God's Billy Pulpit

By NANCY GIBBS and RICHARD N. OSTLING/MONTREAT

What is it in this man, in his urgent voice and eager eyes, in the message and the messenger, that overwhelms even those who are predisposed to distrust him? Long ago, Billy Graham gave up the shiny suits and technicolor ties of the brash young evangelist; the silver mane is thinner now, the step may falter a bit, he no longer prowls the stage like a lynx. In his preaching as well, the temperatures of hellfire have been reduced, the volume turned down. Graham knows he needs to save his strength: he is fighting Parkinson's disease, a progressive nervous disorder that has already made it impossible for him to drive or write by hand. But while he has learned to number his days, Graham intends to make the most of them: "The New Testament says nothing of Apostles who retired and took it easy."

Numbers, poets complain, are soulless things, the anonymous rungs of infinity. But it is hard to talk about Billy Graham, the great reaper of souls, without talking about numbers. This is the man who has preached in person to more people than any human being who has ever lived. What began in country churches and trailer parks and circus tents moved through cathedrals and stadiums and the world's vast public squares, where he has called upon more than 100,000,000 people to "accept Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour."

There may have been cleverer preachers and wiser ones, those whose messages seemed safe, logic sound. But never in history has a preacher moved so many people to act on the "invitation," that mysterious spiritual transaction that concludes every revival meeting. Over the years, 2,874,082 men and women have stepped forward, according to his staff's careful count. In Moscow a year ago, a fourth of his 155,500 listeners answered the call. "I don't know why God has allowed me to have this," Graham says. "I'll have to ask him when I get to heaven."

Billy Graham turned 75 this week, an occasion for some reckoning of a life and career full of blessings and contradictions. Everyone has a preferred ; description. George Bush called him "America's pastor." Harry Truman called him a "counterfeit" and publicity seeker. Pat Boone considers him "the greatest person since Jesus." Fundamentalist leader Bob Jones III says Graham "has done more harm to the cause of Christ than any other living man." Biographer William Martin calls him "an icon not just of American Christianity but of America itself."

Weathering both applause and derision, Graham has through the years become America's perennial deus ex machina, perpetually in motion, sweeping in to lift up spirits befuddled by modernity. When Presidents need to pray, it is Graham whom they call; he ministered to Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, spent the night with the Bushes on the eve of the Gulf War. Richard Nixon offered him the ambassadorship to Israel at a meeting with Golda Meir. "I said the Mideast would blow up if I went over there," Graham recalls. "Golda then reached under the table and squeezed my hand. She was greatly relieved." When Billy arrived for a crusade in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1989, Hillary Rodham Clinton invited him to lunch. "I don't eat with beautiful women alone," Billy told her, so they met in a hotel dining room and talked for a couple of hours.

Moral authorities have come and gone, but Graham has endured, his honor intact despite his proximity to the shattering temptations of power. From the start, Graham presented to skeptics and believers alike a raucous, muscular Christianity, full of fire and free of doubt. Through it all, his message has been essentially the same. Each person is sinful before God, a predicament that can turn to redemption through faith in Jesus Christ and his death on the Cross. And Graham is the master marketer of that faith.

The act of preaching it, however, has always taken its toll, especially these days. "There have been times . . . I've come down from the platform absolutely exhausted," he says. "I feel like I've been wrestling with the devil, who has been doing everything in his power to keep those people from getting a clear message of the Gospel." At the moment he gives the invitation, he explains, "some sort of physical energy goes out of me and I feel terribly weak. I'm depleted." After a crusade he returns to relax with his wife Ruth in the rambling log home that she designed years ago as their sanctuary. It sits up in the Blue Ridge Mountains above Montreat, North Carolina, a retreat from the demands that press upon him continually.

The need to rest, of course, falls prey to the call to minister. In a 12-day stretch last June, he visited John Connally in a Texas hospital, escaped to a quiet hotel in southern France to find the time and space to work on his memoirs, immediately returned to Texas to preach at Connally's funeral, flew back to France, then to California to conduct Pat Nixon's funeral, then returned to France once again, too tired to get much work done. "I found that this Parkinson's does slow you down," he says, "whether you want to slow down or not." Mayo Clinic doctors tell him he can stand and preach for, at most, five more years.

That does not leave him much time. Graham's legacy will be measured not only in the lives he has changed but in the cause he has championed. If modern evangelicalism is in many ways Graham's passionate creation, it could suffer grievously once he is gone. A war over either the social agenda of the religious right or the theological assertions of the Fundamentalists could rend the movement that he held together almost against its fractious nature.

