Billy Graham enjoyed proximity to power. He liked being able to have a hand, or at least a finger, in shaping national and international policy, in helping a friend gain and remain in the White House, in abetting the defeat of those whose religious and political views he believed to be mistaken. Such pleasures, of course, could arise from purely secular motives, which may help explain his abiding reluctance to acknowledge either participation or interest in them. But seductive as the siren song of secular power could be, it never drowned out the fundamental theme of his life and ministry: reconciling men and women to God and to each other. Thus, even during the period when he was involved in partisan politics to a degree that he has found difficult to acknowledge even to himself, most of his time and energy were spent not in trying to hoist flags of victory over conquered enemies but in trying to tear down barriers separating people who might, if given a chance, be friends.
Graham’s efforts to help Nixon explain his China policy fit this pattern. Though not too many years earlier he had called the People’s Republic “the most dangerous enemy of freedom in the world,” he welcomed the President’s dramatic move to reestablish formal ties with the nation and people his wife still loved so much, and he used his great influence to stanch criticism from quarters accustomed to regarding China as a menace even more threatening than the Soviet Union. In this case, he was merely a facilitator, a supplier of names and endorser of invitations. In other cases—in Ireland, India, South Africa, and Korea—Graham acted, sometimes at the risk of his life, as a living symbol and active agent of reconciliation and brotherhood.
Graham visited Ireland in late May of 1972 in the hope that by meeting with both Protestant and Catholic religious and political leaders in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and by judicious appearances on television, he might lay the groundwork for an eventual crusade or some venture that would help ease the tension between Catholics and Protestants, as his American crusades had promoted better relationships between blacks and whites. One strategy he considered, exemplifying his own deep conviction that people who got to know each other personally would find it extremely difficult to remain enemies, was to encourage religious leaders to establish hundreds of “dialogue groups,” consisting of five Catholics and five Protestants each, as a way of substituting webs of personal friendship for walls of blind prejudice. Significantly, his visit came a few days after he completed a large and successful integrated crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, where his Easter service eight years earlier had been an important first step toward reducing overt tensions in that city’s explosive racial situation. An exploratory foray by members of the London office of BGEA had met with warm assurances that a visit by Graham to Northern Ireland might well have a healing effect on the divided region, but tense conditions at the time of his arrival made it clear that a misstep could easily have serious negative consequences, including his assassination.
Graham landed in Belfast, the troubled capital of Northern Ireland, on a Saturday, with an appointment to preach on Sunday evening. Also in Belfast at the time was Arthur Blessit, a colorful and controversial street preacher who gained notoriety for his work with the “Jesus People” on Sunset Strip and was satisfying his continuing need for publicity by traveling about the world dragging a large cross on his shoulder, in the presumed manner of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa. Some doubted that self-promotion should be added to the catalog of spiritual gifts listed in the twelfth chapter of I Corinthians, but few questioned Blessit’s physical courage, which he had already demonstrated in Belfast by openly consorting with both Catholics and Protestants, a tactic hardly calculated to endear him to either group. Blessit, however, thrived on audacious behavior and delighted at the chance to invite Billy Graham to join him on a bipartisan Sunday-morning sortie. As they entered the most troubled district in the city, with no police or private security guards to protect them, Graham managed to contain whatever fear he may have felt for his personal safety, but he could not completely conquer his anxiety. In a touching display of both humility and self-knowledge, the most successful public soul winner in Christian history turned to his guide and said, “You’re going to have to teach me and consider me as a student of personal evangelism. I don’t consider myself to be a man that’s gifted of God just to deal with an individual.” Fortunately, Blessit felt quite comfortable taking the lead—and enjoying Graham’s vulnerability. As they approached the Peace Line, a barricade that divided a single road into Roman Catholic and Protestant lanes, and prepared to walk along it, Blessit informed his charge that he would be watched every step of the way. If the IRA deemed his presence unacceptable, they would announce their objection in an unambiguous manner—with a bullet in his back. Bolstered by faith that if he were assassinated he would proceed directly through heaven’s portals, but not overly anxious to surrender his earthly ministry just yet, Graham walked along the barricade with a feeling of anxious peace. At a point where they could see Protestant and Catholic worshipers going in and out of their respective houses of worship, where they professed to love God but learned to hate their neighbors, the two men knelt to pray, asking God to send a revival that might bring peace in its train.
Graham and Blessit spent two and a half hours walking in both the Catholic and Protestant sectors, passing out tracts and talking with individuals. At one point, in the Falls Road district, where anti-Protestant feelings ran highest, they dropped into a skabena, an unlicensed pub, situated in back of a hairdresser’s salon and known to be an IRA hangout. Encouraged by some of the men who recognized Graham, the two clergymen told a few jokes and did a bit of preaching, all to a good-natured response, including a reciprocal offering by a tipsy Irishman who boozily rumbled through “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Later, Graham spent several minutes standing in a bombed-out dwelling, consoling a bus conductor whose wife had been killed by a terrorist’s bomb that had ripped through their home a few hours earlier.
While Graham preached at Ravenhill Presbyterian Church on Sunday evening, a pulpit he had filled in 1946 on a Youth for Christ tour, the most prominent Protestant preacher in Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley, preached a countersermon in his own church, spilling out vitriolic condemnation of the evangelist and his compromising attitude toward Roman Catholics, and announcing that “the church which has Billy Graham in its pulpit will have the curse of the Almighty upon it.” The tirade, one of two Paisley delivered during Graham’s visit, was no surprise. The surprise had come two years earlier when the dogmatic separatist had written a book entitled Billy Graham and the Church of Rome: A Startling Exposure. Since Graham had seldom commented on Ireland, the book was not a criticism of his political views, but of his increasingly cozy relationship with Catholicism. It consisted mainly of quotations documenting his friendship with Catholic leaders such as Cardinal Cushing and denunciations of his ecumenical policies by such unyielding Fundamentalists as Bob Jones, whose university had presented Paisley with an honorary degree and had published the American edition of his book. Graham offered to meet with his antagonist while he was in Belfast, but Paisley declined the opportunity, explaining that he did not “have fellowship with those who deny the faith.”
