donald and Melania Trump; Vice President and Second Lady Mike and Karen Pence; North Carolina governor Roy Cooper; former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory; both North Carolina senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis; the Gaithers; Christian singer Michael W. Smith; five hundred members of the media; representatives from fifty countries; and 1,800 ticketed friends from the political, business, government, entertainment, and religious worlds. Former president Barack Obama did not attend but said that Graham gave hope and guidance to generations of Americans. Former presidents George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter sent regrets, unable to come because of age.

By 2018 attention of this magnitude was an old story. At the dedication of the Billy Graham Library eleven years earlier, former president George H. W. Bush had called Graham America’s pastor. The label stuck. When Graham died, it showed up everywhere. For sure, some journalists had their doubts. In light of the nation’s pluralism, one said America’s pastor was meaningless. A small but vocal minority felt that Graham not only did not deserve the honor but also had inflicted grave harm upon the nation. But clearly the great majority accepted the label, either as a statement of simple sociological fact, or as an expression of their own feelings, or both.

Graham’s death revealed the breadth of the shadow he cast across the religious landscape. His message, said Saphir Athyal, an Indian Syriac Christian theologian, was his life as well as his words. The Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, spoke for many journalists, possibly a majority of Americans, and countless Christians around the world. As anyone growing up in the 1950s and 1960s can tell you, it was hard not to notice and be impressed by the Reverend Billy Graham, the cardinal intoned. Graham . . . always [preached] the same message: Jesus is your Savior and wants you to be happy with Him forever.

Writing for the Religion News Service, journalist Yonat Shimron framed Graham’s achievement in more historical terms. The preacher worked, she said, with a combination of zeal, integrity and graciousness that won him admirers the world over. For millions, he seemed somehow to stand above the partisan controversies of the era. An ordinary man, filling an extraordinary role.

***

Billy Graham lived an enormous life. It would be hard to find a religious leader—or leader of any sort, for that matter—who traveled more widely, or met more people, or addressed more pressing issues of the day than he did. It would take multiple fat volumes to tell his whole story. So in the interest of coherence, not to mention economy, I hope to simplify the task by focusing on one thread. I try to tell the story the way I think he would do it.

More or less, anyway. The more part is that from time to time I add details he might not think to include, or events he was too modest to dwell on, or episodes that he clearly preferred to forget. The less part is that I mainly stick to Graham’s public life, the things he did and said in public for everyone to see and hear. Two wrinkles slightly qualify that promise. Graham’s wife, Ruth Bell Graham, weaves in and out of the narrative because she was very much part of his public presentation. And their son Franklin emerges in the later chapters, for the same reason.

Otherwise I omit many interesting details about Graham’s daily life that he might want to slip in, such as his chronic insomnia, or attraction to sunny beaches, or fondness for lemon cake and Big Macs. But interesting is not the same as important. What is important about Graham—what people will want to know about a century from now—is his public life.

As much as possible, One Soul at a Time follows the main events in Graham’s life chronologically, in the order in which they actually took place. Of course, Graham, like most people, didn’t actually live his life that way, in simple chronological order. Experiences overlapped. But the biographer cannot unfold multiple narratives at the same time. So in each of the chapters—or scenes, as I prefer to call them—I try to highlight the main thread, the one that I think Graham himself probably would isolate as the key feature. When necessary, I sketch in the background or peek ahead to the outcome, but only when I need to in order to make sense of the moment.

It is important to stress that One Soul at a Time is not an abbreviated version of America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, a detailed thematic study of Graham that I published in 2014. In America’s Pastor I focused on Graham’s relation to American culture. Here I focus on the man himself. The two volumes recount some of the same basic facts, of course, and some of the same basic ideas too. In this volume, however, I frame similar facts and ideas in different ways for different purposes.¹

Today biographers of Graham have to figure out how to find him behind the huge cumulus cloud that his son Franklin Graham has created. The son looms in the daily news as an extraordinarily influential evangelist, humanitarian, and culture warrior in his own right. Sometimes Billy and Franklin really did resemble each other, but at other times they differed dramatically.

Discerning the optics of that complex relationship would be a worthy project in itself, but it falls outside the scope of this book. One of the purposes of this study is to help readers see Billy himself, as he really was, in his own times, and leave Franklin for another day.

A few words about my point of view may be useful. Though I try to tell Graham’s story as objectively as I can, I am the first to admit that the lens I use inevitably colors how I see him. So I suppose I should say a bit about that lens.

