In the years following the triumph at Harringay, Graham did his best to fulfill Jesus’ directive to “preach the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15), or at least enough of it to satisfy his 1954 aspiration to be a true world evangelist. Though he held only eight full-scale crusades in the United States between Harringay and the end of the decade, he kept busy spreading his message from Berlin to New Delhi to Tokyo. As a result of his worldwide successes, he advanced from being the popular young favorite of Evangelical Christianity’s key leaders to occupying a position of unchallenged prominence in their front rank.
Immediately following Harringay, Billy and a small band of associates set out on a whirlwind tour of European cities. Bob Evans had planned a series of modest rallies, but the news from Harringay stimulated such interest that most of these were transferred to the largest stadium in each city. The overflow crowds clearly justified the change. In Stockholm 65,000 thronged Skansen arena for the largest religious meeting ever held in Sweden. In Copenhagen 15,000 stood outdoors in a pouring rain to hear Billy speak in the city square. In Amsterdam he preached to 40,000. But it was in Germany that he experienced both the heaviest criticism and greatest success. Repeatedly, he came under fire for what his critics saw as a uniquely American blend of commercialism and sensationalism. They characterized him as “a Hollywood version of John the Baptist” and “a salesman in God’s company” who “advertises the Bible as if it were toothpaste or chewing gum” and is overly concerned with the size of the commission. Critics also scored him for a theology they judged to be superficial and naively literalistic, citing such statements as “from birth to grave, God has a TV camera focused on you, and every bad word is being taped.” His proclamation that people could be born again simply by professing their belief in Christ ran counter to the time-honored process of catechism and confirmation practiced in the Reformed (Lutheran and Calvinist) traditions and to some seemed tantamount to heresy. To step forward at Billy Graham’s invitation as a sign they were accepting Christ as their savior seemed to call into question the validity of the entire confirmation process, and thus of the theology the ministers held dear. Both the individualism and pluralism implicit in revivalist preaching—decisions are personal and differences in belief and practice are downplayed—contrasted sharply with the more hierarchical and communal ethos of the European parish, creating another source of discomfort.
The sharpest attacks, however, came from the East German press, which charged him with being a spy, a tool of Texas oilmen, a front man for weapons manufacturers (a reference to Alfred Owen), an envoy of American imperialism and capitalism, and a demagogue who used the same techniques employed by Hitler. One paper published a cartoon that showed him flying over Berlin with a Bible in one hand and an atom bomb in the other while Secretary Dulles cheered in the background. Several papers cited his address to American military personnel at Frankfurt, in which he had praised West Germany’s postwar recovery and observed that to deter Soviet aggression, the country should be equipped with the most modern and effective weapons available, a statement that also stirred a furor in London, which viewed any encouragement of German rearmament with deep suspicion. In what would become a familiar tactic, Graham denied he had any political agenda, insisting that the opinion he had expressed was not his own but simply an observation he had heard others make. In light of later controversial statements, it seems likely he was expressing a political opinion he felt would please his immediate audience without adequate consideration of its probable reception in other quarters. But whatever the accuracy of the charges leveled against him, they did little to dampen enthusiasm for his mission.
The emotional and statistical high point of the German tour occurred in Berlin. The rally was scheduled for the great Olympic stadium where Hitler and Goebbels had goaded a nation into war, and Graham had learned that large numbers of East Germans would be present—the Berlin Wall had not yet been erected. The symbolic aspects of proclaiming the crucified Christ in what had been a shrine of the twisted cross of Nazism did not escape Billy. A few hours before the rally, he lay writhing in agony in his hotel room, suffering from a kidney stone but refusing to take strong painkillers because they would make him too dopey to preach. Wrestling anew with the forces of ambition and humility that warred within him, he speculated to a friend that perhaps God had sent this affliction to remind him that he should not allow the recent triumph at Harringay or the huge crowds he was attracting in Europe to cause him to believe he could depend on his own strength or rhetorical power, since that would be to repeat the tragic hubris Hitler had displayed in the same stadium where he would speak that very afternoon. His friend could understand that fear better than most. John Bolten had been a confidant of Hitler’s during the early years of his rise to power. When Hitler began to unleash his maniacal hatred of Jews, a group of industrialists persuaded Bolten to convey their objections to this policy, and Hitler reacted with such rage that Bolten fled to America, settling in Boston and gradually building a new fortune to replace the one he had left behind in his homeland. He had rededicated his life to Christ during Graham’s 1950 Boston campaign and had become one of the evangelist’s key supporters. Now, back in his native country to help smooth Graham’s way, he pondered the irony of riding in a motorcade, along the same route Hitler had taken to the same stadium less than two decades earlier, in the company of “a young Timothy with a very different message” but nonetheless a charismatic orator whose ability to sway masses of people was propelling him to heights of power.
Inside the stadium, 80,000 people—at least 20,000 from East Germany—sang Protestant hymns where Nazi war anthems had once been raised, and the banner that hung in the swastika’s place proclaimed Jesus’ assertion, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The tremendous turnout and the strong response to the invitation—stadium officials would not permit people to come forward out of the stands, but thousands filled out cards asking for an opportunity to discuss the Christian faith—was a victory for Graham and his message. Having failed at keeping people away from the rally, the Communist press tried to discredit Graham by reporting that he had taken his team to East German nightclubs, where he had ordered liquor by the case and then been thrown into jail for trying to sneak out without paying the bill, but the story received no more credibility than it deserved.
