https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/billy-graham-dead-evangelist-who-reached-millions-dies-at-99-1086864
Evangelist Billy Graham, Who Reached Millions, Dies at 99
6:04 AM PST 2/21/2018
by the Associated
Dubbed "America's pastor," he was a confidant to U.S. presidents from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
The Rev. Billy Graham, who transformed American religious life through his preaching and activism, becoming a counselor to presidents and the most widely heard Christian evangelist in history, died Wednesday. He was 99.
Graham, who long suffered from cancer, pneumonia and other ailments, died at his home in North Carolina, spokesman Mark DeMoss told The Associated Press.
More than anyone else, Graham built evangelicalism into a force that rivaled liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the United States. His leadership summits and crusades in more than 185 countries and territories forged powerful global links among conservative Christians, and threw a lifeline to believers in the communist-controlled Eastern bloc. Dubbed "America's pastor," he was a confidant to U.S. presidents from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
In 1983, President Reagan gave Graham the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. When the Billy Graham Museum and Library was dedicated in 2007 in Charlotte, former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton attended.
"When he prays with you in the Oval Office or upstairs in the White House, you feel he's praying for you, not the president," Clinton said at the ceremony.
Beyond Graham's public appearances, he reached untold millions through his pioneering use of prime-time telecasts, network radio, daily newspaper columns, evangelistic feature films and globe-girdling satellite TV hookups. Graham's message was not complex or unique, yet he preached with a conviction that won over audiences worldwide.
"The Bible says," was his catch phrase. His unquestioning belief in Scripture turned the Gospel into a "rapier" in his hands, he said.
A tall, striking man with thick hair, stark blue eyes and a firm jaw, Graham was a commanding presence at his crusades. He would make the altar call in his powerful baritone, asking the multitudes to stand, come down the aisles and publicly make "decisions for Christ," as a choir crooned the hymn "Just As I Am."
By his final crusade in 2005 in New York City, he had preached in person to more than 210 million people worldwide. No evangelist is expected to have his level of influence again.
"William Franklin Graham Jr. can safely be regarded as the best who ever lived at what he did," said William Martin, author of the Graham biography A Prophet With Honor.
Born Nov. 7, 1918, on his family's dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham came from a fundamentalist background that expected true Bible-believers to stay clear of Christians with even the most minor differences over Scripture. But as his crusades drew support from a widening array of Christian churches, he came to reject that view.
He joined in a then-emerging movement called New Evangelicalism, that abandoned the narrowness of fundamentalism to engage broader society.
Fundamentalists at the time excoriated the preacher for his new direction, and broke with him when he agreed to work with more liberal Christians in the 1950s.
Graham stood fast. He would not reject people who were sincere and shared at least some of his beliefs, Martin said. He wanted the widest hearing possible for his salvation message.
"The ecumenical movement has broadened my viewpoint and I recognize now that God has his people in all churches," he said in the early 1950s.
In 1957, he said, "I intend to go anywhere, sponsored by anybody, to preach the Gospel of Christ."
His approach helped evangelicals gain the influence they have today. Graham's path to becoming an evangelist began taking shape at age 16, when the Presbyterian-reared farmboy committed himself to Christ at a local tent revival.
"I did not feel any special emotion," he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am. ''I simply felt at peace," and thereafter, "the world looked different."
After high school, he enrolled at the fundamentalist Bob Jones College, but found the school stifling, and transferred to Florida Bible Institute in Tampa. There, he practiced sermonizing in a swamp, preaching to birds and alligators before tryouts with small churches. He still wasn't convinced he should be a preacher until a soul-searching, late-night ramble on a golf course.
"I finally gave in while pacing at midnight on the 18th hole," he said. "'All right, Lord,' I said, 'If you want me, you've got me.'"
Graham, who became a Southern Baptist, went on to study at Wheaton College, a prominent Christian liberal arts school in Illinois, where he met fellow student Ruth Bell, who had been raised in China where her father had been a Presbyterian medical missionary.
The two married in 1943, and he planned to become an Army chaplain. But he fell seriously ill, and by the time he recovered and could start the chaplain training program, World War II was nearly over.