A small, singular event momentarily stirred fears in Graham’s camp that his visit to the troubled city might be misconstrued as a piece of American meddling. On this same weekend, Richard Nixon was visiting the Soviet Union. As was his practice, Graham had urged him to visit some church in Moscow to demonstrate the importance Americans place on spiritual matters and the right to worship freely. Nixon, whose record on heeding Graham’s spiritual counsel was spotty, had followed his advice on this occasion and wanted to let him know it. Unaware of Billy’s whereabouts, he called the White House, which tracked Graham down and patched the call through to his hotel in Belfast, where the switchboard operator strongly resisted ringing his room, since he knew the evangelist had already retired. Then, in a two-minute conversation that bounced from Moscow to Washington and back to Belfast, the President of the United States happily reported to his itinerant pastor that he had attended the Moscow Baptist Church that morning. Just this once, Graham might have preferred a postcard. He and his associates understandably fretted that if word of the call leaked out, sensitive Irishmen would never believe its true purpose but would assume he was acting as an agent of American foreign policy. Inevitably, news of the communication did spread, but Graham’s account of the matter was accepted, and no problem ensued.
During the next two days, Graham met with hundreds of Northern Ireland’s political, religious, and social leaders—at a dinner for two hundred, a breakfast for one thousand, and numerous gatherings of much smaller groups. He also spoke at the Queen’s University in Belfast, on invitation from both Roman Catholic and Protestant chaplains, and appeared several times on Ulster TV and the BBC. In each case, theologians, journalists, and secular intellectuals criticized the shallowness of his understanding of the situation in Ireland and dismissed his assertion that most of the problems bedeviling the Emerald Isle could be swept into the sea by a good revival. On those same occasions, however, many others professed to be deeply impressed by his humility (“He put it over with so much love,” one student commented), his sincere desire to help bring peace to their nation, and his straightforward presentation of the faith that gave meaning to his own life.
Ultimately, example proved more important than utterances. In every meeting, Graham insisted that both Catholics and Protestants be present in proportions as equal as feasible, a requirement that brought together people who had never met or, if they knew each other at all, had certainly never sat down to eat or talk or pray with one another. In an encouraging coincidence—“He’ll get the credit for it,” an Irish MP wryly noted—the official IRA announced it was suspending military action in a truce it hoped might lead to lasting peace. The more violent Provisional IRA did not immediately consent to the truce, but radical Catholics seeking independence from England were not the only disturbers of the peace. Whether followers of Ian Paisley or not, many Protestants rejected Graham’s efforts to build bridges of friendship across an abyss of prejudice and hatred. Despite his uncommon ability to feel hope when others could not, the peace-seeking evangelist acknowledged a discouraging hardness of heart among his Protestant brethren that he recognized might be a formidable hindrance to lasting peace.
Paradoxically, Graham received a much warmer reception in the Catholic-dominated Republic of Ireland, where he was hosted by the Irish branch of International Christian Leadership. As in Ulster, he met publicly and privately with hundreds of Protestant and Catholic leaders; the Irish Times said of one large breakfast meeting that “the guest list was startling for the brains and wealth and influence it represented.” In a clandestine encounter complete with police disapproval, back-alley connections, switched vehicles, and secret routes, the Dublin leader of the IRA received Graham for a long conversation in which he explained his organization’s view of the conflict with England and the Protestant Unionists in Ireland. Afterward, Graham refused to divulge details of their conversation but observed that he had “the distinct feeling that the issues involved were not religious but political,” apparently overlooking the fact that these powerful forces in human life could seldom be neatly separated. In another temporary triumph of hope over history, he predicted confidently that a complete cease-fire in Northern Ireland was in the offing. In fact, the Provisional IRA in Ulster did join the previously announced truce three weeks later, but soon resorted to the bombs and bullets they seemed unable to abandon; by midsummer, England dispatched new troops to quell fresh outbreaks of violence.
If it did not bring peace to Ireland, Graham’s visit was nevertheless a sincere and salutary step toward increased understanding among separated people. In contrast to the coolness of spirit he felt in Belfast, particularly from Protestants, he reported that he had seldom experienced such kindness and genuine religious fervor as he had in Dublin. Repeatedly, priests and nuns offered fervent expressions of gratitude for his visit and his ministry and replayed tapes of his addresses in convents and rectories, establishing the fact that Billy Graham was no enemy of Roman Catholics. He did not follow up on his expressed desire to hold a crusade in Ireland—largely because of opposition from the Protestant clergy—but eighteen months after his visit, BGEA associate evangelist Akbar Abdul-Haqq held a full-scale campaign in Dublin with extensive cooperation from the Catholic community.
Later in 1972, just after the election, Graham made another visit to a strife-torn region, this time to Nagaland, a state in the northeast of India, along the border with Burma. In a situation similar in some respects to that in Ireland, the predominantly Christian Nagas had sought independence from the Hindu-dominated New Delhi government since 1947, when India obtained independence from Great Britain. Guerilla action against national troops was a constant feature of Naga life, creating a situation so explosive that Westerners were seldom permitted to enter Nagaland. Graham did not visit Nagaland during his 1956 tour, but the Nagas knew well of his ministry and longed to have him hold a crusade in their region. In 1967 Akbar Abdul-Haqq held a crusade in the city of Kohima and indicated that Graham might respond positively to an invitation. Five years later, the Naga dream seemed about to come true when the evangelist agreed, pending government approval, to come to Kohima in November 1972.