In 1955 Graham returned to both the United Kingdom and the Continent. His tour of the UK included a six-week stand in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall as well as a week-long stint in Wembley Stadium in London, and was, by any normal standard of measurement, a success. A Good Friday service, for example, was broadcast from Kelvin Hall by both BBC radio and television—the first time any preacher used the combined networks for a religious program—and reached a larger audience than any program in the history of British television, save for the Queen’s coronation. Yet some of the bloom had faded from the Evangelical rose since Graham told U.S. News & World Report shortly after Harringay that Great Britain was at “the beginning of what could be the greatest spiritual awakening of all times.” Despite record crowds, the public impact of this second tour simply did not compare with the first. Several factors contributed to the lessened enthusiasm, including disillusion among Church of England clergy about the long-term results of Graham’s approach, as well as the simple fact that Billy Graham was now old news. Nevertheless, Graham did see thousands respond to the invitation and no doubt took personal pleasure from his association with the highest social stratum in Anglo-American society, the royal family. Queen Elizabeth and several members of the family had viewed the Good Friday broadcast from Kelvin Hall, and it was rumored that Princess Margaret had attended at least one service at Wembley. Whether true or not, she and the Queen Mother did entertain Billy and Ruth at Clarence House, and on the Sunday following the crusade, Graham preached to the queen and other members of the family in the royal chapel at Windsor Great Park. This was the first time an American preacher had been accorded this honor.
After the Wembley crusade, Graham made another whistle-stop tour of twelve European cities, where he experienced what was becoming the standard response: opposition or foot-dragging resistance from established clergy claiming his message and methods were unsound and too unsophisticated to appeal to Europeans, and stadium-packing crowds who seemed not to have realized they were above this sort of thing. The longest of these ventures was a four-day effort in Paris, the first time Protestants had mounted a major evangelistic effort in modern France’s history. Reminiscent of the flap over the “socialism” calendar in England, Graham stirred a small controversy by declaring at a press conference that “France is like a watch without its mainspring. It has run down. The French just sin and sin, and get weaker.” Americans accustomed to being damned by preachers may have taken such an assessment in stride, especially when coming from one of their own; self-assured Frenchmen were less willing to be so harshly judged. When called to account for his unflattering assessment, Graham resorted to an increasingly familiar ploy: He claimed these were not necessarily his own feelings, but that he had been quoting the remarks of a Far Eastern diplomat, that he regretted very much that anyone had misconstrued his statement, and that he wished the papers had quoted the many wonderful things he had said about France at the same press conference. In any case the damage was minor. Crowds were surprisingly good for a country that was largely either Roman Catholic or openly secular, and the prestigious newspaper, Le Monde, counseled Parisians not to mock the “American style of such a religious manifestation” but to “bow before [Graham’s] spiritual dynamism. His technique may offend European intellectuals, but the fact remains he is successful. French Protestants who, despite some reservations, did not hesitate to ask him to come to our country, made no mistake.”
Later that same year, Graham returned to England to conduct a brief mission at Cambridge University. The customary resistance to his message in such settings was increased by the fact that he came at the invitation of the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union (CICCU, pronounced “kick you”), an aggressively Evangelical organization noted for its buttonholing tactics and lack of cooperation with other Christian groups. Most of the college chaplains and theology professors expressed open skepticism or outright opposition to the Fundamentalism they believed he represented, and an exchange in the London Times made the visit and the nature of Fundamentalism itself a matter of some national debate, particularly in religious circles. Graham, ever insecure about his lack of advanced theological education, dreaded the meetings and feared that a poor showing might do serious harm to his ministry and affect “which way the tide will turn in Britain.” Had he been able to do so without a complete loss of face, he would have canceled the meetings or persuaded some better-qualified man to replace him. “I am scared stiff about preaching at Cambridge,” he told Stephen Olford, who counseled him “not to get involved in a philosophical approach or to try to do something that was out of his depth, lest he be discredited for inaccuracies,” and to remember that he was preaching not to students but to sinners, and should keep things simple.
Graham found Olford’s advice hard to accept. In the first two or three meetings he tried to be at least somewhat intellectual but found his sermons falling flat. Finally, midway through the series, he abandoned the effort and addressed them as if they had gathered at Harringay or Kelvin Hall, not the hallowed university church. Neither approach got high marks from the Cambridge dons who bothered to attend the services, but he did generate an enthusiasm among students that some compared to D. L. Moody’s historic visit in 1882. At one address a divinity professor who introduced him pointedly noted that he “could not agree with his doctrinal views.” Graham countered this chill-inducing remark with a warm smile and observed that he did not pay great attention to theological differences. “We are all Christians,” he said, “and we love one another.” With that as a basic foundation, soul winning is more important than hairsplitting. “A minister is not a minister,” he asserted, “unless he is winning men for Christ. If theological students don’t think they can do that, they should quit studying for the ministry.” The students, many of whom were preparing to be ministers, applauded him for a full three minutes.
