From Bob Jones student to White House pastor and beyond

By JAMES SHANNON

In a cover story for the New York Times Magazine published on a Sunday late last month, David D. Kirkpatrick posed the question “End Time for Evangelicals?” then crafted a detailed analysis of the current state of the Religious Right and its bittersweet relationship with the Republican Party.

The focus was primarily on the disenchantment of the faithful with the return on their investment in right-wing politics in general and George W. Bush in particular. Towards the end of the piece, Kirkpatrick quotes a thoughtful Rev. Gene Carlson, senior pastor for decades of Westlink Christian Church in Wichita, Kansas and erstwhile leader of the Christian right.

“When you mix religion and politics, you get politics,” was Carlson’s rueful assessment. Those words of wisdom provide a good starting point for our consideration of the career of Billy Graham, whose name in print is usually preceded by the words “famed evangelist.” Indeed, for over 58 years, Graham has been the most famous preacher in the United States, although some might argue the line between fame and infamy is slight and often fleeting. His mammoth revival meetings conducted over six decades – and the television broadcasts of same – garnered him almost as much attention as his close association with every American president since Harry Truman.

Our story is prompted by the recent appearance of two books about Graham. The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House by Time magazine columnists Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy (Center Street, 2007) could hardly be described as tough, but it raises enough questions about his career to avoid dismissal as mere hagiography – although the cover image of a prayerful Graham in front of the presidential seal comes close. The second new book, The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire (Brave Ulysses Books, 2007) was written by Cecil Bothwell, a long-time Asheville journalist and former editor of the Mountain Xpress weekly newspaper.

Bothwell’s unauthorized biography is tough, to be sure, but derives its power from a careful analysis of the public life of Billy Graham culled from news accounts and the words of Graham himself. We have excerpted a chapter of The Prince of War in this issue, and encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. In similar fashion, get the book by Gibbs and Duffy as well. Both are worthy entries in an already crowded field, and taken together, form a more rounded portrait of the man who is living out his days near Asheville in Montreat.

He was born William Franklin Graham, Jr. in 1918 on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. The land where his father worked a herd of some hundred Jersey and Holstein cows has long since been swallowed whole by the sprawl of the Queen City. A small plaque on the lawn of the IBM building in Charlotte commemorated the place of the great man’s birth – or at least it did in 1979, when Marshall Frady’s massive biography was published by Little, Brown. Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness is noteworthy because of its detailed treatment of its subject and because Frady was a reporter for the Greenville News before moving on to Newsweek, Life and Harper’s magazines. Frady, who died of cancer in Greenville in 2004 at the age of 64, also penned notable biographies of George Wallace and Jesse Jackson.

Besides his own local connection, Frady’s biography of Graham contains details of his tangled relationship with another local institution, Bob Jones University. When Billy’s mother Morrow Graham heard Bob Jones, Sr. speak in Charlotte in 1936, she decided her son would attend what was then called Bob Jones College. Founded in 1927 in the Florida panhandle, the small fundamentalist academy had moved to Cleveland, Tennessee in 1933.

As Graham would recount years later, “I didn’t have the slightest idea what kind of school it was. All I knew is that it was Christian.” When the dutiful son followed his mother’s wishes to Bob Jones, he encountered an environment far different from the family farmhouse where he had been raised. Described as “a kind of an evangelical boot camp,” Bob Jones College in 1936 housed students in “grim brick barracks with long low corridors lit with drab glares and posted with notifications like ‘Griping Not Tolerated’ and presided over by the autocratic and irascible figure of Jones.”

At least that’s how Frady described what he called “the Dickensian bleakness” of Bob Jones in those days. When he went home at Christmas after his first semester, Graham persuaded his parents to let him transfer to Florida Bible Institute near Tampa. There he would find respite from cold Tennessee winters and a place where his outgoing personality could be put to more effective use. Upon finishing there, he traveled to Illinois and enrolled in Wheaton College, where he met Ruth McCue Bell, the daughter of American missionaries in China who would become his wife. But his career path would cross the Bob Jones campus more than once in the years ahead.

To understand how Billy Graham was transformed from small-time Southern evangelist to a national religious phenomenon requires a trip back in time to the year 1949. Those were heady days in the United States, still flush with victory in World War II and struggling to fully embrace the millions of servicemen who had returned from overseas.

After getting into the pulpit for the first time during his college days, Graham became the pastor of West Springs Baptist Church in Chicago. His duties included a weekly radio show broadcast from a studio in the church basement that led to an invitation to preach at the first Chicago rally of an outfit known as Youth for Christ in 1944. The enthusiastic young preacher brought elements of the Southern fire-and-brimstone style with him, reinterpreted for the modern age, if you will – and it worked. He paced the stage, Bible in hand, arms swinging extravagantly as his powerful voice rose and fell. The crowds who came to these rallies responded to Graham and his message. He quickly accepted the invitation to go on the road with Youth for Christ, leaving West Springs Baptist Church behind after only a year as pastor. But the opportunity to reach vast numbers of souls had an undeniable appeal.