There are those who say he will never retire, including Graham himself. Yet back in 1952, three years after he had arrived as a national spiritual leader at the age of 30, he was so exhausted that he wasn't sure he could continue much longer. "I've always thought my life would be a short one," he told a group of churchmen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "I don't think my ministry will be long. I think God allowed me to come for a moment and it will be over soon."

Four decades later, it's not over yet. William Franklin Graham Jr. grew up on a North Carolina dairy farm, the son of pious parents who believed in spankings and Bible readings and persistent instruction in clean living. In 1933, on the day Prohibition was repealed, his father made Billy and his sister Catherine drink beer until they vomited, an early exercise in aversion therapy that lasted a lifetime.

Young Billy Frank was a big reader but a mediocre student who dreamed of becoming a big-league baseball player. But destiny had other plans for him, as Martin recounts in his exhaustively researched, revelatory biography A Prophet with Honor (Morrow). One day in 1934, 30 or so of the local farmers, squeezed by the Depression and despairing of their future, gathered at the Graham farm for a day of prayer. When Billy arrived home after school and saw the crowd in the grove, he explained to a friend, "Oh, I guess they are just some fanatics % who talked Dad into letting them use the place." Yet it was only a few months later that Billy had his own conversion experience. "I didn't have any tears, I didn't have any emotion, I didn't hear any thunder, there was no lightning," he says. "But right there, I made my decision for Christ. It was as simple as that, and as conclusive."

It didn't look exactly simple at first: he was turned down for membership in a church youth group on the grounds that he was "just too worldly." After graduation he enrolled at Bob Jones College, a Bible boot camp in Tennessee where hand holding was forbidden, and dating was limited to chaperoned chats in a public parlor. Between the rules and the course work, Graham soon found himself on the brink of expulsion and thought about transferring. The legendary Jones warned him about throwing his life away: "At best, all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks." Then he tempted him. "You have a voice that pulls," he told the young man. "God can use that voice of yours. He can use it mightily."

Such prophecy notwithstanding, Graham fled south to the Florida Bible Institute, where he could play golf and go canoeing and court a pretty classmate named Emily Cavanaugh. Her decision to break off their engagement hit Billy hard. "She wanted to marry a man who was going to amount to something," Graham's brother Melvin told Martin. The disappointment planted in Graham a determination to prove her wrong; it ripened alongside his commitment to discerning, and obeying, God's will. He would practice sermons aloud in old sheds or in a canoe in the middle of a lake. He ate a quarter- pound of butter a day to try to spread some bulk across his lanky frame, and he worked on his gestures and facial expressions as he traveled to tiny churches or declaimed outside saloons frequented by drunkards and prostitutes, sharing the Gospel.

Even early on, friends sensed in him an ability to move people that owed less to intellect than to the tug of sincerity. His sermons in those days were highly colorful and factually creative, to a point that would haunt him in later years. Heaven, he used to explain, measured 1,600 sq. mi.: "We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we'll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible." Decades later, the vision has matured. "I think heaven is going to be a place beyond anything we can imagine, or anyone in Hollywood or . on Broadway can imagine," he says now. "There is a passage in Revelation that says we will serve God in heaven. We're not going to have somebody fan us or sit around on a beach somewhere."

The chance to broaden his education came in 1940, when he won a scholarship to Wheaton College in Illinois, then as now the leading undergraduate institution of Evangelicalism. There he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of missionaries to China who herself wanted to go and evangelize in Tibet. Graham talked her out of it, arguing that she knew God wanted them to marry, so "I'll lead and you do the following."

For his part, Billy says Ruth "was the one who had the greatest influence in urging me to be an evangelist."

Ruth: "I thought God called you."

Billy: "Well, he told me through you too."

After Wheaton and a brief stint in a small church, Graham joined Youth for Christ International, a "para-church" group of vigorous young evangelists who would travel the country, and soon the world, working with churches to stage revival meetings to ever larger crowds. In the immediate postwar years, there seemed to be a hunger for the virile, vibrant call to faith that Graham and his friends represented. On and on they came, until as many as a million kids a week were attending such revival meetings around the country. The YFC rallies included blaring bands, quiz shows, horse acts, emcees with bow ties that lit up. As for Graham, so loud and fast was his delivery that journalists called him "God's Machine Gun." "Christian vaudeville," sniffed skeptics.