With repeated successes in Great Britain and on the Continent under his belt, Graham decided to challenge the Far East. During the 1955 Wembley crusade, he met with Jack Dain, an Anglican who spent many years as a missionary to India and was intimately familiar with the religious situation in that country, and asked him to help set up a month-long tour. Dain quickly sketched a map of India on a breakfast napkin, scribbling in the cities they should visit and the route they should follow. With his typical trust in the expertise of his advisers, Graham accepted Dain’s recommendations completely and asked him to take charge of the campaign. Dain had seen what Graham had wrought in London and Scotland, and the prospect of similar triumphs in his adopted homeland excited him mightily, but his faith was not boundless. “The Christian Church is such a small minority in India,” he noted. “We had never considered, ever, anything like a citywide evangelistic crusade. Those of us who knew Billy knew what God was doing with him, but I think I’ve got to be honest and say that we had our doubts as to whether this could happen in India.” But when Dain spread the word that Graham was willing to come, invitations from his many contacts in India poured in, so that the tour, while technically at the invitation of Indian Christians, was able to follow the exact route he had sketched on the napkin.
Graham faced the trip with his usual mixture of trepidation and boldness, fearing he could fail miserably yet believing the tour might mark a turning point in the history of Indian Christianity. He carried with him the good wishes of Church and State alike. Harold John Ockenga, still the dominant figure of Evangelical Christianity, reminded him of God’s words to young Joshua when he assumed the leadership of Israel: “As I was with Moses, so will I be with thee.” President Eisenhower sent him an encouraging telegram shortly before he departed, and John Foster Dulles, whose enthusiasm for Graham apparently matched Eisenhower’s, invited him to his home for an hour-long briefing on world affairs. Dulles, a minister’s son who had often sounded the need for a “righteous and dynamic faith” to counteract the quasi-religious zeal of dedicated Communists, commended him for not watering down his message in foreign lands but also gave him a bit of political advice, perhaps hoping Graham would not make statements that ran counter to U.S. foreign policy. The secretary referred to the evangelist’s recent recommendations that American farm surpluses be sent immediately to needy peoples, pointing out that such a policy would have negative effects on the agricultural economy of such nations as Australia and Argentina. He also brought him up to date on the relationship between the United States and India, which were experiencing some tension over Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s attempt to carve out for his young democracy a then-unheard-of position as a nonaligned nation. The Eisenhower administration did not believe such a position was tenable, and many suspected Nehru of using this approach as a rather transparent front for a tilt toward Russia—a recent visit by Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin had drawn large and enthusiastic crowds. Dulles thought it crucial to bring India into the U.S. camp to prevent other nations from adopting a similar nonaligned stance and seemed to think Graham might be an effective advocate for U.S. interests. According to Graham, the secretary told him that one of India’s greatest needs was for someone like him to proclaim the Christian message of discipline and authority to its masses, particularly at this time, when the favorable memory of the Russian leaders was still fresh. Graham apparently saw no conflict between the roles of soul saver and semiofficial representative of American foreign policy. Whatever was bad for communism and good for capitalism must obviously be a plus for Christianity.
Thus prepared, Graham set sail for India. When he arrived, the country obviously astonished and enchanted him, its exotic nature gratifying his lifelong desire to visit strange lands and stimulating the curiosity about other cultures that his anthropological studies at Wheaton had encouraged. At times he was simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Indian population and its problems. He tried to keep a vow, made back at Florida Bible Institute, to sign autographs for anyone who asked him, but crowds he could never have imagined as he roamed the streets of Temple Terrace made it impossible. The poverty he saw on every hand tugged at his compassion. “Beggars were all around in Bombay,” he wrote to Ruth, who had stayed behind in Montreat, “some men with their legs gone, others with their arms that had been eaten by disease, and blind men everywhere, all asking for money. It was one of the most heartbreaking scenes that I had seen since I left Korea. I wanted to give every one of them the message of Christ and give them all money.” Ignoring the warnings of missionary friends, he did give some of them money, distributing “as many rupees as I possibly could to as many people as I saw in need” until he found himself engulfed by a teeming whirlpool of beggars screaming and fighting for more, forcing him to concede that his advisers were right—he could not, by him self, alleviate poverty in India.
At first, the campaign itself seemed in danger of being overwhelmed by the tumultuous country, as Graham arrived in the midst of wild riots and turmoil caused by the government’s redivision of Indian states. An American reporter, whose dispatches from the tour would become a laudatory book later in the year, dismissed the upheaval with the observation that “authorities agreed that the riots were inspired by Communists, who brought in goon squads,” and noted that a young man who was asked why he was throwing stones had answered, “I don’t know. Somebody told me to.” Whatever the degree of Communist involvement, the riots clearly had nothing to do with Graham, and he felt remarkably unthreatened by them. “All people will respond to a smile and affection,” he later observed. “In Bombay, rioters were throwing rocks at each other, but as I passed, I smiled and they smiled back.” He could not, it seemed, conceive of the possibility that a riot might be an expression of justifiable discontent and anger rather than the work of evil conspirators, nor could he move beyond his conviction that all problems, and their solutions, are ultimately individualistic. However deep-seated it may or may not have been, the turmoil was sufficient to compel cancellation of a large stadium rally slated for Bombay. Several small indoor services and a large meeting with ministers went on as scheduled, and Graham received wide public exposure through a press conference at which he spent most of his time explaining the basics of Evangelical Christian belief rather than answering the questions about American political issues he had expected to receive.