Seldom, if ever, did a proposed crusade face such obstacles. During Abdul-Haqq’s preliminary visit to prepare the churches for Graham’s visit, a guerilla band killed three people in an attempt to assassinate the chief minister of Nagaland, a development that led to a stiff increase in state security measures and appeared likely to destroy chances of getting a permit for Graham. With endorsement from the chief minister (a Christian himself) and gracious but lukewarm assistance from a well-known young liberal Indian clergyman named Robert Cunville, a delegation of Naga churchmen went to New Delhi to beseech the minister for home affairs not to prohibit Graham’s visit. The minister had no objection to Graham’s coming but feared the rebels might kidnap or kill him in an effort to draw attention to their cause, thus creating a severe embarrassment for the Indian government. Finally, in an almost laughable gesture of governmental hand washing, the home minister agreed to allow Graham to come if the Baptist Church in Naga would take responsibility for maintaining peace during the crusade. Readily conceding, at least to themselves, the essential absurdity of that request, the churchmen agreed and dispatched one of their number into the mountainous jungle, where he met with rebel leaders and won from them a written promise not to engage in disruptive action during the crusade. Even so, the home minister, on a visit to the United Nations in New York, met with Graham and explained to him that while the government viewed his coming in a positive light, it stood ready to withdraw the permits on a moment’s notice if the situation in Nagaland became too volatile.
Meanwhile, the Nagas were getting ready. To raise money for crusade expenses—as always, BGEA picked up the costs incurred by Graham and his associates—the churches obtained a contract from the government to build a road connecting a major artery to an airstrip four miles away. In less than two days, 7,000 volunteers cleared a path through steep jungle terrain with hand tools brought from their homes. The same spirit of commitment flourished in Kohima. Because crusade organizers expected as many as 100,000 souls to descend on the relatively small town, nearly every family opened its doors to guests, the town government allowed pilgrims to sleep in schools and other public buildings, and the Indian Army provided hundreds of tents as additional shelter. Villagers also sold meat and produce at low prices and gave away firewood on which to cook it.
Early in November, Baptists in Nagaland had celebrated the centennial anniversary of their denomination’s presence in the state. That event, which the central government watched closely to see if the promised cease-fire would hold, passed without incident. Then, less than a week before the crusade was to begin, and after 80,000 pilgrims had arrived in Kohima, some walking for five or six days, guerillas ambushed an army convoy, killing and wounding several soldiers. The Naga church leaders were aghast, but remarkably, the government did not cancel the permits for Graham and his team, who were already in the Far East. Several of Graham’s own advisers, however, including Akbar Abdul-Haqq, urged the evangelist to cancel the crusade, fearing either that the guerillas might stage an uprising and kill or injure innocent parties or that the central government would use the event as an excuse to dispatch more troops to Nagaland. In either case, the embarrassment to Christianity might outweigh any good a crusade could do.
In Bangkok Graham reluctantly decided to cancel the crusade, something he had never before done, except for illness. On Saturday he prepared a press release and directed Walter Smyth to take it to New Delhi for publication the following Monday. Back in Calcutta, Robert Cunville, who had become enthusiastic about the crusade, was crushed at the news but refused to accept it as final. “God can still do a miracle,” he insisted, and he placed a call to Kohima, urging the multitudes gathered there to begin assaulting heaven with requests for deliverance from this quite real dilemma. Recalling this incident fourteen years later, Cunville insisted that God an swered those prayers with nothing less than a miracle. During the night, Graham received several cables, including messages from the U.S. State Department, acknowledging the risk but suggesting it might be better not to cancel the crusade. Early the next morning, Graham answered an insistent knock at his door and found himself facing a Naga Christian and a young American who had once been a missionary to Nagaland. The missionary announced dramatically that “I have come here as the servant of the Lord. You’ve got to go to Nagaland.” He and his Naga friend explained the harm that a cancellation would bring to the church and, because church leaders had a key role in trying to bring peace to the region, to the whole state. They also challenged his faith, assuring him that God would protect him from danger. Ever susceptible to intimations that his ministry was part of some grander divine plan, Graham seized upon their importuning as the very sign from God that he had been seeking through a prayer-filled night, and he set out immediately to join several team members waiting for him in Calcutta. Monday afternoon, following attendance at a cricket match and a visit with Mother Teresa in Calcutta on Sunday, Graham and the team descended on Kohima, where the assembly, now swollen to an estimated 100,000 and packed onto a soccer field tucked in front of dark green mountains, cheered ecstatically at his long-awaited arrival. Later, he wrote in his diary, “Tears came to my eyes. I felt rebuked that I had even doubted about coming to these mountain people to minister the gospel. I felt terribly unworthy.”
