Evangelist Billy Graham leaves the White House
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"I may be just a small item on the back page of heaven's newspaper," says Graham modestly. But on earth he has already got enough newspaper publicity to make both Hollywood and the circus envious. Five full-length movies in which he appears, a weekly radio program, broadcast on nearly 1,000 stations, and a daily newspaper column syndicated in 99 newspapers, keep a steady stream of converts "deciding for Christ" every week. Tycoons listen to him respectfully, and grey-headed clerics sit at his feet. The humble send him gifts, and the great ones seek him out. Churchill invited him to Downing Street, and Eisenhower keeps one of Billy's red leather Bibles at his bedside. By all indications, that is just the beginning of a career that is making this Baptist from North Carolina one of the greatest religious influences of his time.
Billy Is Different. From Savonarola to Billy Sunday, evangelists have exhorted sinners to repentance and preached salvation as a right-now, yes-or-no decision. The hot Gospel played a major part in the making of America, when churches were fewer, distances vast and life hard. But upper-crust Christians tend to regard the sweaty urgency of evangelistic Christianity as frequently hypocritical and always in bad taste. Billy Graham is different.
He preaches with his shirt collar unbuttoned, so that "my Adam's apple can move up and down." Yet he always looks immaculately pressed and groomed. He is surrounded by electronics—a tiny portable microphone to pick up his voice while he preaches (with a wire clipped to his belt loop), batteries of Dictaphones for dictation, the whole Bible on records. And yet he never sounds mechanical and often seems oldfashioned. He unblushingly applies the hard-sell technique to God ("I am selling," he says, "the greatest product in the world; why shouldn't it be promoted as well as soap?"). And yet such eminently low-pressure, dignity-bound clerics as the Archbishop of Canterbury have given Graham their blessing. A farewell dinner given for him in London this spring included 70 peers and peeresses, and even the austerely intellectual Manchester Guardian admitted, "He has a holy simplicity."
How does he do it? Billy would be able to answer that one right off, and with deep sincerity: by the grace of God. "If God should take His hands off my life," says Billy, "my lips would turn to clay. I'm no great intellectual, and there are thousands of men who are better preachers than I am. You can't explain me if you leave out the supernatural. I am but a tool of God."
The Conversion. The pious parents of William Franklin Graham Jr. planted his feet firmly on the path of truth and righteousness. His farmer father once gave him a hiding in church with his broad leather belt for fidgeting during the sermon. The day beer was taken off Prohibition, Billy's father went to town and bought a case. Then, in an awesome atmosphere of ritual sacrifice, he forced Billy and one of his sisters to guzzle bottle after bottle until they were sick. "It was awful," recalls Billy. He has never touched it since.