I place myself in the broadly evangelical tradition of American religion that Graham did so much to create and shape. Usually I find myself rumbling around somewhere on the left side of that tradition, both theologically and politically. But it is big enough and diverse enough that I feel comfortable thinking that we are all part of the same family.

Viewing Graham from this perspective, then, I see him as one of the most influential Christians, and certainly the most influential evangelical Protestant Christian, of the twentieth century. He was a great man, who helped bring spiritual meaning to the lives of millions around the globe. At the same time, Graham, like all great men and women, also had serious character flaws and made serious mistakes. I certainly believe that the strengths far outweighed the weaknesses. Yet that complexity means that his story has much to teach us about the complexities of faith in the modern world.

All that being said, I seek to avoid evaluating Graham for good or for ill. When he lived up to his own highest ideals, that should be evident. And when he failed to do so, that should be evident too. I try to let the reader judge.

***

The book’s title—One Soul at a Time—deserves a word. It comes from Ken Garfield, a journalist who covered Graham’s crusades for the Charlotte Observer for many years. In 2013 Garfield said that the evangelist made people feel that he cared for them, one soul at a time. Garfield was Jewish and never considered converting to evangelical Christianity. But he appreciated the gentle, inclusive spirit of the man who invited others to find a new faith or to renew an old faith grown cold. When Graham died five years later, Garfield wrote, We mark Graham’s passing with gratitude and grief. He offered the promise and comfort of Jesus to the last person in the last row in the most distant venue on Earth.

But there is more. In one sense Graham seems to be the last person on earth whose approach should be described with the words one soul at a time. After all, he perfected the art of mass evangelism. He preached to 215 million people in 185 countries in crusades, rallies, and live satellite feeds. Of those, some 77 million saw him face-to-face in more than seventy countries.² More than 3 million souls responded to his invitation to profess faith in Christ.³ He broke numerous attendance records, sometimes speaking to more than 100,000 people face-to-face in a single service. Indeed, twice he spoke to more than 1 million in one event.

If we add the folks who encountered Graham through his books, magazines, motion pictures, daily newspaper columns, and syndicated radio and television programs, the number swells beyond any easy reckoning. Hundreds of millions more, possibly billions, seem likely. With the possible exception of Pope John Paul II, said religion journalist David van Biema in Time magazine, Graham . . . touched more lives for Jesus than anyone else in the modern era and . . . extolled him directly to a greater swath of humanity than anyone else in history.

Even so, Graham said that he always saw himself speaking not to audiences, let alone to nameless multitudes, but to individual hearts. That is where enduring change ultimately had to begin, with each person making their own decision to follow Christ. Or not. This is not mass evangelism, he liked to say, but personal evangelism on a mass scale.

Billy Graham very much wanted to invite every person on the planet to embrace the gospel. And he hoped to inspire them to try to reform society as a whole, from top to bottom. But his method—the way he sought to do it—was always the same. One soul at a time.

Acknowledgments

I have found that the acknowledgments section of a book is usually the hardest to write. After studying American religious history for four decades, and working on Billy Graham for one of them, the list of people who have given me ideas and encouragement stretches out into the horizon. So where should I draw the line?

In order to keep this section to a tidy length yet not dilute the appreciation I owe to the people who have contributed to this book specifically, I have kept the list fairly brief. But I want to stress that my debts range far beyond the people I can reasonably name in the following few paragraphs.

As usual, priority goes to the librarians and archivists who helped more than their jobs required. Like pretty much everyone who writes seriously about Graham, I must begin with Bob Shuster, the polymath archivist at the Billy Graham Center Archives (BGCA) at Wheaton College. Bob not only directed me to obscure resources but also offered new ideas for the narrative all along the way. Paul Ericksen, Director of the BGCA, provided wise counsel throughout. Katherine Graber, Public Services Archivist, came flying to the rescue whenever I called (or e-mailed).

It would be difficult to exaggerate my debt to David Bruce, Executive Assistant to Mr. Graham in Montreat, North Carolina. Though it is a cliché, sometimes a cliché is the only word that fits. His assistance was priceless.

Readers of the manuscript included John Akers, David Bruce, Jean Graham Ford, Leighton Ford, Aaron Griffith, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Anne Blue Wills. All read every word. They helped save me from factual mistakes, wobbly concepts, and missteps into too much praise—or criticism. These folks proved that the best friends are the ones who present the bracing medicine of honest critique before—not after—the book sees light. They also proved that a dollop of encouragement, offered at just the right time, can restore the patient to robust health.