As Graham and his small band of associates moved southward, the tour finally assumed its hoped-for contours, including crowds far larger than anyone had publicly predicted. In many respects, the rallies and crusades during this portion of the tour resembled those in America and Europe, a circumstance aided by the fact that most were scheduled in the Indian Bible Belt, where the majority of the nation’s Christians were concentrated and could be counted on to generate a good turnout for the meetings. In each city the sponsoring committee followed standard operating procedures and launched a publicity barrage that included advertising sheets nailed to trees and loudspeaker trucks that rumbled through cities and villages inviting people to hear the dynamic young Christian from America. Wherever he went, Billy preached the same things he had preached from the swamps of Florida to the venerable halls of Cambridge University: Belshazzar’s Feast, John 3:16, and the Second Coming. In Madras attendance over three days exceeded 100,000 with 4,000 to 5,000 inquirers, a response that swamped the counseling corps and moved Billy to marvel that “all you could hear was just the tramp, tramp, tramp of bare feet and sandaled feet as they were coming forward quietly and reverently. This was God. Yes, the same God that was with us at Wembley and Harringay and Kelvin Hall has been with us here in India.” His basic crusade, Graham learned, in a lesson that would be crucial to his career, could be packaged and delivered with amazingly little alteration to a land whose history and culture could hardly differ more strikingly from those of North Carolina, particularly if he restricted himself primarily to areas already familiar with the Christian message.
But despite this apparent success, even Graham admitted that the enormous crowds resulted in part from the novelty of his being an American, and it seems clear that some non-Christian observers were baffled by what they heard and saw. One Indian reporter marveled at the strangeness of his message. Graham, he wrote, “propounds the theory that the reproductive act, for instance, is in itself sinful, ‘the whole business being a legacy from Adam and Eve.’ He insisted that his son, age three, was a liar, and asserted that he himself had wallowed in ‘evil’ pleasures until, at the age of seventeen, a ‘voice’ had asked him to spread the divine message.” The reporter acknowledged, however, that these peculiarities notwithstanding, “Dr. Graham can be dreadfully effective.”
The high point of the crusade as a whole, however, came at Kottayam, a city of only 50,000 located in the heart of India’s largest Christian population. Aware that no existing setting would accommodate the anticipated throngs, local church leaders commissioned the construction of a massive temporary amphitheater around the athletic field of a school belonging to the Church of South India. Using small hand tools and baskets, a corps of young girls labored for hours carving terraces into a hillside to provide seating areas for worshipers, segregated by sex as was customary, with women sitting at levels lower than those occupied by men.
Graham’s host in Kottayam was Bishop Jacob, spiritual leader of the Church of South India and vice-president of the World Council of Churches. Upon the evangelist’s arrival, the bishop told him, with a straight face but perhaps with an inner smile, that just a week earlier, snake charmers had captured twenty-six cobras in the front yard. He assured him, however, that “very rarely do the cobra come in the house,” and that even though people were bitten every day, “many of them survive.” Given this bit of intelligence, Graham may not have slept well that night under any circumstances, but when a strange communal buzz awakened him at 4:00 A.M., he looked out a window in his room to see an amazing sight: Five thousand worshipers had already assembled and were conducting a massive prayer service, entreating God to bless the American evangelist’s visit to their country. This was only the beginning. Throughout the following day, Billy and his team watched in wonder as little knots of pilgrims, all dressed in white and many with large Bibles under their arms, drifted in from every direction and found places, sitting on palm leaves to protect themselves from the ground’s slight chill. More than half had traveled at least ten miles; some had walked fifty or sixty miles. All day, they continued to arrive, filling the amphitheater until the crowd had grown to an astounding 75,000 by the time Graham spoke that evening, their garments gleaming in the glare of the powerful arc lights, a dazzling company of Christians larger than any the region had ever seen. Though most were Christians and almost worshipful in their attitude toward him, Graham admitted to some anxiety. “When I leave the platform at night,” he wrote to Ruth, “the Bishop always takes me through the milling crowd. It’s in a sense a terrifying experience with the crowd pressing in close with their dark faces peering at you, trying to get us in view; and you could imagine that anything could happen if they became excited.”
Those who shared those moments still speak of the miracle of Kottayam, but the most powerful sense of supernatural forces at work was unleashed at Palamcottah, deep in southern India. Graham had read and seen enough of Hindu religion to be aware of its ability to incorporate new beliefs and deities into its fantastically elaborate mythology. Indeed, he was quite aware that Hindus, who could co-opt both Christ and Buddha into their system, were far more likely to attend his meetings than were Muslims, who regarded the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divinity as blasphemy. He also knew of their reverence toward holy men of varied stripe, and had become somewhat accustomed to having villagers gather at the windows of his street-level rooms in primitive hotels to peer wordlessly through tattered curtains at the tall white figure who prayed and read his strange limber book till far into the night. Still, he was not prepared for the response at Palamcottah, where the crowd’s response to his personal power reached new heights.
