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A. Nixon offered me any job I wanted. I said, "Dick, I do not want any job. God called me to preach." Johnson offered me the ambassadorship to Israel. Later on, sitting beside Golda Meir at a dinner at the White House, I said, "I am not the man. God called me to preach." And Golda Meir reached and grabbed my hand. She was so thrilled. I told Johnson, "The Middle East would blow up if I went over there."
Q. What kept you from throwing in your hat with the Christian right, the Moral Majority?
A. I knew the great dangers that being a political partisan has for an evangelist or a preacher of the gospel. People say, "Well, you have been friends with all these Republican Presidents." But I have been friends with Democrats too. I am a registered Democrat. So I was determined to be just as neutral as I could be in those things. I also remember Jerry Falwell flew down here to Montreat to see me about the Moral Majority. He said, "Billy, I want to tell you, you stay out of Moral Majority. You have too big a ministry to get bogged down in politics."
Q. You have met the Pope twice. Do you share his views of spiritual revival in Eastern Europe and elsewhere?
; A. I would say that there are a great many parallels. I remember the first time I was with him in 1981. He reached his hand out, and he grabbed my thumb, like this ((grabs his left thumb with his right hand)). And he said, "We are brothers."
Now I have spent considerable time with the people around him. I could sense they recognize that they have an affinity with Evangelicals. They have suddenly realized that these are the people who are closest to them theologically.
Q. Some of your brethren in the Southern Baptist Convention have expressed outrage at your meeting with prominent Roman Catholics.
A. There used to be big problems. But now I have reconciled in my mind that God has his people in all kinds of places and all kinds of churches and groups. I have found many people in the Roman Catholic Church, both clergy and laity, who I believe are born-again Christians. They may hold different theological views than I hold, but I believe they are in the body of Christ. So I consider them brothers and sisters in Christ. And, as my wife has often said, we have never received an ugly letter from a Roman Catholic.
Q. Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart are nationally known Christian leaders who have fallen from their pedestals. I know you have no desire to judge them, but what accounts for their fall?
A. I do not think there is a single element. If you would name one word, you would say sin and the temptations of the evil one, Satan. Because we are all tempted. I think if they had realized what was happening and turned to the Lord in the deepest part of their lives, they would not have fallen. Of course, when a person becomes what they were on television and becomes a celebrity, he faces a special kind of temptation, a special time of vulnerability because you become a target for anybody who is jealous or anybody who is disloyal in the organization.