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Which is what finally happened. Toronto, says Franklin, had "kind of got Daddy thinking." One night, after they had preached a joint crusade in, of all places, Saskatoon, Billy called him to his hotel room. "He said, 'Franklin, I'm really dreading the board meeting that's coming,'" because his ill health had made "some changes" necessary. He produced a sheaf of letters he had received from executive-committee members, letters he said he had thus far shared only with Ruth. They had a common thread, he explained,"...and that's that you're to be the one to take it over. And, Franklin, I agree with them, and if I present this to the board I want to know what you're going to say." Franklin did not hesitate. "I said, 'Daddy, if this is what you feel in your heart, I would accept that.' We had prayer, and we discussed some general things."
Last Nov. 7, on Billy's birthday, the 32-member B.G.E.A. board announced that it had voted, unanimously, to name William Franklin Graham III vice chair, with direct succession as chair and chief executive officer "should his father ever become incapacitated." The disposition that had seemed assured at the moment of Franklin's birth in 1952 had finally come to pass.
There are some, however, who might question the worth of his inheritance. The revivalist, traditionalist branch of American Christianity that Billy Graham led from the obscurity in which it had languished roughly since the 1925 Monkey Trial is now the most vital and aggressive spiritual force on the national landscape. A 4,000-respondent poll by the University of Akron lists Evangelical Protestant as the most common religious self-identification in the U.S. (26%), followed by Catholic (23%) and mainline Protestant (17%). Beliefs closely associated with Evangelicalism--that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ, and that the Bible is inerrant, or utterly truthful--are held by almost half of all Americans. And yet the Graham influence over this important movement is not what it used to be. Evangelicals have never been a single church with a hierarchy, explains Mark Noll, director of the Institute for Evangelical Studies at Illinois' Wheaton College, but rather "a network of networks." During his extended prime, Billy spoke for many of these. If his gradual journey from a narrowly exclusive vision of Christianity to the embrace of almost anybody willing to accept Jesus alienated the movement's Fundamentalist wing, it brought untold numbers into the fold. It resonated particularly well during the prosperous post-World War II years, with the emphasis on American unity.