Graham stayed in Kohima four days. When he spoke at the morning Bible study sessions and at the late-afternoon crusade services, twenty interpreters translated his words into regional languages and dialects, not from soundproof booths wired to individual headsets or closed-circuit TV screens, but standing throughout the crowd, using bullhorns and mega phones to carry their voices to clumps of people gathered in the various language groups. No tongues of fire appeared, but the comparison to Pentecost, when “each one heard them speaking in his own language,” could not be avoided. Perhaps the inescapable association with that event stimulated the expectation that other Pentecostal flowers might blossom in that remote jungle. In any case, crusade leaders responded to numerous requests by allowing people who sought healing of physical or spiritual affliction for themselves or for others to put the names of the afflicted person in a large box, which was then presented to Graham. The evangelist carefully explained that he did not claim the gift of healing nor believe that his prayers were more valuable than those of any other faithful Christians. Still, he did believe that God answers prayer and, if he willed, could meet any need. With that qualification, Graham prayed that those whose names were in the box might be healed if it pleased God. No lame people cast crutches aside and no blind men professed to see, but within a few days, grateful believers began to report what they could only interpret as miracles—recovery from epilepsy, from tetanus, from undiagnosed but apparently life-threatening ailments, and from the grip of soul-deadening sin. Graham’s colleagues recall these incidents with an amusing mixture of mild skepticism, humility in the face of evidence, and unmistakable satisfaction. They tend not to approve of Pentecostal healing ministries, but they stop short of denying that God can intervene supernaturally in human life today if he so chooses. Best of all, they seem to relish the conviction that even in a field in which he does not specialize, Billy Graham still got good results.
Unfortunately, not every service had such a happy outcome. During the Wednesday morning Bible class, attended by tens of thousands, gunfire rang out at a point where the edge of the crowd lay close to the jungle. Graham called for calm and no panic ensued, but a guerilla’s bullet had found its mark, leaving one man dead. As the service ended, a skirmish between guerillas and government troops resulted in several more deaths, but crusade leaders decided to proceed according to schedule, and no further incidents marred the meetings.
Though Nagaland was one of the few Christian strongholds in India, Graham’s audiences contained Hindus, Muslims, and syncretists who might profess some form of Christianity but had no clear sense of the exclusivity Western Christians believed it entailed. Aware that many of his hearers might affirm allegiance to Christ but regard him as only one of many beings worthy of honor, Billy took great care in his invitation to stress that the God he proclaimed was not “one of the gods” but “the God,” and that pledging allegiance to him involved renunciation of all other gods. Seating arrangements at Kohima did not permit inquirers to come forward or make it possible for counselors to talk with them individually. Even so, observers believe that more than 4,000 people made decisions for Christ during the three days that Graham preached.
Whatever the true number of decisions made at Kohima, Indian Evangelicals insist that the effects of the crusade involved more than an immediate net gain in church membership. Christianity is still a minority religion in India, claiming only about 3 percent of the population. That minority, however, is heavily Evangelical, especially in the northeast region of India that includes Nagaland and neighboring states. As in numerous other locales, nearly all of the growth among Christians is posted among Evangelicals, as conservative seminaries consistently turn out far more clergymen than do those of more liberal bent. And occasionally, men trained at the liberal seminaries find themselves attracted to the vitality they see in Evangelical circles. One such man was Robert Cunville. Exposure to Billy Graham and his team at Kohima so impressed Cunville that he gave up his more socially oriented ministry and came to America to enroll at the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary, supported by a scholarship from BGEA. Three years later, he returned to India with a doctorate in missions, and he has served since that time as an associate evangelist with the Graham organization. The crusade also seems to have had an impact on the tense political situation. Cunville and others believe that the rebel cease-fire negotiated by crusade leaders created a lull that provided opportunity for reflection and led ultimately to the writing of a peace motion that resulted in a stable government for Nagaland. Some government officials doubted that Graham’s appearance had much effect on the peace process one way or the other. Still, the Naga church leader most responsible for bringing Graham to his homeland and for persuading the guerillas to allow the crusade to proceed was also intimately involved in the deliberations that led to a 1975 agreement that ended the Naga rebellion, and he emphatically regarded the Graham crusade as a turning point in the quest for peace. And Robert Cunville, who was not prepared for what he saw, summed up his account by saying, “In Nagaland, we never call it the Billy Graham Crusade. To this day, we call it the Kohima Miracle.”
Immediately after Kohima, Graham returned to New Delhi for a meeting with Indira Gandhi. At President Nixon’s request (“He knew I was a friend of hers”), the evangelist asked the prime minister what kind of ambassador she wanted the President to appoint. “She told me, ‘I want one who has the ear of the President, who knows economics, and who knows something about India.’ So I went right over to the embassy and said that straight to the President, and he appointed [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan.” Graham called the appointment “an absolute master stroke” and offered to share his insights about India, particularly information he had gotten from three Christians in Mrs. Gandhi’s cabinet. Moynihan was more than receptive. “When I got back to Washington,” Graham recalled, “Moynihan came over to my hotel and thanked me. He thought I had had him appointed. We got down on our knees and prayed together about his going to India.”
In another notable brush with world leaders, Graham wound up his Eastern tour with a stop in Tehran, where he discussed biblical prophecies with the shah of Iran.
Shortly after Nixon was elected in 1968, Graham began to contemplate returning to Washington for a major crusade. Noting that he was “convinced that the type of crusade we now hold could have a great impact,” he suggested to a friend that he contact several of the men who had spearheaded the recent New York City crusade to see how to organize an appropriate invitation. Nothing happened immediately, but early in 1972, a group of leaders that included Congressman (and former major-league ballplayer) Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell approached Nixon to see if he would sign an invitation to Graham, as he had done for the 1969 New York crusade. On John Dean’s advice that it would not be in keeping “with our general policy or the dignity of the Presidency,” Nixon chose not to sign but informed Graham in a warm letter that he wanted him to know “how pleased I would be to see you lead such a Crusade here.” Graham indicated that the current exploratory effort was “news to me” and that he would be unwilling to hold a crusade in the capital during an election year lest it embarrass the President in some way, but he did say that “after the election, I will get some of my people to investigate the possibilities.”