As his fame spread, first in evangelical circles and later nationally and internationally, Graham and his friends understood the importance of avoiding the hazards that, then and later, would disgrace other freelance preachers. One day in 1948, Graham gathered his tiny retinue in a Modesto, California, hotel room to inoculate them against temptation. To prevent sexual rumors, each agreed never again to be alone with a woman other than his wife. The "Modesto Manifesto" also pledged honest statistical reports and open finances. The money setup was further cleansed in 1950 after the Atlanta Constitution ran a photo of Graham next to a picture of ushers with sackfuls of cash.

"I said never again," recalls Graham, who put everyone on straight salary and later set up a board dominated by outsiders. (Graham has, however, ministered to his wayward fellow preachers; after Jim Bakker's fall from grace, he quietly visited the imprisoned televangelist in Minnesota for a prayer session.) For years Graham's annual salary was $69,150 plus a $23,050 housing allowance, but last April his board raised that to $101,250 plus $33,750. He was given homes in Florida and California but donated them to Christian causes.

Graham always appreciated the importance both of appearances and of self- promotion. Along the way he won some unlikely backers, among the most useful William Randolph Hearst. The old reprobate publisher was so taken with the evangelist's patriotism and call for spiritual renewal that he telegraphed his editors around the country: "Puff Graham." TIME for its part declared in 1949 that no one since Billy Sunday had wielded "the revival sickle" as successfully as this "blond, trumpet-lunged North Carolinian."

Even as Graham's preaching grew more confident, his concern about his intellectual preparation lingered. But when his friend and fellow YFC revivalist Charles Templeton urged him to come to Princeton Theological Seminary and lay a deeper academic foundation for his preaching, Graham balked. When they met on their travels, they fell into deep debates, with Templeton now armed with philosophy, anthropology and a willingness to read the Bible as metaphor. Graham found he couldn't muster the logical responses.

As Martin tells it, this led to a spiritual and intellectual turning point. "Chuck, look, I haven't a good enough mind to settle these questions," Graham finally declared. "The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides." Graham concluded that "I don't have the time, the inclination or the set of mind to pursue them. I found that if I say 'The Bible says' and 'God says,' I get results. I have decided I'm not going to wrestle with these questions any longer."

Templeton charged him with committing intellectual suicide. But Graham came to believe doubt was a dangerous distraction from his calling. He decided the Bible was the one true Word in its entirety and never wavered. Looking back today, Graham says, "I had one great failure, and that was intellectual. I should have gone on to school. But I would talk to people about that, and they'd say, Oh no, go on with what you're doing, and let others do that. I do regret I didn't do enough reading, enough study, both formal and informal."

That does not mean he makes any apologies for his belief in the Bible as the literal Word of God, a conviction that confounds his critics. "I would never seek to solve the ethical problems of the 20th century by quoting a passage of Holy Scripture, and I read the Bible every day," says liberal Episcopal Bishop John Spong of Newark, New Jersey, who used to deliver newspapers to the Graham farm as a boy in North Carolina. "I wouldn't invest a book that was written between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 150 with that kind of moral authority." Graham, for his part, wouldn't think of doing otherwise.

His Biblical purity, however, did not protect him from conservative attacks. Over the years, strict Fundamentalists came to see Graham as a traitor for his willingness to work with everyone -- Catholics, Anglicans, even liberal modernists -- to bring the unchurched into the tent. "Fundamentalist is a grand and wonderful word," Graham says now, "but it got off track and into so many extreme positions." Their hostility pained him far more than the sneers of liberals. "I felt," Graham admits, "like my own brothers had turned against me."

If Graham's power as a spiritual leader came from authenticity and fervent conviction, it did not mean he was incapable of change. In the 1950s Graham's warnings about a diabolically inspired Soviet empire helped inspire his frightened audience to seek solace and protection in faith. By the 1980s he was joining the peace movement. Graham was pilloried in 1982 for speaking to a staged "peace" conference in the Soviet Union and resolutely downplaying religious repression. His supporters argued that in private he lobbied the Kremlin on behalf of Jewish and Christian prisoners. Ruth Graham, herself fervently anticommunist, opposed her husband's strategy, but it succeeded in gaining him access to preach in Eastern Europe. She now says, "Jesus said go into all the world and preach the Gospel, not just the capitalist world. I mean, I was dead wrong."

Back at home Graham was always an interested, although cautious, student of politics. In public he was careful to keep his role spiritual: it took an act of Congress in 1952 for Graham to be allowed to hold the first religious service on the Capitol steps. But in private he pestered Truman about the need to turn back communism in Korea and encouraged Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. According to Martin, so involved was he in counseling his friend Richard Nixon that the defeated candidate would write in 1960, "I have often told friends that when you went into the ministry, politics lost one of its potentially greatest practitioners."

