Billy Graham

William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on November 7, 1918, on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, the eldest of four children of William Franklin Graham Sr. and Morrow Coffey Graham ^[1]. The family belonged to the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, and religion in the household was steady rather than fervent. Young Billy milked cows before dawn, played baseball with more enthusiasm than talent, and by his own later account showed little early sign of a preaching career ^[2].

The turning point came in the autumn of 1934, when the traveling evangelist Mordecai Ham held a series of revival meetings in Charlotte. The sixteen-year-old Graham attended reluctantly at first, then returned night after night, and made a personal commitment to Christianity at one of the services ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Billy Graham before that moment would have found an ordinary farm boy; afterward, his direction slowly but permanently changed.

After graduating from Sharon High School in 1936, Graham enrolled at Bob Jones College in Tennessee, but he chafed under its rigid rules and left after one semester. He transferred to the Florida Bible Institute near Tampa, where he practiced sermons alone in the swamps and preached his first public messages. He was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1939 ^[2]. Seeking a stronger academic grounding, he then studied anthropology at Wheaton College in Illinois, graduating in 1943 ^[1].

At Wheaton, Graham met Ruth McCue Bell, the daughter of medical missionaries who had served in China. The two married in August 1943, shortly after graduation, and settled in the Chicago area, where Graham briefly pastored a church in Western Springs, Illinois ^[3]. He soon took over a radio program called Songs in the Night and recruited the baritone George Beverly Shea, beginning a broadcast partnership that lasted decades.

Graham joined the newly formed Youth for Christ movement in 1945 as its first full-time evangelist, crisscrossing the United States and Britain to preach at rallies aimed at young people and returning servicemen ^[2]. From 1948 to 1952 he also served as president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis, then the youngest college president in the country, though itinerant preaching remained his real vocation ^[1].

National fame arrived suddenly in the fall of 1949. A tent campaign in Los Angeles, planned for three weeks, stretched to eight as crowds swelled, helped by the conversions of several local celebrities and by heavy coverage in the Hearst newspapers ^[4]. Almost overnight the 30-year-old preacher with the rapid delivery and pointed finger became a national figure. In 1950 he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis to organize his campaigns, radio broadcasts, and finances, and he launched the weekly Hour of Decision radio program the same year ^[3].

Any account of Billy Graham achievements begins with the crusades. His 1954 campaign at Harringay Arena in London ran for twelve weeks and drew more than two million attendees, establishing him as an international phenomenon ^[4]. Three years later, his New York crusade filled Madison Square Garden nightly for sixteen weeks, closed with a rally in Times Square, and marked the first time his meetings were broadcast on national television ^[2]. Over six decades he preached in more than 185 countries and territories, and his association estimated that nearly 215 million people heard him in person, with hundreds of millions more reached by radio, television, and film ^[3].

Graham insisted from 1953 onward that his American crusades be racially integrated, personally removing the ropes that separated Black and white sections at a Chattanooga meeting, and he later invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at the 1957 New York crusade ^[5]. He also carried his message behind the Iron Curtain, preaching in Hungary in 1977, in the Soviet Union in 1982 and again in 1984, and in North Korea in 1992, visits that drew both praise and criticism during the Cold War ^[4].

His institutional legacy reshaped American Protestantism. In 1956 he helped found the magazine Christianity Today, which became the flagship publication of evangelicalism ^[1]. He convened the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin and the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, a gathering that produced the influential Lausanne Covenant and linked evangelical leaders across the developing world ^[5]. Among many honors, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1996, and an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2001 ^[3].

Graham and Ruth raised five children, Virginia, Anne, Ruth, Franklin, and Nelson, at their mountain home in Montreat, North Carolina ^[3]. Ruth, a writer and poet, declined to adopt her husband's Baptist affiliation and remained Presbyterian throughout their 63-year marriage, a fact Graham cited with affection. Because he traveled for months at a time, Ruth carried most of the burden of raising the family, something Graham acknowledged with regret in his 1997 autobiography, Just As I Am ^[2].

He guarded his reputation with unusual care. In 1948, meeting with his team in Modesto, California, Graham adopted a set of rules later known as the Modesto Manifesto: he would never be alone with a woman other than his wife, his salary would be fixed by a board rather than drawn from offerings, attendance figures would not be inflated, and local churches would not be criticized ^[5]. The financial transparency of his organization helped him avoid the scandals that felled several televangelists in the 1980s.

His friendships with presidents brought both influence and trouble. He was close to Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and especially Richard Nixon, whose fall wounded him deeply. The release in 2002 of a 1972 Oval Office tape, in which Graham made disparaging remarks about Jewish influence in the media, prompted a public apology that he repeated in person to Jewish leaders ^[4]. Graham later said he wished he had steered clear of partisan politics altogether, advice he passed on to younger evangelists ^[2].

Graham kept preaching long after most contemporaries retired. His 1995 crusade in San Juan, Puerto Rico was transmitted by satellite to 185 countries, and he continued to draw enormous crowds into his eighties despite Parkinson's disease, hearing loss, and repeated hospitalizations ^[3]. In 2000 he formally handed leadership of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to his son Franklin Graham, though he remained its most visible face.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Graham delivered the principal address at the national prayer service in Washington National Cathedral, one of the last of his many appearances as an informal chaplain to the nation ^[4]. His final crusade was held in June 2005 at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in New York City, where roughly 230,000 people attended over three days ^[1].

Ruth Graham died in June 2007, shortly after the dedication of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. Graham spent his last decade quietly at home in Montreat, largely out of public view, writing several reflective books on aging and faith. He died there on February 21, 2018, at the age of 99 ^[3]. His body lay in honor in the United States Capitol Rotunda, only the fourth private citizen to receive that tribute, before burial beside Ruth at the library grounds in Charlotte ^[4].

Graham changed the scale and style of mass evangelism. Where earlier revivalists worked tents and tabernacles, he filled Wembley Stadium, Yankee Stadium, and a Seoul plaza where a 1973 gathering drew an estimated one million people in a single service, often cited as the largest crowd of his career ^[3]. He fused old-fashioned revival preaching with modern broadcasting, film production, and careful advance organization, a model that evangelists worldwide still follow.

Historians credit him with pulling conservative Protestantism out of its post-1925 isolation and into the American mainstream. By cooperating with mainline churches and Catholics in his crusades, he broke with hardline fundamentalists and helped define the broader movement now called evangelicalism ^[5]. Gallup polls placed him on the list of most admired men more than 60 times, far more than any other figure in the survey's history ^[1].

Assessments of his career note limits as well as reach. Critics questioned how many crusade conversions endured, and some historians fault his caution during the civil rights era, when he endorsed integration but declined to join protest marches ^[5]. Even so, the basic Billy Graham facts remain striking for anyone studying twentieth century religion: a farm boy from Charlotte who preached face to face to more people than anyone before him, advised twelve presidents, and left institutions, from Christianity Today to the Lausanne Movement, that outlived him. Any serious Billy Graham biography must reckon with both the preacher and the movement he came to embody ^[2].