True to his word, Graham began to put out feelers shortly after the election. The response was clear—and sharply divided. White churches wanted him; blacks did not. The board of the Council of Churches, with heavy black representation, voted to dissociate itself from the proposed crusade. The Reverend Ernest Gibson, later executive director of the council and cochair of the 1986 crusade, explained what he and his colleagues had felt at the time: “Tension between blacks and whites was high in 1972. Black leaders who were part of the civil rights movement were trying to identify friends. One of the criteria was whether whites would stand with us, support us, use their influence and positions of power to help. Mr. Graham was a frequent visitor to the White House, and we hoped he would say something supportive about the rights of black people in this country. But he didn’t. He said nothing at all.” That indictment was not quite accurate, but it was certainly true that Graham avoided movement rhetoric. To complicate the situation, according to Gibson, white church leaders did not so much consult blacks as to whether the evangelist would be welcome as inform them he was coming. “We resented that,” he recalled, obviously still feeling whites had miscalculated. “We decided we would not cooperate with the call for a crusade. We were a pretty consolidated group.” That decision killed a Washington crusade, erecting a barrier that had to be surmounted before the 1986 crusade could occur.
Ironically, at the very time American blacks were finding fault with Billy Graham, blacks and mixed-race “coloreds” in South Africa were hailing him as a principled and effective enemy of apartheid. Consistent with his long-standing policy, Graham spurned all invitations to preach in South Africa until he could be assured that any service in which he participated would be fully and freely integrated. Then, in 1972, a breakthrough came when South African evangelist Michael Cassidy managed to wrest from his wary brethren an invitation that satisfied Graham’s criteria. Cassidy was a spiritual grandchild and avid admirer of Graham’s; won to Christ by a Harringay convert, he heard Graham preach at Cambridge in 1955 and again in New York in 1957. After studying at Fuller Seminary, he returned to his homeland and established a small multiracial team of evangelists who held revivals throughout Africa. At the Berlin Congress, he delivered a brief and quite moderate paper on “The Ethics of Political Nationalism,” in which he took an essentially Graham-like position, acknowledging the complexity of the South African situation, observing that the excesses of black nationalists were no more acceptable than those of their Afrikaner oppressors, and calling for government informed by love and justice for all rather than group self-interest. Unexceptional as it was, the paper generated heated response from South African representatives of the Dutch Reformed Church, who asked that it not be included in the official proceedings. That bit of attempted censorship failed, but Cassidy agreed to allow the proceedings to carry an appendix noting that the South African government observed and protected “complete freedom of evangelism” and stating that the policy of “parallel development” had a long and complicated historical background and “has been generally accepted by all the various racial groups” in the country.
Inspired by the Berlin Congress and follow-up gatherings in other parts of the world, Cassidy organized a South African meeting, to be held in Durban in 1973. To his utter surprise, when he mentioned the meeting to Graham during a visit to the United States early in 1972, Graham volunteered to participate if he would be welcome. Elated at this unexpected offer, Cassidy was dumbfounded when the organizing committee decided by a narrow margin that it would be best if the famous evangelist were not invited, ostensibly out of fear he might dominate the meetings and divert attention from the primary agenda. Beneath the surface, the decision was more complex. Black members of the committee, appreciative of Graham’s long-standing refusal to wink at apartheid, wanted him to come. The more socially liberal white members tended to be suspicious of evangelism and feared that Graham might emphasize soul winning to the detriment of anti-apartheid efforts. A third and smaller contingent of staunch white Evangelicals either favored or had made peace with apartheid and correctly anticipated that a Graham visit would involve public criticism of that policy. Few of the resisters, however, were adamant in their opposition, and with a bit of active lobbying, Cassidy was able to win a reversal and official confirmation of his own informal invitation.
When he volunteered to break his personal boycott of South Africa, Graham expected only to participate in the Congress of Mission and Evangelism in South Africa, which would be the largest fully interracial meeting that nation had ever seen, with whites, blacks, coloreds, and Indians all living and eating in the same hotel. At the urging of Cassidy and others, however, he agreed to hold a public rally at the King’s Park rugby stadium on condition that it would be open to all races and colors, with no separate seating arrangements. Then, both to appease Evangelicals who looked askance at his consorting with some of the liberal churchmen who would be present at the Durban Congress and to offer an additional witness against apartheid, he agreed to hold another public service in Johannesburg, this time under the aegis of Youth for Christ. Lest his hosts in either city later complain that he had misled them, Graham explicitly warned them that while he did not intend to launch an attack on apartheid, he would, if asked, state flatly that he disapproved of it.
Because he was speaking only twice, with one of those occasions an addendum to the congress, Graham did not field a full team for his South African appearances, but one bit of preparatory work stood out for both its short- and long-term effects. Millie Dienert, who for several years had been in charge of the prayer campaign prior to Graham’s crusades, worked with a prominent South African Anglican woman to organize more than five thousand women into small interracial groups that met regularly to pray for the rallies. The groups proved so rewarding to the participants that instead of disbanding when the rallies were over, they became the nucleus of an interracial women’s prayer movement that claimed 350,000 members just five years later.
Saturday, March 17, 1973, was a historic day in Durban, as 45,000 people from every racial and ethnic group in South Africa pressed into King’s Park stadium for the first major public interracial gathering in that nation’s history. Overcome by the sight of white ushers courteously welcoming blacks and of blacks and whites sitting together with no display of animosity or discomfort, a Zulu Christian said, through tears of joy, “Even if Billy Graham doesn’t stand up to preach, this has been enough of a testimony.” Graham did, of course, stand up to preach. Without mentioning apartheid, he repeated the same theme he had sounded during his 1960 African tour. Jesus was neither a white nor a black man, he said. “He came from that part of the world that touches Africa, and Asia, and Europe, and he probably had a brown skin. Very much like some of the Indian people here today. Christianity is not a white man’s religion, and don’t let anybody ever tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people! He belongs to the whole world! His gospel is for everyone, whoever you are.” It was hardly a harangue against apartheid, but after 4,000 people answered the invitation, many for repentance of sins unspecified but surely including prejudice and discrimination, the headline of Durban’s Sunday newspaper proclaimed: APARTHEID DOOMED.