In recent years, there has come a curious reversal. Fundamentalist leaders who once shunned the political realm began to move forcefully into it, bearing a moral agenda for family values and school prayer, against abortion and gay rights. And Graham, in a sense, returned to the pure power of the pulpit, preaching as forcefully as ever of the need for moral renewal but without allying himself with the political activism of the religious right. "I can identify with them on theology, probably, in many areas," he says, "but in the political emphases they have, I don't, because I don't think Jesus or the Apostles took sides in the political arenas of their day." He opposes abortion except in cases involving rape, incest or danger to the mother's life, but he is critical of Operation Rescue. "I think they have gone much too far, and their cause has been hurt. The tactics ought to be prayer and discussion."

Critics on the left are just as likely as those on the right to demand that he take a public stand. "I don't think you can save souls without working for justice," says Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. "I hear Billy Graham as interested in saving souls of the poor but not interested in changing the conditions that create the poverty."

But social commentary has never been the core of Graham's mission. His ministry rests on the notion that if individuals are brought to God and their lives transformed, they in turn will go out and transform society. That priority, and even more his zeal for social orderliness, often kept Graham on the sidelines, particularly during the civil rights movement. Though he insisted on racially integrated seating at his revival meetings, Graham says Martin Luther King Jr. himself advised in a lengthy talk that "if you go to the streets, your people will desert you, and you won't have the opportunity to have these integrated crusades." But then and ever since, he has been criticized for his role. "He should have been more deeply involved earlier on," argues Dean Joseph Hough Jr. of Vanderbilt University's Divinity School. "Had he been, he could have had quite an impact."

To this day, the spotlight on Graham is so bright that spiritual gestures are taken as political statements. "I was distraught and offended when he spent the night in the White House before Bush launched Desert Storm," says Alan Neely, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. "I saw that as Graham giving his sanction for what was about to take place. I don't think that's the role of the Christian minister."

His congregation of past Presidents sees it rather differently. "Billy came to the White House to give me the kind of reassurance that was important in decisions and challenges at home and abroad," says Gerald Ford. "Whenever you were with Billy, you had a special feeling that he was there to give you help and guidance in meeting your problems."

Graham is intent on saving time for his family, time he rarely had for them when he was traveling at least half the year. Each day becomes precious. "It doesn't make me feel any different, turning 75, than when I turned 45," he muses. "But when I see pictures of my 19 grandchildren and four great- grandchildren, I know some time has passed. I let days like that slip by and try to forget it. I'm not looking backward. I'm looking to the future."

The ceaseless demands leave him with hard decisions to make. He wants to preach redemption to as many people as possible while he still can: he is already committed to Atlanta, Cleveland, Ohio and Tokyo for next year. Then comes a career climax, a 1995 revival meeting that will span the entire globe at once. In this technological Pentecost, sermons will be translated into dozens of languages and transmitted by satellite TV to about 130 nations -- possibly including mainland China.

And yet achievements and the numbers, mighty as they are, mean less and less now. Sitting in Montreat, Graham muses about America's spiritual life. "It seems we've gotten caught up in numbers. We have so many polls that give different figures about how many go to church and synagogue, how many are saved and unsaved. When I ask people to come forward and a thousand people respond, I know in my heart they're not all converted." He mentions Bibles. Everyone used to bring them to his revival meetings before. Now only a small percentage do. It is as if they could not find copies.

Graham is determined to nurture his legacy, not only the people he has touched but the movement he has led. Evangelical Protestantism has triumphed over other, sugarcoated brands, not least because his sincerity and his probity protected his movement from the stain spread by the moral and financial disasters of other high-wattage clerics. New studies show that . Evangelical church bodies are the largest segment in American religion in active membership, and the most committed.

While Graham is confident that Evangelicalism is firmly embedded in the "mainline" churches, he has once again conquered the individuals, not the institutions. So he is counting on individuals to take up where he will one day leave off, sharing the good news. He has a list in his computer of 43,000 evangelists around the world, whom he visits when he travels or invites to training meetings. If he can inspire one preacher, who goes home and converts his family and neighbors, who in turn breathe new life into a gasping church, which shines new light on a lost city . . . who knows how far it may go?

But, Billy is asked, is he not the last of the big-time evangelists? "After D.L. Moody was finished, they said the same thing," the preacher says, "and after Billy Sunday they said the same thing, and after I'm finished they'll say the same thing. But God will raise up different ones who will do it far better than me." If so, that will truly be a miracle.