The evening service did not begin in promising fashion. The huge crowd, estimated at over a hundred thousand people, had trouble settling down, and a cranky loudspeaker system made it difficult for many people to hear. Some began to shout and scream until the missionaries feared a riot might erupt. Frustrated by the lack of attention, Graham resorted to the one weapon he hoped would work: prayer. “I bowed my head,” he wrote, “and prayed a prayer I have not prayed in a long time. It was almost a prayer of commanding, a prayer of authority. I remember I opened my hand as though to come down upon the crowd, and I said, ‘Oh God, stop the noise; quiet the people now.’” For whatever reason, the power possessed by charismatic leaders manifested itself dramatically. “Immediately a deathlike hush came on the crowd, and it became the quietest, most reverent meeting we have had in India yet. It was like the breath of God had suddenly fallen. You couldn’t hear a sound.” Graham preached to the suddenly silent crowd for about an hour, feeling a “tremendous power and liberty.” Then, he recalled, “Pentecost fell. People began to run forward and fall upon their knees. Some of them began to scream to God for mercy; others were saying, ‘Jesus, save me, Jesus, save me,’ until about 3,000 to 4,000 people had come, and we had to stop the invitation because there was no room for anyone else. They were falling on their knees like flies. It was almost as if they were being slain by the Lord.” Inquirers outnumbered trained counselors by at least ten to one, so that long after the formal service ended, the meeting ground twinkled with the light of lanterns whose flames struggled with the darkness, providing just enough light to allow counselors to read from the Bible to the little groups of seekers huddled around them across the hillside. In his room that evening, Graham wrote, “Certainly tonight’s demonstration of the Spirit is the deepest and greatest that I have ever sensed. . . . It is almost like something you read about in the ministry of Charles Finney.”
Word of the evangelist’s presence and power spread quickly through the countryside around Palamcottah. The next morning, when he arrived at the cathedral to address a meeting of women, he found the sanctuary jammed with 5,000 people. At least an equal number stood outside, clamoring to squeeze inside, and the streets were lined with still others trying to get at least a glimpse of the man who had created such excitement. “As we got to the Cathedral,” he recalled, “the press of the crowd was so great that our car could not get through. The people were pressing and fighting. I almost thought the car would overturn, they were pushing it, grabbing. Many of them were trying to touch us. . . . Jack Dain is fearful that many of the Hindus are beginning to accept me as a god. Many of them fall down and practically worshipped me as I come by. Many of them try to get in my shadow.” The looming specter of a jealous deity who does not share his glory filled Graham with a frantic compulsion to disavow whatever illicit thrill the moment may have provided. If seeing his name in lights made him uneasy, seeing himself treated as a god absolutely terrified him. “I told them time after time, very much as Peter, that I am not a god but a man; but the word is spreading all over the southern part of India as to what God is doing, and people are coming for miles to see and hear the revival.”
Despite denying he had a political agenda, Graham made his customary attempt to forge links with his host country’s most powerful and prestigious leaders. He liked to say that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross,” but the VIP section of the sprawling canvas-covered and neon-lit shamiana (a kind of flat-topped sideless tabernacle) featured armchairs for ambassadors and embassy staff members, while others sat or squatted on the ground. Prominent local government officials had been gracious toward the evangelist in most cities, and in Bombay the head of Nehru’s Congress party had met him at the airport, informed him that he often quoted him in his speeches, and announced his intention to attend all his meetings in that city. But the real prize was an appointment with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had maintained a polite distance, perhaps waiting to see how Graham would comport himself.
As always, Billy had behaved in public in an almost painfully gracious manner, making every effort not to offend any segment of the population and taking scrupulous care not to utter any public criticism of Hinduism. While privately abhorring much that he saw—in his journal he described the spectacle of priests laying offerings before phallic sculptures in a Benares temple, a scene he said made him aware of “the powers of darkness and heathenism more in Benares than in any city in which I’ve ever been”—Graham remained a model guest throughout his tour. Nehru may have appreciated Graham’s gentlemanliness, but his close identification with America and the Republican administration made the prime minister wary. He had accompanied Khrushchev and Bulganin on their tour of the country and had closed schools and government offices in an effort to swell attendance at their appearances. The word in unofficial channels was that it troubled him a bit to see Graham visiting many of the same cities without government sponsorship, yet attracting larger crowds than he and the Soviet leaders had drawn. The prime minister agreed to see the evangelist not from any strong personal curiosity but because Dulles and Richard Nixon, working through Ambassador John Sherman Cooper, had urged him to. Striving to maintain a delicate balancing act of remaining poised between the two superpowers, Nehru evidently felt receiving Graham was a requirement—a testimony to the political clout Billy had acquired—but he made no particular effort to make him feel welcome.