Socially progressive churchmen who appreciated the significance of Graham’s King’s Park rally were disappointed that the evangelist did not mention apartheid in his address to the congress, where the risk would have been small and the possible impact great. To make matters worse, he left the convention hall immediately following his speech and departed for Johannesburg, leaving what Cassidy described as “an acute sense of vacuum and frustration” among delegates who had sought to elicit some more satisfying and helpful statement from him. Leighton Ford eased the situation by a more critical assessment of apartheid in his address to the assembly, and Graham’s representative insisted that the early departure had been planned all along and was in no way an effort to duck controversy, but many delegates who had hoped for more could sympathize with their American colleagues who felt that throughout his ministry Billy Graham repeatedly stepped back from the courageous statement or action that might have made a crucial difference in critical situations.
If Graham’s aim was to avoid controversy, he should not have been in such a hurry to reach Johannesburg. On his first day in the city, he held a press conference at which he described racial separation as “un-Christian and unworkable.” He also moved a step beyond his oft-voiced position that changing hearts, not laws, was the only solution to the racial problem. Admitting that while in many respects America was no model for other countries to follow in addressing their racial problems, he pointed out that the U.S. Congress had enacted “the finest civil rights legislation in the history of the human race,” and asserted that “at least legally, we are on the right footing.” Then came a shot that hit his foot but ricocheted around the world. Aware that the United States Supreme Court had recently handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, a reporter asked Graham if he regarded abortion as the taking of human life. He said that he did but conceded it might be justified in some situations, such as pregnancy caused by rape. In an egregious example of a notorious tendency to allow a key word or image to send him down what his colleagues refer to as “rabbit trails,” he referred to a newspaper article he had read the day before about the gang raping of a twelve-year-old girl. He volunteered that he advocated stiff punishment for rape, adding, “I think when a person is found guilty of rape he should be castrated. That would stop him pretty quick.” Graham recalls that he immediately realized he had gone too far. “It was an offhand, hasty, spontaneous remark that I regretted almost as soon as I said it,” he said. “I meant to get back to it, but I got sidetracked.” Fortunately, South African papers paid little attention to the comment, but when it reached America, it created such a flap that White House staff members quickly prepared a memo for the President, alerting him to be ready to discuss it with Graham should the occasion arise. The remark drew fire because of a perceived barbaric quality and also because it was allegedly racist, since a disproportionate number of convicted rapists in America are black. Without trying to justify the statement, Graham explained that he had a deep concern about sex-oriented crimes and had been profoundly affected by the story of the young victim, who doctors said would probably be a psychological invalid for the rest of her life. He also noted that he had made a point of saying that any such penalty “should be administered fairly, objectively, equally and swiftly to all, without regard to race or wealth,” and observed that it was odd that his critics seemed more disturbed by his commendation of castration than by the crime of rape.
Cries of racism from critics in America must have seemed incongruous to blacks and other nonwhites in Johannesburg, for whom Graham’s rally at the Wanderers Cricket Ground was the first interracial public meeting most had ever attended. The service not only drew a thoroughly integrated crowd of 60,000, smashing the week-old record for integrated meetings by 15,000, but was carried live to the nation by the state-run radio network (television did not come to South Africa until 1975). No foreigner had ever been granted that privilege before, and the broadcast drew the third-largest audience ever registered by the network. Ever the gracious guest, Graham complimented South Africans for giving him “one of the finest receptions of my entire ministry” and showed himself worthy of such treatment by public association with two of the country’s most popular figures, cricket star Trevor Goddard and golfer Gary Player. Both men helped with press relations, and Player gave Graham and his entourage a well-publicized reception at his home. The evangelist also garnered favorable publicity for a generous gift of more than $70,000 to famine victims in West Africa, an effort that exemplified his growing determination to make a tangible response to physical as well as spiritual needs.
Graham’s conviction that this could be a valid and important part of his ministry led to the formation of the World Emergency Fund, a BGEA outreach that channels several hundred thousand dollars to disaster victims annually. But it was the simple, profound fact that by force of reputation and principle he had been able to set aside South Africa’s dominant and infamous social arrangement that made the greatest impression on that nation. Shortly after his visit, a popular magazine proclaimed, “Apartheid gets three knockout blows.” One blow was an international, multiracial athletic festival; the other two were Billy Graham’s rallies in Durban and Johannesburg. The nefarious system did not, of course, stay down for the count. But undeniably, two successive giant demonstrations at which blacks and coloreds and Indians and whites could meet and mingle, could stand and sit and sing and pray side by side without breach of peace or threat to order, could confess that they were all flawed and sinful creatures who alike needed forgiveness from a God who was “no respecter of persons,” could not but leave their mark.
Unhappily for Graham, many American blacks continued to view his efforts on their behalf to be less than adequate. That summer in Atlanta, his crusade drew a noticeably small turnout from the city’s large black population. A major bus strike played some role, but with the notable exception of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., most of the city’s key black leaders urged blacks to stay away. Ralph Abernathy, successor to Martin Luther King, Jr., as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, complained that blacks had not been involved in preparation for the crusade. Hosea Williams, of the conference’s Atlanta chapter, charged that Graham had a poor record on race and poverty issues. The president of a black seminary criticized Graham’s role as “chaplain to the Establishment” and his tendency to take “an oblique stand” on issues that vitally affect blacks, and for supporting Richard Nixon, who cut programs to benefit the poor. Others dragged up his allegedly racist comment about castrating rapists and faulted the “culturally white” style of his services.
