America's Pastor

AMERICA’S PASTOR AMERICA’S PASTOR Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation Grant Wacker The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Grant Wacker All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Wacker, Grant, 1945– America’s pastor : Billy Graham and the shaping of a nation / Grant Wacker. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 05218- 5 (alk. paper) 1. Graham, Billy, 1918–. Christianity and culture— United States— History—20th century. I. Title. BV3785.G69W33 2014 269'.2092—dc23 [B] 2014014155 For Gretchen, Nicholas, and Charlie Stern Henry and Silas Beck Children’s children are the crown of old men. Proverbs 17:6 Contents Prologue 1 Introduction 5 1 Preacher 32 2 Icon 68 3 Southerner 102 4 Entrepreneur 137 5 Architect 168 6 Pilgrim 204 7 Pastor 248 8 Patriarch 283 Epilogue 312 Note on the Sources 319 Abbreviations 322 Notes 323 Ac know ledg ments 397 Index 401 AMERICA’S PASTOR But he had in his Pocket a Map of all ways leading to, or from the Celestial City; wherefore he struck a Light (for he never goes also without his tinder- box). —John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678/1684 Prologue Billy and I descended on New York City at the same time, the summer of 1957. He was thirty-eight and about to clinch his reputation as the premier evangelist of twentieth-century America. I was twelve and about to taste freedom. But not that summer. One humid night my parents packed themselves and me— entirely without my permission— into a subway car bound for Madison Square Garden. The Great Man was preaching. I was a kid from a small town in southwest Missouri, and that was the biggest crowd I had ever seen. I remember that the choir alone seemed larger than my whole church. After a lot of music, including a dirgeful rendering of “The Old Rugged Cross” by “Bev” Shea, Graham fi nally stepped to the pulpit. The Garden fell silent. The anticipation was electric. He was hand- some and charismatic and funny. Focusing on the great number of young folks in the audience, he quipped something about puppy love being utterly real to the puppy. The audience roared. By the end of the sermon, however, he had grown deadly serious. When he invited people to stand up and walk to the front to commit or recommit their lives to Christ, hundreds surged forward. For a while I thought I should go too, but then I remembered that I had already been saved when I was four. Beyond that, not much stuck. Soon our fi rst family trip to the Big Apple was over and we headed back home. At the time I had no idea what the big whoop was all about. I eventually realized, however, that Graham’s core constituents— the millions of mostly white, middle- class, moderately con- servative Protestants we might call Heartland Americans— did not share my puzzlement. They knew exactly what it was all about. America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation explores Graham’s place in the great gulf streams of American history in the long second half of the twentieth century. It is not a conventional biography. Numerous studies of Graham’s life or aspects of it already grace the shelves of public libraries, and many of them are excellent. My aim is different. I try to step back and ask another question. Why does Graham matter? What does his story say about the construction of charismatic leadership? More important, what does it say about how evangelical religion became so 2 Prologue pervasive? Most important, what does it say about the relation between religion and American culture itself? The short answer to all three of these questions is, a great deal. Graham’s long life (born 1918) and sixty- year ministry (roughly 1945 to 2005) offer a means for hearing the conversa- tions of the age. But there is more. Graham’s story not only registered other Americans’ stories but also shaped them. I do not suppose that he exercised much infl u- ence in the formation of public policy. For that matter, with the possible exception of Martin Luther King, Jr., I do not suppose that any clergy per- son did. But I do think Graham exercised infl uence in another, subtle, and deep way. He played a large role in the shaping of public consciousness: how Americans perceived the world around them, how they interpreted those perceptions, and then how they acted upon them. He gave them tools to help them see themselves as good Christians, good Americans, and good citizens of the modern world all at the same time. He also called them to accountability on each of those scores. Graham did not speak for everyone. Millions knew or cared nothing about him. But many millions did. In a very real sense those millions— the ones I variously call Heartlanders, ordinary Americans, or simply supporters— constitute along with Graham himself one of the two main players in this narrative. The days are long gone when historians can credibly pretend to hold a mirror up to the past and simply report what they observe. They see what they are prepared to see. So it is only fair to let readers know ahead of time what I think I see in Graham’s career. On one hand, Graham ranks with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope John Paul II as one of the most creatively infl uential Christians of the twentieth century. One could make a case for others, too, such as Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Mother Teresa, but all of them spoke for a more limited constituency and for a briefer stretch of time. On the other hand, Graham was not a marble statue, and he was the fi rst to say so. He made mistakes, and some of them were grievous. “A hero,” said the historian Michael Kazin of three-time failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, “is not a man whose life is free of errors and contradictions.” Rather, he is (quoting classicist Moses Hadas), “ ‘a man whose career has somehow enlarged the horizons of what is possible for humanity.’ . A man without fl aws, adds Hadas, ‘is not apt to possess the determined energy heroism requires.’ ”1 Graham’s achievements loom all the larger when we recognize that he did not tumble from the sky fully formed and perfectly chiseled like an American Moses. Prologue 3 He grew gradually, and sometimes fi tfully, into the imposing fi gure that millions of Americans carved for him and that he carved for himself. Since feelings about Graham run strong, I should say a few words about my method and point of view. As for method, I hope simply to be fair. That means that I try to treat him as I hope others would treat me, by giving him the benefi t of the doubt when the evidence allows it but also by telling the truth without fl inching when it does not. Graham made clear to historians and journalists that he wanted it no other way. I have talked about the project with members of Graham’s family and several of his close associ- ates. They caught factual errors and offered perspectives I had not thought about, but the overall interpretation is mine alone. Readers on Graham’s left will fi nd my account too positive, and those on his right too negative. Long ago I decided that I would have to proceed as my grandmother pro- ceeded onto freeways: buckle up, close your eyes, and just do it. As for point of view, I count myself a partisan of the same evangelical tradition Graham represented, especially the irenic, inclusive, pragmatic form of it that he came to symbolize in the later years of his public ministry. That identifi cation comes from my upbringing and from adult choice. To be sure— to steal a line from the historian Ron Wells— I have often thought of resigning from the movement, but I did not know where to send the let- ter. Besides, who else would have me? Sunday mornings usually fi nd my wife and me in our accustomed pew in a small United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, seated on the cemetery side of the building. Just outside the window, the weather- beaten tombstones dating back to 1859 remind me of the enduring power of the gospel message, generation after generation. At the same time, I know that the eroded tombstones with no names at all may well mark the graves of Methodist slaves. They remind me of the tradition’s failings. I started this Prologue with a personal recollection because I thought my experience represented many others. I will close the same way and for the same reason. In the summer of 2009, I escorted my four- year- old grand- daughter, Gretchen, to the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mostly, we wanted to see the famous talking cow just inside the entrance. After a long time— a very long time— admiring the cow, and then walking through several rooms of exhibits celebrating (and celebrating is the right word) the evangelist’s life, we ended up, as all visitors do, in a theater with an enormous cinema screen. Across the screen fl ashed a five- minute clip of Graham, in his prime, preaching to a vast stadium audience.

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