Instead, he took a job organizing meetings in the U.S. and Europe with Youth for Christ, a group he helped found. He stood out then for his loud ties and suits, and a rapid delivery and swinging arms that won him the nickname "the Preaching Windmill."
A 1949 Los Angeles revival turned Graham into evangelism's rising star. Held in a tent dubbed the "Canvas Cathedral," Graham had been drawing adequate, but not spectacular crowds until one night when reporters and photographers descended. When Graham asked them why, a reporter said that legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst had ordered his papers to hype Graham. Graham said he never found out why.
The publicity gave him a national profile. Over the next decade, his massive crusades in England and New York catapulted him to international celebrity. His 12-week London campaign in 1954 defied expectations, drawing more than 2 million people and the respect of the British, many of whom had derided him before his arrival as little more than a slick salesman. Three years later, he held a crusade in New York's Madison Square Garden that was so popular it was extended from six to 16 weeks, capped off with a rally in Times Square that packed Broadway with more than 100,000 people.
The strain of so much preaching caused the already trim Graham to lose 30 pounds by the time the event ended. It remains his longest revival meeting ever.
As his public influence grew, the preacher's stands on the social issues of his day were watched closely by supporters and critics alike. One of the most pressing was the civil rights movement. Graham was no social activist and never joined marches, which led prominent Christians such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to publicly condemn Graham as too moderate. Still, Graham ended racially segregated seating at his Southern crusades in 1953, a year before the Supreme Court's school integration ruling, and long refused to visit South Africa while its white regime insisted on racially segregated meetings.
In a 2005 interview with The Associated Press, before his final crusade which was held in New York, Graham said he regretted that he didn't battle for civil rights more forcefully.
"I think I made a mistake when I didn't go to Selma" with many clergy who joined the historic Alabama march led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "I would like to have done more." Graham more robustly took on the cause of anti-Communism, making preaching against the atheist regime part of his sermons for years.
As America's most famous religious leader, he golfed with statesmen and entertainers and dined with royalty. Graham's relationships with U.S. presidents also boosted his ministry and became a source of pride for conservative Christians who were so often caricatured as backward. But those ties proved problematic when his close friend Richard Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal, leaving Graham devastated and baffled. He resolved to take a lower profile in the political world, going as far as discouraging the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a founder of the Moral Majority, from mixing religion and politics.
"Evangelicals can't be closely identified with any particular party or person. We have to stand in the middle, to preach to all the people, right and left," Graham said in 1981, according to Time magazine. "I haven't been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future."
Yet, in the 2012 election, with Graham mostly confined to his North Carolina home, he all but endorsed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. And the evangelist's ministry took out full-page ads in newspapers support a ballot referendum that would ban same-sex marriage.
His son, the Rev. Franklin Graham, who runs the ministry, said his father viewed the gay marriage question as a moral, not a political, issue. Graham's integrity was credited with salvaging the reputation of broadcast evangelism in the dark days of the late 1980s, after scandals befell TV preachers Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
He resolved early on never to be alone with a woman other than his wife. Instead of taking a share of the "love offerings" at his crusades, as was the custom, he earned a modest salary from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
His ministry was governed by an independent board that included successful Christian businessmen and other professionals — a stark departure from the widespread evangelical practice of packing boards with relatives and yes-men.
"Why, I could make a quarter of a million dollars a year in this field or in Hollywood if I wanted to," Graham said. "The offers I've had from Hollywood studios are amazing. But I just laughed. I told them I was staying with God."
While he succeeded in preserving his reputation, he could not completely shield his family from the impact of his work. He was on the road for months at a time, leaving Ruth at their mountainside home in Montreat, North Carolina, to raise their five children: Franklin, Virginia ("Gigi"), Anne, Ruth and Nelson ("Ned").
Anne Graham Lotz has said that her mother was effectively "a single parent." Ruth sometimes grew so lonely when Billy was traveling that she slept with his tweed jacket for comfort. But she said, "I'd rather have a little of Bill than a lot of any other man." She died in June 2007 at age 87.