Others contributed in important ways too. More than once Scott Kelley, Diana Langston, and Ray Woody—friends since high school days—sent me back to the drawing board with penetrating questions. Edith Blumhofer, Allison Brown, Ken Garfield, Jim Lutzweiler, Daved Anthony Schmidt, and my research assistant, Max Feiler, provided a steady stream of data bytes I never would have found on my own. Jean Graham Ford, Leighton Ford, Bob Mayer, Garth Rosell, and Bob Shuster carved time from their busy schedules to find and provide a majority of the (mostly unpublished) photos of Graham that grace this volume.

The list goes on. Vincent Bacote, Uta Balbier, Catherine Brekus, Anthea Butler, Elesha Coffman, Heather Curtis, Darren Dochuk, Betsy Flowers, Spencer Fluhman, Marie Griffith, David Heim, Brooks Holifield, John Huffman, Helen Jin Kim, Katie Lofton, Mandy McMichael, Kristopher Norris, Dana Robert, Jon Roberts, Garth Rosell, Nathan Walton, and Todd von Helms prompted me to think about Graham’s legacy in fresh ways. Nannelle Griffith shared her memories of the 1953 Chattanooga crusade. Heath Carter and Mark Noll, the editors of Library of Religious Biography, acting solely on faith, invited me to submit the manuscript before they had seen a word of it.

Perennial conversation partners and dear friends Randall Balmer, Martin Marty, Matt Sutton, and Ken Woodward, speaking with Episcopal, Lutheran, secular, and Catholic voices, respectively, helped me remember that if this book doesn’t make sense to readers beyond Graham’s evangelical tradition, it doesn’t make sense at all.

My regular coffee-swilling mates at Duke—Kate Bowler, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Hays, Dick Heitzenrater, Greg Jones, Xi Lian, Rick Lischer, and Will Willimon—kept me from slacking off by recurrently asking, How’s it going? My nine-year-old grandson, Henry Beck, put teeth in the question: "Have you finished your Billy Graham book yet, Grandpa?"

Andrew Finstuen and Anne Blue Wills, two of the three editors of Billy Graham: American Pilgrim, let me pretend to be the third and equal partner, even though they did more than two-thirds of the work. Their generosity proved that the study of American religious history is often a labor born of deep affection among colleagues.

The five people named in the book’s dedication know that words can go only so far. But sometimes you have to try.

My copy editor, Tom Raabe, well earned his keep—and more. He caught embarrassing factual howlers and applied his scalpel to excess prose without mercy. Some of my best writing ended up on the cutting room floor. For which readers should be as grateful as I am.

My debt to David Bratt, the executive editor at Eerdmans, is hard to measure. David recognized that the detailed thematic study of Graham that I published several years ago left a need for a concise narrative biography. He selected this book’s title, smoothed out lumpy prose, posed the two governing questions that One Soul at a Time tries to answer, bolstered my courage to take stands on controversial questions, spotted paragraphs the world could do without, batted ideas back and forth in person and over the phone, and did not bark at me when the manuscript grew larger and took longer than he expected. Through it all he turned out to be a wonderful friend as well as editor.

And then there was Billy himself. Four visits with him in his mountaintop home near Montreat, North Carolina, when he was in his late eighties and early nineties, permanently etched themselves in my memory. Given his age, I made no attempt to interview him, at least as journalists and historians ordinarily do. But he interviewed me. He did it partly by asking a lot of questions about my own life—dogs, kids, grandkids, Blue Devils—but also and more memorably by letting me experience firsthand the extraordinary humility, graciousness, and spiritual depth of a truly great man.

My wife, Katherine Wacker, did not type a single word or, after the preface, read a single page of the manuscript. Something about been there, done that was, I think, what she said. But a half century of putting up with me, as I drifted off wondering how to phrase the next sentence, gives the biblical image of the pearl of great price new dimensions of meaning.

Cary, North Carolina

March 2019

INTRODUCTION

Landscape of a Life

By the time Billy Graham was thirty years old, probably most adult Americans had heard of him. By the time he was thirty-five, his name had spread around the globe, and by forty, he had become an iconic figure in Christian circles everywhere. Graham retained that status until he effectively retired from public ministry in 2005.

