I suppose today was among Billy Graham's happiest. "I’ll be glad when the moment comes when the Lord calls me to heaven," he once remarked. "I get tired down here sometimes." That, I can imagine, given the furious pace at which he moved.
Some of his success was as much due to luck as activity. Although he had gained a respectable reputation in evangelical circles by 1949, also in that year "newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst … had decided that America needed a spiritual awakening," notes the Washington Post's obituary. Graham happened to be
preaching in Los Angeles and he "caught the eye" of Hearst, who next ordered his editors nationwide to "Puff Graham."
Graham inherited a fundamentalist community that, by the mid-20th century, had been ravaged by overindulgence. "The profession had become badly tarnished … for a variety of reasons," writes the Post, among which "were the rigid fundamentalist religious dogma held up to ridicule in the Scopes 'monkey' trial of the 1920s and the unscrupulous excesses of itinerant evangelists traveling the 'tent-and-sawdust circuit' as portrayed in the Sinclair Lewis novel 'Elmer Gantry.'" I recently read a biography of Clarence Darrow, whose letter from Eugene Debs — about the Scripture-thumping William Jennings Bryan — gives a flavor of the anti-fundamentalist sentiment building at the time. Debs charged that Bryan was a "shallow-minded mouther of empty phrases," a "pious, canting mountebank," a "prophet of the stone age" who was but one in the "age-old rule of crowning frauds, hypocrites, time-servers and scoundrels."
As for "Elmer Gantry" — one of my all-time favorite films, in part because as a wee lad I fell in love with its prostituting femme fatale, Shirley Jones — I wonder if it also affected Graham. From the pulpit, said Burt Lancaster as the fiery Gantry, "I know nothing of theosophy, philosophy, psychology, ideology or any other ology." Said Graham, once, "I’m not here to teach psychology or philosophy or theology."
The most delicious passage in the Post's obit is this: "In 1950, Mr. Graham made his first White House visit, calling on President Harry S. Truman, who was cool to the young evangelist. When Mr. Graham suggested that they 'have a word of prayer' together, the president answered, 'I don't suppose it could do any harm.'"
(Oh, and Graham "was not invited back during the Truman administration.")
A regular feature of Graham's evangelical spiel was, "Are you frustrated, bewildered, dejected, breaking under the strains of life? Then listen for a moment to me. Say yes to the savior tonight, and in a moment you will know such comfort as you have never known." It would have been pleasant had his audiences experienced those metamorphoses. In my experience with evangelical Christians, however, they are far from earthly bliss: calm, collected, uplifted, floating along in the river of life. They are instead petty, judgmental and seemingly miserable.
Still, Billy Graham was more honorable than most at what he did; he managed to steer clear of today's evangelical spitefulness, bigotry and hate. (It's a shame his son failed to catch some of that spirit.) With Graham's passing, who of any note is left in the evangelical community who sounds more like their Savior than Satan?