"I will miss her terribly," Billy Graham said, "and look forward even more to the day I can join her in heaven."
In his later years, Graham visited communist Eastern Europe and increasingly appealed for world peace. He opened a 1983 convention of evangelists from 140 nations by urging the elimination of nuclear and biological weapons.
He told audiences in Czechoslovakia that "we must do all we can to preserve life and avoid war," although he opposed unilateral disarmament. In 1982, he went to Moscow to preach and attend a conference on world peace. During that visit, he said he saw no signs of Soviet religious persecution, a misguided attempt at diplomacy that brought scathing criticism from author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others.
"It's worth taking a risk for peace," Graham contended, although he was clearly stung by the controversy.
Graham's relationship with Nixon became an issue once again when tapes newly released in 2002 caught the preacher telling the president that Jews "don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country."
Graham apologized, saying he didn't recall ever having such feelings and asking the Jewish community to consider his actions above his words on that tape.
Health problems gradually slowed Graham, but he did not cease preaching.
In 1995, his son, Franklin, was named the ministry's leader. Along with the many honors he received from the evangelical community and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Graham received the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1982 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1996.
Graham will be buried by his wife, Ruth, at the Billy Graham Museum and Library.
"I have been asked, 'What is the secret?'" Graham had said of his preaching. "Is it showmanship, organization or what? The secret of my work is God. I would be nothing without him."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/21/billy-graham-obituary
Billy Graham obituary
American evangelist who preached to millions all over the world and advised US presidents
Alan Webster
Wed 21 Feb 2018 11.38 EST Last modified on Wed 21 Feb 2018 12.19 EST
Between 1947 and 2005, the US evangelist Billy Graham, who has died aged 99, conducted more than 400 crusades around the world, preaching to millions of people. He was one of the first western Christian leaders to speak beyond the iron curtain, first in Hungary, then in Poland and Russia. In 1973, more than a million people attended the closing ceremony of his crusade in Seoul, South Korea. He gained access, with great difficulty, to China in 1988 and North Korea four years later.
Like thousands of others in the UK, I first heard Graham at Earls Court stadium in 1966, on one of his London crusades. Though fewer had turned up than to Harringay stadium in 1954 (when he ministered to more than 1.3 million people in three months), the numbers were impressive. The glamour of expensive and skilful hype, lighting and music, and support from local religious leaders, drew the crowds.
Graham was handsome and eloquent, but his proclamations were strident, and his theme – “what would happen to you if you died on your way home?” – spoke of an unbelievably hardline deity. His favourite text then, and throughout his world tours, remained: “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” There was little place for a questioning faith or political action, but he had the ring of someone who was totally sincere.
He was gentler, more humane and more diplomatic than the west coast evangelical leaders who succeeded him in the US. Graham respected the sharp protests against materialism in the 1960s and student cynicism about the political process, especially during the Vietnam war. But he did not personally question that war, owing to his conviction that “godless communism must be defeated”. While it was fair enough for Graham to reply to a bearded student at Miami in 1969 who asked him to pray for “good friends and good weed”, “You can also get high on Jesus”, it was noticed that he never grappled with the liberation theology of Hispanic America.
He preached strongly that “Jesus was a nonconformist” but found it hard to criticise the cold war anti-liberation ideology of the establishment. He met the Sorbonne student leaders of 1968 in the US embassy in Paris, but could not share their longing for a new order and urged personal conversion as the answer to their problems.
In 1996, when he was presented with the US Congressional Gold Medal, he spoke of wondering whether the 21st century would be as bloody and tragic as its predecessor. “Our basic problems come from the human heart,” he said.
Eldest of four children of Morrow (nee Coffey) and William Franklin Graham Sr, he was born on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, North Carolina, then a poor, hard-pressed rural area. His family were strict Presbyterians, rigorous and righteous. They lost their savings in a bank collapse during the Depression. Childhood treats for Billy were being given a calf to raise and take to market, having a home-made crystal radio receiver and driving a goat cart.