Graham faced a similar boycott in Minneapolis a month later. Perhaps because black poverty was a less serious problem in Minnesota than in Georgia, Minneapolis ministers focused most of their hostility on his prescription of castration for rapists. At a long and frank meeting with the critical clergymen, Graham noted that a black friend counseled him not to apologize to blacks for the statement, since that would imply that he associated rape with blacks. He had decided, however, not to follow that advice. The statement, he said, had been “wrong and inflammatory,” and he was sorry he had made it. He also agreed that he had not done enough to aid the poor, adding that he would not simply assert his repentance but would demonstrate it. Then, after a tour of black neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, he made a little-noticed but significant change in theology when he told the men that he had come to believe that the gospel should aim at saving not just individuals but society itself. All but two of the critical clergymen declared themselves convinced of Graham’s sincerity and with drew their opposition to the crusade, but winning the confidence and cooperation of black Christians would continue to be a hill that had to be climbed, sometimes a wall that had to be scaled, in crusade after crusade throughout the remainder of his career.
Two months after the South African meetings, Graham returned to the Far East for a stunningly triumphant campaign in Korea. Perhaps no nation in the world has experienced such an explosive growth of Christianity as South Korea. Rather small and insignificant at the end of World War II, the Christian church claimed 10 percent of the population in 1970 and was experiencing a growth rate four times faster than that of the population as a whole. (By 1990 the proportion had grown to 28 percent, and at least one congregation claimed more than 500,000 members.) Favorable political conditions helped. In contrast to the anti-Christian bias found in some oriental countries, the South Korean government accorded favored treatment to Christianity, regarding it as a useful bulwark against, and counterforce to, communism. “Anything that promotes anticommunism,” one prominent Korean leader explained, “the Korean government favors.” But more important, Korean Christians display a level of commitment that amazes even the most dedicated of American Evangelicals. In hundreds of churches all over the nation, thousands of earnest believers gather every morning at four-thirty or five o’clock for fervent prayer meetings and enthusiastic preaching. Though not especially charmed by the dawn’s early light himself, Abdul-Haqq conceded that such habits inevitably create “a psychological ethos that is spiritual” and attributes much of the success of Korean Christianity to the fact that “fifty years ago, someone started to pray.”
The invitation to Graham came from a blue-ribbon committee representing sixteen hundred churches and led by Dr. Han Kyung Chile, a Presbyterian pastor who had served as the evangelist’s interpreter in 1951 when he addressed Korean audiences following his visit with American troops at Christmastime. Reflecting the influence of American missionaries, some extreme Fundamentalist churches with ties to Carl McIntire and Bob Jones refused to cooperate either with each other or with Graham, whom they had been taught to regard as an archcompromiser. Eventually, however, the overwhelming majority of Christians in Korea supported the crusade, initiating a new era of ecumenical cooperation. “It was really the first time,” Dr. Han observed, “that all the Christian people, not only in Seoul but also in a good many provincial towns, gathered together. In that sense, it was unique. When we knelt together, we found we were all friends.”
To oversee crusade preparation, Graham dispatched Henry Holley, a former Marine staff sergeant who had joined BGEA several years earlier after impressing team members with the administrative skills he showed while working as a volunteer during Graham’s 1960 Washington crusade. A thoroughly cordial but nevertheless spit-and-polish man accustomed to acting decisively, Holley clashed at times with local committeemen, who tended also to have definite notions about how things should be done. Holley was accustomed to thinking in large-scale terms, but the Koreans’ aspirations and plans seemed at times too grand to be realistic and generated considerable anxiety both for him and dubious team members back in Atlanta, where team operations were now headquartered.
Nothing illustrated the Korean vision better than the proposal to stage the crusade on the People’s Plaza, a mile-long former airstrip on Yoido Island in the middle of the Ham River. Holley and some Korean committee members feared that the facility was simply too big, so that even a huge crowd—100,000, for example—would be swallowed up in the vast expanse and appear insignificant in newspaper and television pictures. Still, the only other large facility, Seoul’s 25,000-seat National Stadium, was almost certainly too small, so there was little real choice. Yoido was also a fitting symbolic site; nearly ninety years earlier, the first American missionary to arrive in Seoul had been stoned when he stepped off the boat onto that same island. Ordinarily, the plaza was restricted to military parades and state-sponsored events.
In keeping with its pro-Christian policy, however, the government not only gave approval, but dispatched the Army Corps of Engineers to build a platform large enough to hold a 10,000-voice choir and to install powerful arc lights.
The crusade was originally planned for 1972, but an effort to control Graham’s chronic high blood pressure had forced a postponement until 1973. Even then, at his physicians’ direction, the evangelist notified Holley that he would not be able to follow through on his original plan to appear for the final service of six crusades to be held by his associate evangelists in Korea’s other major population centers. This news stunned local organizers, who believed not being able to deliver Billy Graham as promised would result in a severe loss of face for themselves and the church. They also suggested that Graham was suffering from what they saw as an occidental weakness. “Americans,” one observed, “always follow medical doctor’s way. But the Oriental, even though his health is a little bad, if we promise, then we should be there.” Graham stuck by his decision, but perhaps in the hope that he might change his mind at the last minute, the local committees did not publicize his withdrawal.