Hard, quantitative signs of Graham’s importance on the religious landscape crop up almost everywhere we look. Probably more people saw or heard Graham preach than any other person in history.¹

Graham’s endeavors set records in other ways too. Between 1955 and 2017, he won a berth in Gallup’s list of the Ten Most Admired Men sixty-one times. President Ronald Reagan, his closest rival, appeared only thirty-one times, while former president Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II appeared twenty-seven times apiece.

Exact figures about the size of Graham’s media empire—the numbers of listeners, viewers, and readers—are extremely hard to pin down. Even so, allowing for significant variations in data-gathering methods, the overall picture is clear enough.

First up were the network broadcasts. Hour of Decision, a weekly syndicated radio program, was released in November 1950. One hundred fifty ABC-affiliated stations carried the first broadcast. Within weeks twenty million potential listeners were tuning in. In 2010 nearly one thousand stations around the world still carried the program, by then airing in five languages.² Graham’s syndicated national television program, also called Hour of Decision, which started in June 1957, soon ranked as one of the most widely viewed religious television broadcasts in the nation.³

Believing that words lasted longer in print than over the airwaves, Graham moved toward the publishing market with even greater vigor. His daily newspaper column, My Answer, which he launched in 1952, ran in seventy-three newspapers. In time it reportedly hit two hundred venues with a circulation of fifteen to twenty million potential readers.

The fortnightly Christianity Today, which followed four years later, almost immediately established itself as the normative voice of mainstream evangelicalism.⁴ At the time of Graham’s death in 2018, it claimed a print circulation of 120,500 (36,000 free), a readership of 240,000, and five million discrete visits each month for its online version.

The popular monthly magazine Decision, issued in three—later six—languages and a Braille edition, started landing in readers’ mailboxes in 1960. By 1975 this monthly—written with a mass audience in mind, and lavishly illustrated with black-and-white and soon full-color pictures—was reaching five million readers. Except for two Jehovah’s Witness publications, it likely ranked as the most widely circulated Christian-related magazine in the world.⁵

Graham’s books appeared on average every other year, from his first in 1947, Calling Youth to Christ, to his last in 2015, Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity, and the Life Beyond, when he was in his late nineties. All together, he authored or authorized thirty-four volumes, which were translated into at least fifty languages and sold millions of copies.⁶ Three of them sold more than one million apiece. Graham’s third book, Peace with God, published in 1953, served as his signature work. This compact volume of two hundred or so pages sold more than two million copies and saw translation into thirty-eight languages.⁷

Graham personally knew all thirteen presidents from Harry Truman to Donald Trump.⁸ Most of them became his friends—some his close friends. When Graham died, his home state of North Carolina initiated the complex process of replacing the statue of one of its two favorite sons in the US Capitol (Charles Aycock) with one of Graham.

Factoids and anecdotes might actually tell us more about Graham’s influence than any number of raw statistics or listing of awards and honors. First the factoids. For two years in the mid-1950s Graham won more magazine and newspaper space than any other person in the nation, including the president. Also, the BGEA’s photograph archive contains more than 1,100,000 negatives. Photographers knew a good, not to mention marketable, image when they saw one.

Second, the anecdotes—or what we might call cultural snapshots—reveal worlds within worlds about Graham’s place on the American religious landscape. Two, coming from surprising corners of American life, are especially worth quoting. Harold Bloom, a leading literary scholar at Yale, and not especially sympathetic to Graham, brilliantly captured his impact in a cover article published in Time magazine in 1999 entitled 100 Most Important People of the Century: You don’t run for office among us by proclaiming your skepticism or deprecating Billy Graham.

In 2014, in AARP The Magazine, Bob Dylan reflected on his own legendary career with a remarkable extended reference to Graham.

[He was] the greatest preacher and evangelist of my time—that guy could save souls and did. I went to two or three of his rallies in the ’50s or ’60s. This guy was like rock ’n’ roll personified—volatile, explosive. He had the hair, the tone, the elocution—when he spoke, he brought the storm down. Clouds parted. Souls got saved, sometimes 30- or 40,000 of them. If you ever went to a Billy Graham rally back then, you were changed forever. There’s never been a preacher like him. He could fill football stadiums before anybody. He could fill Giants Stadium more than even the Giants football team. Seems like a long time ago. Long before Mick Jagger sang his first note or Bruce strapped on his first guitar—that’s some of the part of rock ’n’ roll that I retained. I had to. I saw Billy Graham in the flesh and heard him loud and clear.