His religious upbringing was strict. At 16 he went forward to commit himself at a Southern Baptist mission and later spoke in a jail about his experience of conversion. Part-time work as a brush salesman led him to try to give “a hard sell about Christ, as much as about Fuller’s brushes”. He studied at a series of evangelical colleges, including Wheaton College, Illinois, where he met Ruth McCue Bell, whom he married in 1943. In 1944, he became a full-time evangelist for the American Youth for Christ campaign. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, from which he drew a modest salary, was set up in 1950 (and is now headed by his son, Franklin).
He was now a well known evangelist, but his rural background remained one of his great strengths. As a child, he had mixed with black workers on his father’s farm and on a crusade at Chattanooga in 1953, he removed the customary ropes that separated white people from black people – the white head usher at the crusade resigned. Martin Luther King respected Graham’s role: “You stay in the stadiums, Billy, because you will have far more impact on the white establishment than if you march in the streets.” Graham refused to visit South Africa until apartheid regulations were lifted from his meetings, and said: “Christianity is not a white man’s religion … Christ belongs to all people.”
Crusade succeeded crusade, each involving meticulous organisation, massive fundraising and diplomatic briefings. After initial gaffes when he betrayed some of President Harry S Truman’s and President Richard Nixon’s remarks, he was meticulously briefed before meeting celebrities. In 2002, he apologised when the Nixon tapes revealed they had both been guilty of antisemitic comments.
Graham was always traditionalist and conservative. The radicalism of martyrs of his time – Archbishop Oscar Romero, King or Jonathan Daniels (the Episcopalian seminarian shot down in Alabama) – did not win his support. He would rarely invite world Christian leaders to state non-evangelical views from the platform at his crusades, and Graham’s converts were not guided towards a more generous, open understanding of Christianity, catholic, ecumenical and reasonable, as well as reformed. As the world became one village, Graham could have done more to help the church to become a tolerant, open and caring community.
Anglican archbishops were often asked how they felt about Graham, who preached to much larger crowds than they. Michael Ramsey said: “He may do some good, but I feel that his mission could show a greater awareness of the political and intellectual circumstances in which we are placed at the present time.” Robert Runcie was more friendly, and Graham went to Runcie’s enthronement in Canterbury in 1980, as he did to George Carey’s in 1991.
Runcie and Graham also got to know each other on ecumenical journeys in eastern Europe and Russia. Graham irritated some who heard him speak in Guildhall after receiving the Templeton Prize in 1982, when he implied that there was more religious freedom in Russia than there was in England because England had an established church – a view refuted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the following year. For a time he helped to finance the evangelical journal The Church of England Newspaper. Graham’s autobiography, Just As I Am (1997), makes much of the occasions when he met the Queen and the Queen Mother.
He advised US presidents from Truman to Obama. Watergate memoirs revealed his bitter-sweet relationship with Nixon, who told a trusting Graham that “he believed the Bible from end to end”. To Graham, “Watergate was a brief parenthesis” and he seemed more worried by Nixon’s language than by his dishonesty. But when Ronald Reagan asked him for an endorsement in 1980, Graham said: “Ron, I can’t do that. I think it would hurt us both.”
He gave private advice on the religious passages in presidential speeches and offered his prayers at times of crisis, especially for George HW Bush at the declaration of the Gulf war and Bill Clinton at the Oklahoma bombing. Even from his early days, Graham cast a spell over world leaders. In 1954 Winston Churchill, talking about life after death, had trusted Graham enough to confess: “I am a man without hope.”
Graham’s optimistic warmth, his astonishing energy and total assurance that God is, and loves this world, won him committed supporters. For decades he received more than 10,000 letters a week, often with small donations and promises of support. In his years of retirement and illness, he remained widely respected. Many were delighted when he was invited to the British embassy in Washington in 2001 for the ambassador, on behalf of the Queen, to award him an honorary knighthood. His simple vision of the Christian gospel and his absolute conviction of the truth of Christianity remained among the positive religious memories of many millions.
His wife, Ruth, died in 2007; he is survived by their three daughters, Virginia, Anne and Ruth, and two sons, Franklin and Ned.
• William Franklin Graham, evangelist, born 7 November 1918; died 21 February 2018
• The Very Rev Alan Webster died in 2007