By 1949, the crusade had developed the format still familiar today to those who have attended Billy Graham revivals or watched them on television and taken it throughout the US with trips to Canada and Europe. The slick, show-biz savvy staging was present even in those early days, although far more modest than it would become in later years. An announcer would bring the acts on and off with the adroit manner of a ringmaster or vaudeville emcee – a parade of musicians, singers, Gospel duets and quartets and finally Billy himself. By all accounts, the style of his preaching has not changed radically over the years, smart adherence to the doctrine “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The climax of the evening was and is the altar call, the moment when the faithful impacted by the power of the sermon are asked to come forward and declare their commitment. In fact, the second most-cited statistic after the number of people who view the crusades - in person or on television – is the number of individuals who answer these altar calls.

When they came to Los Angeles in 1949, the stage was set for a breakthrough that would take Billy Graham and his crusades to another level altogether, though they couldn’t have known it at the time. On a vacant lot, they erected a massive tent that could seat 6,000 and settled in for a three-week crusade. The crowds were modest, and the crusade was soon able to tout the conversion of a couple of minor celebrities, a local radio cowboy preacher and an Olympian known more for tearing down a swastika at the Berlin Games in 1936 than for his athletic exploits.

Two things happened that changed the course of Graham’s public life. Two days before the start of the Los Angeles crusade, news that the Soviet Union had exploded their own atomic bomb rocked America. Already a fervent anti-communist, Graham gave that message new prominence and it lent an greater sense of urgency to his crusade.

More importantly, Graham somehow attracted the attention of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, living in his storied palace at San Simeon on the Pacific coast. Then 86, Hearst was not the all-powerful media overlord he had been in 1898 when he supposedly started the Spanish-American War so his chain of newspapers would have something incendiary about which to write. But Hearst – model for Orson Welles’ fictional Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane – retained enough stroke that when he sent out a two-word memo to his underlings that read “PUFF GRAHAM,” the impact was electric and immediate.

Suddenly, the tent crusade was attended by flash bulbs as reporters and photographers swarmed to Graham. Stories appeared on the AP and UPI wire services, and in Life , Time and Newsweek magazines. Big-time celebrities including Gene Autry and actress Jane Russell publicly associated themselves with Graham. The original three weeks run was extended to eight, and crowds soon overflowed the tent. When the crusade ended, an estimated 350,000 people had attended – and the legend was born.

By 1950, the fame of Billy Graham had spread further still, even though he would not make his first national radio broadcast until November of that year. It would be another year after that before he entered the nascent medium of television, a move that would prove critical to his larger ambitions.

Gov. Strom Thurmond invited Graham to stay at the Governor’s Mansion when he held a crusade at the University of South Carolina football stadium in 1950, attended by some 42,000. While he was there, Graham received an invitation to speak at his former school. Now called Bob Jones University, it had moved from Tennessee to Greenville, South Carolina in 1947. In a program held on campus before an overflow crowd, Graham was warmly introduced by school president Bob Jones, Jr. Before the decade was over, however, the position of the school towards their former student would undergo a remarkable transformation.

Although Dr. Bob Jones, Sr. had bestowed an honorary doctor of humanities degree on Graham in 1948, the decision to seek sponsorship from officials of other, non-fundamentalist religions for Graham’s New York crusade in 1957 brought him into sharp conflict with Bob Jones doctrine. Bob Jones Sr. said such outreach across denominational lines violated 2 John 9-11, which prohibits receiving in fellowship those who do “not abide in the teaching of Christ.”

Jonathan Pait, current spokesman for Bob Jones University, would not comment directly on these events that occurred years before he was associated with the school – years before he was even born, for that matter. But Pait was frank in describing the theological impasse that led to the split between Graham and Bob Jones.

“As I understand it, the problems arose when he began moving his crusades in a more ecumenical direction,” says Pait. “Having multiple types of theology to participate in his campaigns - liberal theologians as well as people of other religions who would join in those crusades - is basically giving credence to others with quite different beliefs.”

Although at the time Bob Jones (both senior and junior) insisted there was nothing personal in their position, and Billy Graham attested to his love and respect for both men, the controversy was played out against the backdrop of a broader split between fundamentalists and mainstream Christian churches. Not all of the participants in these disputes adhered to the principles of Christian charity professed by their leaders, and it didn’t help when Graham accepted honorary degrees from two Roman Catholic colleges and had his Boston campaign endorsed by Richard Cardinal Cushing.