Graham knew it would be hard to make a strong impression on Nehru, and his confidence was not increased by the behavior of Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary general of the United Nations, whose appointment with the prime minister immediately preceded his own. As Hammarskjöld crossed the room on his way out, he looked at Graham but did not speak, either not sure that he recognized him or not interested in meeting him. When Graham entered Nehru’s office, his host greeted him cordially but then fell silent, leaving the conversational shuttlecock in the evangelist’s court. At Dulles’s suggestion, Billy spoke of how much Americans admired and respected India and its great leader. Nehru did not respond. Graham volunteered that his tour had given him a much better appreciation for India’s problems. Still no response. Graham later acknowledged his uneasiness, perhaps unconsciously fingering the reason for Nehru’s reticence: “When I got through what I considered a rather pleasant speech, he didn’t say anything. He just sat there with a letter opener in his hand, twiddling it.” Then, when he began a recital of the high points of his tour, the prime minister stared at the ceiling. “I had never had an interview quite like it,” Graham recalled, so he fell back on the one topic with which he felt entirely comfortable, regardless of the reaction it stirred. “I decided I’d tell him what Christ had done for me, and I told him in no uncertain terms . . . how He had changed me and given me peace and joy, and how He had forgiven my sins. Then immediately, he began to be interested. He began to ask some questions.” Graham pointed out that he had no interest in preserving Christianity as an outpost remnant of British imperialism; indeed, he had repeatedly told his audiences that Jesus was an Asian like themselves, with skin a bit lighter than theirs but darker than his own, and had urged them to make their churches indigenous and self-supporting. Nehru warmed to that line of conversation and said he had no objection to Christian missionaries in India as long as they refrained from political activity. He conceded that Graham’s presence in India seemed to have a salutary effect and offered to help in any way he could during his sojourn in New Delhi. Once again, Graham’s simple, sincere testimony, cut loose from State Department cant, melted a potential opponent’s icy reserve and won for himself, if not a friendship, at least an attitude of tolerant respect.
Graham reported that even though Nehru had said nothing when he ventured that peace would come only “when people turn by faith to Christ,” he sensed the prime minister was “pro-Christian.” But Billy frequently divined in people, particularly those in positions of power, sentiments that may not have been present. He seemed to assume, in the absence of compelling counterevidence, that deep down most people saw the world much as he did. His belief in the universality of the deepest human needs and characteristics bespoke a large and admirable spirit but made it difficult for Graham to accept the brute fact that human cultures and the people they comprise can differ radically over quite basic issues. Throughout most of his public ministry, he had hammered away at the Satanic nature of communism, and yet when he met real Communists, he found it hard to believe they understood what they were ostensibly espousing. When he saw Indian Communists marching in the streets, waving Communist flags, shouting Communist slogans, and singing Communist songs, he walked along beside them and directed his photographer to take pictures. “We marched along for about three or four hundred yards with one group,” he reported. “I would wave at them and smile, and they would smile back, because of course most of them, even though they were in red shirts, waving the hammer and sickle, did not know what it was all about. I am convinced that the average Communist in India doesn’t know what it’s all about.”
The positive side of Graham’s attitude was that he believed, and some times demonstrated that openhearted friendliness could overpower ideology. On hearing of the hospitality and warmth the Indians extended to Khrushchev and Bulganin, and experiencing a similar response himself, he observed that “if Eisenhower came to India, he would get the most overwhelming reception of his life, and it would do America a whale of a lot of good. They don’t care two hoots for all the money we give them, but they are thrilled to death when we come in person to visit them.” Graham’s intuitive grasp of the fact that a symbolic gesture may do more to win a people’s allegiance than more substantive measures was accurate, but it led him to make a foreign-policy recommendation that must have had diplomats in both capitals groaning. At the airport in Bangalore, he had seen a beautiful plane the Russians had given to Nehru to commemorate their leaders’ visit. “We give fifty million dollars in economic aid to India,” he wrote, “and it appears on the third page. Mr. Nehru is given an airplane costing probably a million dollars and it’s front-page news and people talk about it everywhere. There is a showmanship in the way the Russians give that puts all of our giving in the shade. I thought: wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if we gave to India perhaps a beautiful new air-conditioned train; or we might give to Mr. Nehru a white air-conditioned Cadillac. This would cause the people of India to talk more than all of our economic aid put together.”
Before leaving the country, Graham took steps to preserve and extend the achievements of the campaign by making outreach to India an official element of BGEA activities. To do this he conferred the mantle of leadership he had been weaving upon Dr. Akbar Abdul-Haqq, a Methodist scholar who had been his interpreter in New Delhi. A formal and formidable man, Abdul-Haqq had been lukewarm about Graham’s visit, but the experience of holding a large throng in absolute thrall, even if the words belonged to another man, had their effect. After only one sermon, he confided to Graham that “I believe God has called me tonight to be an evangelist.” Graham persuaded Abdul-Haqq to come to America to learn the trade of evangelism by pointing out that part of his own success in drawing great crowds stemmed from the novelty of his being an American, but that would fade. “I’m not the man to be used for spiritual awakening here,” he told Abdul-Haqq. “It has to be an Asian. I think you are the man.” Eight months later, after a visit to Graham’s crusade in Louisville, Kentucky, Akbar Abdul-Haqq held the first of a still-continuing string of crusades in North India.
Apart from the initiation of this ongoing effort, the impact of Graham’s Indian campaign is difficult to assess. Without question, it stood out as a brief, shining moment in the life of the Indian church in the regions he visited. It demonstrated that it was possible to conduct large-scale evangelistic crusades in India, a hypothesis that had not been rigorously tested. It also lent encouragement to scattered bands of believers who, like the prophet Elijah, may have imagined that they alone had not bowed the knee to Baal (or Siva or Krishna or Vishnu). They could now see some strength in the cause they espoused and could continue in the face of ridicule or persecution from relatives and fellow villagers.