Granted, Graham never came close to winning universal approval. Secular pundits found his theology absurd in the clear light of modern thinking. Mainline preachers, both Protestant and Catholic, recoiled from his unflinching presentation of his interpretation of the gospel. Fundamentalists scored him for cooperating with Catholics and liberal Protestants in order to win popularity.

Graham’s perennial hobnobbing with the rich and the famous, his unsteady (initially hawkish, later ambivalent) support for the Vietnam War, his dogged defense of Nixon during Watergate, and his noxious private comments about Jews and the media in Nixon’s office in 1972 tarred his reputation. Repeated apologies never erased the damage.

Death offered no protection, either. After Graham’s demise, historian Matthew A. Sutton, writing in the Guardian, judged that Graham had positioned himself on the wrong side of history. His backward-looking posture may be his most significant, and saddest, legacy, said Sutton. Writing in the New York Times, historian David A. Hollinger, in turn, dismissed Graham’s career as largely a story of missed opportunities, one that promoted childlike religious emotions and obscurantist ideas.

Historians were not alone in their dismissal. In an obituary essay headlined Billy Graham Was No Prophet, the conservative columnist George F. Will found the subtitle of my book America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation inapposite. Far from being a shaper of the culture, Will argued, Graham was shaped by the culture, and not by its best parts, either. Though Graham gave comfort to many people and probably improved some, Will allowed, the preacher was neither a prophet nor a theologian. In Graham’s dealings with presidents, for example, he mixed vanity and naivete.

Other journalists used Graham’s death as an opportunity to denounce him. In an essay revealingly titled The Soul-Crushing Legacy of Billy Graham, posted at RollingStone.com, journalist Bob Moser found him a Machiavellian backroom operator . . . a conniving hypocrite with a layman’s grasp of the Bible and a supernatural lust for earthly power. Actress Nia Vardalos showed that a scalpel could cut deeper than a cleaver. Billy Graham, Rest In Peace sir, she intoned. I hope God bunks you with Liberace.

***

These jabs notwithstanding, this book will show, I think, that historian Martin Marty got it right when he told a 2013 gathering at Wheaton College, Graham’s alma mater, that Graham belonged on the Mount Rushmore of American religious history. Millions of evangelicals worldwide used his views to settle debates, exegeted his words as if they were biblical proof texts, and wrangled about what Billy really meant.

When reporters said, as they often did, that Graham was the closest thing to a pope that Protestants had—columnist Murray Kempton dubbed him the Pope of lower Protestantism—they were using Graham not simply as a handy symbol but were also stating a fairly indisputable historical fact. At the time of his death, Ashish Ittyerah Joseph, an Indian eulogist, dryly observed that for Protestants he is what Mother Teresa is for Catholics. A Protestant saint.

Perhaps the most historically important point about Graham is not whether he was a villain or a saint but that millions of people, both inside and outside the United States, positioned themselves on the religious and cultural landscape by virtue of their view of Graham. Historian George Marsden said that an evangelical could be defined as anyone who liked Billy Graham. The line was a quip, but funny precisely because it cut so close to the quick. For more than 50 years, said another historian, Daniel Silliman, Graham was so famous people felt like they had to have an opinion about him. Whether they liked him or didn’t like him, he became a lodestar of religious identity. The story that this book tells helps us know why.

Two questions run throughout the following pages. The first one is simple. What made Graham different from other evangelists of his era and, with the possible exception of George Whitefield in the eighteenth century, from all other evangelists in American history?⁹ Granted, Graham emerged from a long, rich tradition of schools, newspapers, magazines, radio programs, missionary organizations, sturdy denominations, country pastors, pulpit princes, media stars, and itinerant preachers like himself. Still, in the late 1940s, before he was thirty, he rapidly moved to the front of the pack, and for the next six decades no one else came close.

Why?

In this book I will try to show that Graham became singularly successful because he displayed an extraordinary ability to embrace the trends of the age and then turn them to his own evangelistic and moral-reform purposes.

All successful evangelists did the same, of course, but Graham did it more skillfully than anyone else, and with remarkably few missteps along the way. He spoke to multiple audiences at once: politicians, journalists, denominational leaders, local pastors, and ordinary folk ranging from earnest seekers to ardent skeptics. And he made it all look so easy.

At a