It all came to a head when the Graham organization announced they would hold their only American crusade of 1966 in Greenville. The Southern Piedmont Crusade was held from March 3 to 14, 1966 at the mammoth new Textile Hall, drawing tens of thousands of participants – but presumably not any of the 3,800 students of Bob Jones who had been publicly ordered not to attend on threat of expulsion.

Just as the Pope in Rome often makes his views known through encyclicals, matters of faith on the Bob Jones campus are often proclaimed through chapel talks, a tradition begun by the founder and continued by his successor son and grandson. “ The Position of Bob Jones University in Regard to the Proposed Billy Graham Crusade in Greenville, A Chapel Talk by Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., on February 8, 1965 ” was the transcript of one such event that surfaced publicly that year. It proclaims, “The Bible commands that false teachers and men who deny the fundamentals of the faith should be accursed; that is, they shall be criticized and condemned. Billy approves them, Billy condones them, Billy recommends them… I think that Dr. Graham is doing more harm in the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man; that he is leading foolish and untaught Christians, simple people that do not know the Word of God, into disobedience to the Word of God.”

The key sentiment expressed in that 1965 chapel talk, “Dr. Graham is doing more harm in the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man,” is repeated to this day as an example of religious intolerance by Bob Jones, though the view makes a little more sense when viewed in context as a matter of doctrine – or at least it did before Bob Jones III endorsed Mitt Romney for president despite the fact he is a Mormon.

Beyond the story of the emergence of Billy Graham and the Greenville connection to the sideshow of his travails with Bob Jones University is the history of the relationships between the evangelist and the men who have served as president of the United States. Beginning with Truman, the Gibbs and Duffy book offers a plethora of details on the who, what, where, when, how and how much of these encounters.

In a curious move, the Mountain Xpress – the alternative newsweekly in Graham’s hometown of Asheville – commissioned evangelical Seth Dowland, who holds a doctorate in American religious history from Duke University and teaches in the school’s writing program, to write an article reviewing both books. He is much harder on Bothwell’s book than he is on the Gibbs and Duffy tome, perhaps because the latter work more closely coincides with his own views.

“Gibbs and Duffy narrate Graham’s rise to power as the story of an overeager but well-meaning preacher who did wonders for the powerful men to whom he ministered,” writes Dowland, who then offers a conclusion perhaps drawn from the book without citing any particular evidence: “Presidents loved Graham because he seemed utterly committed to the saving of souls.”

Dowland’s criticisms of Bothwell’s book are more pointed. “Overall, Bothwell allows Graham no room to grow and change,” he writes. “He focuses most of his book on the evangelist’s early career, when Graham’s politics lacked the nuance and ethical seriousness his later statements displayed. Graham learned from his mistakes - most notably after Watergate - and he recalibrated his relationship with the presidency.”

What Graham could not “recalibrate” was the devastating evidence about the nature of his relationship with Richard Nixon revealed by various White House tapes released over the years, one of which spurred Bothwell to write his book.

But if Dowland has any regard for the man who used to edit the newspaper in which his review appeared, it is not apparent – almost as if Mountain Xpress set out to distance themselves from the book and delegated the task to Dowland, who concludes, “It’s a shame that Bothwell’s book lacks nuance and depends on specious evidence, because it could have performed the vital service of offering an unflinching look at the harmful effects of religion in politics.”

For a contrasting point of view, we turn to journalist Michael O’McCarthy, a Greenville-based writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications and websites, including The Beat . In a review of the book for the Los Angeles Free Press , O’McCarthy writes, “Cecil Bothwell’s spare and well documented, unauthorized biography captures Graham’s rise from his family’s anti-Semitic, quick dealing legacy in the south of Charlotte, North Carolina to become the Crown Prince of Protestantism… Perhaps no other preacher broke through the barrier of church and state as did Graham, all too often in service to what President Dwight Eisenhower, one of his fondest worshippers, would come to call, ‘the military industrial complex.’” O’McCarthy’s conclusion, drawn from his appraisal of Bothwell’s book: “The truth is: Billy Graham never saw an American war he did not love!”

It goes on from there. Both reviewers note Graham’s advice during the Vietnam War that the US should bomb the dikes to flood North Vietnam; neither flinches from the declaration that such an action would have been a war crime. To that extent, neither book quite manages to take the full measure of the man in the pulpit. To chronicle a life can be a complicated task, and often things that will be understood in the fullness of time elude us today. The 28 years that have passed between the publication of Marshall Frady’s still useful biography and the emergence of these two new books suggest that while Graham is nearing the end of his natural life, his story will be grist for the historical mill for many decades to come.

For all his spiritual outreach over the decades, the life journey of Billy Graham might well be seen as a cautionary tale proving that “when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.”