Unfortunately, much of whatever goodwill Graham generated by his attempts to be a gracious guest was erased by an apparent failure to recognize that India, though far away from the United States, was not completely insulated from Western media. A few months after the tour, Chattanooga Free Press reporter George Burnham, an Evangelical journalist who chronicled Graham’s British and European tours and traveled with the team to the Far East, published a book that included such condescending observations of his own as “a majority of the economic problems now suffered in India could be wiped out overnight if they would eat their cows instead of worshiping them.” It also contained unflattering comments Graham had recorded in his diary or in letters to Ruth and had unwisely allowed Burnham to quote. The book drew heavy fire from the Indian government and the religious community, both of which felt the evangelist had dissembled by displaying apparent openness to Indian culture while in fact regarding it as decidedly inferior to that of the West. Deeply chagrined that he had offended his hosts, Graham wrote an abject apology for the Madras Sunday Standard, noting somewhat lamely that although he had written an introduction to the book, he had not taken the time to read it and therefore had not been aware of Burnham’s ethnocentric bias. Ultimately, since several of the offending quotations were from his own hand, all he could do was pledge to himself not to repeat his mistake in the future. “I have learned a lesson,” he ruefully admitted to Jack Dain, “and it will never happen again.” It is difficult to know exactly what other lessons Graham learned on this tour, how his first exposure to a culture so deeply different from his own affected his view of life and the world. His abhorrence of Hindu rituals involving sexuality and his shock over the crushing poverty he saw must have strengthened his beliefs in sexual reserve and the American economic system, just as his exposure to the deep spirituality of the Indian people may have contributed to a gradual widening of his vision and a loosening of the bonds of Fundamentalist separatist dogma. But in large measure, it appears Graham came away relatively unscathed by whatever reflections he entertained. Near the end of the trip, in a tone one observer perceptively likened to that a boy might use in capsuling a good summer-camp experience, he observed that “everything has been absolutely perfect. I have not been sick one single day. I do not have any cold, sore throat, or stomachache. . . . I have not lost my temper once and try to wait patiently on everybody.” In the same vein, he reported on returning home that “I don’t think that in any place I’ve ever been they’ve had finer platforms for me to speak from, better amplification systems, and finer arrangements.”
While Billy stumped the world preparing people for an eternal home, Ruth stayed back on Black Mountain building an earthly one. As their children grew and their privacy diminished, she set about to construct an environment that suited both her uncompromising aesthetic tastes and her preference for solitude. In 1954 the Grahams had the chance to buy a heavily wooded 150-acre cove between two hogback ridges rising up behind Montreat. This was at a time when more people wanted to move into town than out to the country and two mountain families offered the land for sale at $12.50 an acre. The narrow, steep, and winding clay road was barely passable, and Billy wondered at the wisdom of trying to build a home on the side of a mountain, but he left the decision to her. To his mild alarm, she made it. While he was on a trip to the West Coast, she borrowed the money from the bank and bought the land. She fixed up a pole cabin one of the mountain families had abandoned, and the family used it for a time as a weekend retreat from tourists. Then, while Billy was in Europe and the Far East during 1955 and 1956, she scoured the North Carolina mountains, bouncing her red jeep up and down back roads and into remote hollows, popping into gas stations and little grocery stores with bread signs stenciled into the screen door to ask if anybody knew of a log cabin she could buy. Some of the citizens found it hard to believe the feisty creature in blue jeans and army jacket was the wife of their state’s most famous citizen, or that she was serious about wanting to buy old houses, but her scavenging turned up five cabins and several truckloads of lumber, well-weathered bricks, cords of crooked fence rails, and a yard sale’s worth of rough-hewn rustic authentica.
Ruth hired an architect to draw plans for the house but served as counter-architect and project manager herself. Her task was not easy. Local workmen found it hard to understand why a woman whose husband had a good job would want a house made out of old logs instead of clean brick or brand-new lumber covered with asbestos siding, and then want to fill it with country junk instead of going to Sears, Roebuck and buying furniture that matched and wasn’t all scratched up as if somebody else had used it. Billy himself had some preference for the new and modern—“When Bill gets to heaven and finds it’s not like a Holiday Inn or Marriott,” Ruth joked, “he’ll be back”—but he let his wife build it to suit herself, stipulating only that it have comfortable chairs and plenty of good lighting. Several of the craftsmen never caught her vision. One carpenter finally quit when she insisted he hang weather-beaten cabin doors in the front hall closets. “I weren’t mad at none of you men,” he told his co-workers, “but everything I done up there I had to do wrong. A man can’t take no pride in this kind of work.” But others eventually came to share at least a bit of her affection for “mountain primitive,” and one finally conceded, “You know, this house kind of grows on you, and before you know it, you catch yourself a-liking it.”
Little Piney Cove is not hard to like. The view across the mountains, framed in great sweeping windows that fill the high-ceilinged, rough-beamed living room, dining room, and large functional kitchen is beyond price. The rooms themselves are large, warm, and rich with wood and books and mementos and the redolence of four fireplaces, the largest of which, in the living room, is of walk-in dimensions and crowned with a mantle (fashioned from an old diving board) carved with the words Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”). To the question of how many rooms it has, Ruth laughs and gives a stock answer: “The architect told me, ‘Ruth, if you are smart, you will never count the rooms in this house.’ So I never have. You have to decide what’s a room and what’s not a room. Ned [their youngest son, born in 1958] always slept in what was supposed to be the linen closet.”
Isolated as it was, Little Piney Cove did not permit complete withdrawal from the world. Graham’s foreign tours had enabled him to avoid direct involvement with mounting racial tensions in the United States during 1955 and the early part of 1956, but as he faced repeated questioning about the American situation and watched with a mixture of dismay and fascination at the nonviolent protests led by fellow Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., he began to ponder what he might do to help. Others had been pondering the same question. Alabama congressman Frank W. Boykin, a friend and supporter, wrote to President Eisenhower, recommending that he enlist the evangelist to help the South make the transition to integration—“to quiet it down and to go easy and, in a godlike way instead of trying to cram it down the throats of our people all in one day, which some of our enemies are trying to do.” Eisenhower, whose chances of reelection could be hurt by racial turmoil, seized immediately on Boykin’s suggestion and dictated a long letter to Graham. The President referred to a previous conversation in which they had discussed “the opportunity open to ministers of promoting both tolerance and progress in our race relations problem” and listed several gradualist measures he thought might help reduce tensions. “Could we not begin to elect a few qualified Negroes to school boards?” he asked. “Could not universities begin to make entrance into their graduate schools strictly on the basis of merit—the examinations to be conducted by some Board, which might even be unaware of the race or color of the applicant?” Might it not be possible to develop flexible seating plans for public buses so that blacks would not be left waiting at bus stops while seats reserved for whites went vacant? “It would appear to me,” the President ventured, “that things like this could properly be mentioned in a pulpit.”
Graham’s response, dispatched by return mail and followed with a visit to the White House two days later, not only reflected his willingness to use his influence to help ameliorate an important social problem but showed his oft-repeated claim of political neutrality to be less than fully accurate. He assured Eisenhower he would convene a meeting of the leaders of the major southern denominations and would urge them to call on their people to show moderation, charity, and compassion as they moved toward compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision. He also noted that he had talked with Governors Luther Hodges of North Carolina and Frank Clement of Tennessee and had urged them “to consider the racial problem from a spiritual point of view.” Then, moving from the role of minister to partisan tactician, he said, “Immediately after the election, you can take whatever steps you feel are wise and right. In the meantime, it might be well to let the Democratic party bear the brunt of the debate. Your deeds are speaking for you. You have so wonderfully kept above the controversies that necessarily rage from time to time. I hope particularly before November you are able to stay out of this bitter racial situation that is developing.”
As promised, Graham met with a wide range of black and white southern religious leaders, both in groups and privately, laying before them “what I considered to be a sensible program for better race relations.” He had little doubt that like the President and himself, God approved of a gradual approach to integration. “I believe the Lord is helping us, and if the Supreme Court will go slowly and the extremists on both sides will quiet down, we can have a peaceful social readjustment over the next ten-year period.” Like many another moderate, however, he soon found that standing in the middle affords more people an opportunity to shoot. On the Right, staunch resisters of desegregation denounced him as a meddler and traitor to his people. On the Left, liberal Christians wondered why he demanded that some sins be renounced immediately and totally but thought it permissible to repent of racism a step or two at a time. Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the most acute and influential religious thinker in America at the time, scolded Graham in Christian Century for a moderate approach that failed to take black suffering seriously and that looked pale and timorous when compared to Charles Finney’s vigorous support of abolition.
To have become the sort of bold prophet Niebuhr and others wanted him to be was ideologically and temperamentally impossible for Billy Graham. He sincerely believed that laws cannot change hearts, and he found it extremely painful to make people angry enough to renounce him. But if he could not directly confront, he could attempt to persuade, and he did so quite publicly. That fall, in Life magazine, he issued a plea for an end to racial intolerance. He assured a national audience that most southern ministers believed segregation should be ended on buses, in railroad and bus stations, in hotels, and in restaurants, but that it was “far too early to implement school integration in some sections of the Deep South.” Still, he did not lay all the blame at the feet of extremists and outsiders. “We have sown flagrant human injustice,” he confessed, “and we have reaped a harvest of racial strife.” But southerners, he noted, were not the world’s only racists. Jains discriminate against people of low caste in India, the British look down on Jamaican blacks, Arabs and Jews dislike each other, white Americans behave unjustly toward Mexicans and Indians as well as blacks, and blacks themselves often manifest prejudice toward whites. He reiterated his conviction that none of these attitudes could be justified from Scripture—“Let’s not make the mistake of pleading the Bible to defend it”—and noted that after an earlier period of bowing to local custom, he now refused to hold a crusade unless blacks were permitted to sit wherever they pleased, even though his conversations with blacks revealed that they usually felt comfortable sitting by themselves. Parents, he said, should actively teach their children to love people of other races lest they pass on the sin of prejudice, and all Christians should “take a stand in your church for neighbor love. . . . Take courage, speak up, and help the church move forward in bettering race relations.” All things considered, it was hardly a pathbreaking statement, but it was a statement, and it called on Christians to take responsibility for building a better world.