A second, less serious crisis involved the choice of interpreter. Dr. Han feared he was too old to perform the rigorous and stressful task of translating the evangelist’s words for a huge audience. The obvious second choice for the role was a thirty-nine-year-old Baptist pastor named Kim Jang Whan, now better known in Evangelical circles as Billy Kim. During the Korean War, Kim had been converted and adopted by an American soldier who took him back to America and financed his education—at Bob Jones University. Equipped with Fundamentalist fire and southern-revivalist technique, as well as with an American wife, Kim quickly rose to prominence in the Korean Church as a pastor, a powerful evangelist, and a director in several international Christian organizations, including the missionary-run Far East Broadcasting Company and Billy Graham’s old fraternity, Youth for Christ. He had also proved himself an effective translator by serving in the role for Carl McIntire, whose virulent anticommunism had gained him a considerable following in Korea.
At Bob Jones University, Kim had never heard either of the Doctors Bob or any guest speaker describe Graham as anything other than an enemy of true Christianity. Carl McIntire, of course, held the same opinion. Back in South Korea, where the minority status of Christians made shunning other believers less feasible than in South Carolina, Kim had moved away from strict separatism. He had attended the Berlin Congress, which had heightened his appreciation for Graham, and he had come to recognize that missionaries trained at BJU sometimes “talked of issues that were not central.” Still, he was not so great a fan of Graham’s that he felt he could not pass up the honor of standing beside him, and even more important, he feared that identification with Graham might cause some of his more conservative supporters in America to cut off contributions to programs in which he was involved. On the other hand, he could not escape the force of what both he and others believed: He was the right man for the job. In particular, he believed no one else could communicate Graham’s offer of the invitation as well as he could. Presbyterians, by far the dominant Protestant body in Korea, did not really believe in the invitation, and no other Korean Baptist had sat through hundreds of pleas for sinners to come to Jesus just as they were. If the maximum number of souls were to be snatched from the sea of sin, Billy Graham would need Billy Kim to help hold the net. Finally, after praying almost continually for three days and calling a key American backer who assured him that he would not withdraw his support, Kim notified Graham that he would be his translator. Ugly letters damning him for his apostasy came in as and whence expected, but Kim put them aside and immersed himself in preparation, listening to tapes, watching films, studying Graham’s tempo, even imitating his voice and gestures.
Bob Jones, Sr., had often spoken of Billy Graham as a man filled with self-importance and pride. An incident on the day Graham arrived in Seoul erased that image from Billy Kim’s mind. As they prepared to leave the hotel for a reception and dinner with the crusade committee, Graham was abashed to find a caravan of four black limousines, each with a uniformed chauffeur, waiting for him and his party, and a motorcycle escort ready to clear their way of traffic. Fearful that such ostentation would create a negative impression, Graham asked if it might be possible to use a smaller car. Kim was impressed that a world figure would respond with such modesty but gave him a quick lesson in protocol. “These cars are the courtesy of the Korean government,” he explained. “If you don’t accept this gesture, you will offend the government. Also, you will make the Korean people feel you are not important enough to rate a limousine. If you ride around in a taxi or a small car, your credibility will be shot with Korean people. Billy, for the sake of the Korean mentality, please get in the car. Just say thank you. If the press picks it up, that’s their problem.” Graham doubtless acted wisely when he decided not to risk offending President Park Chung Hee’s oppressive government. Though neither he nor the crusade could plausibly represent a threat to order or ideology, team members feel certain their hotel rooms and automobiles were bugged, and reflecting apparent conviction that any large gathering needed to be closely monitored, the army assigned an estimated 7,000 soldiers to the crusade services, ostensibly to help direct traffic, which seldom amounted to more than a few hundred cars.
Hours before the first crusade service, it was already obvious that the crusade committee had not overreached by securing Yoido Plaza. To provide some estimate of attendance, as well as to facilitate crowd control and the handling of possible emergencies, the physical-arrangements committee laid down a grid of paper strips glued to the asphalt pavement. Each square held six to twelve people seated on mats or pieces of paper or cloth they brought with them, and each section of 250 squares, roped off to form aisles, held approximately 2,000 people when all units were filled. By the time Billy and Ruth (who had spent time at a boarding school in North Korea as a girl) arrived at the island in the late afternoon, the crowd-control chart indicated that the dreamed-of throng of 300,000 was already in place. By the time the service started, it appeared that half a million people were sitting quietly, waiting to worship God and to listen to Billy Graham. Ruth later wrote in her diary that it was “one of those things impossible to take in,” and Billy could not hide the awe in his voice as he told the happy crowd that they were not only the largest audience he had ever preached to, but “the largest audience ever to hear a preacher in person anywhere in the world.”
Almost always in top form when preaching with an interpreter, Graham seemed even more effective than usual in Seoul as Billy Kim performed what almost anyone discussing these meetings seems convinced was the most impressive display of translation they had ever witnessed. Kim was so good, in fact, that some Korean television viewers assumed he was the featured preacher, with Graham interpreting his message for American military personnel. As usual, some pastors and theologians criticized the sermons for their theological thinness. And also as usual, the multitudes filled themselves happily with the simple loaves and fishes he offered them. When the services ended in the evening, thousands stayed afterward to pray, then bedded down right on the tarmac, so they could attend a 5:00 A.M. prayer meeting before returning home or hurrying off to work or, if they were from out of town, simply because they had no place else to go.
The huge crowds continued to gather, and the secular press and television paid the crusade an unprecedented amount of positive attention. Even the North Korean media noted that a remarkable kind of witchcraft event was occurring in Seoul. Then, for the closing service on Sunday afternoon, an incredible, impossible thing happened. When Billy Graham stood up to speak, he faced a densely packed ribbon of people stretching 200 yards in front of him and half a mile to either side—according to the crowd-control grid, 1,120,000 people, almost certainly the largest public religious gathering in history. Amazingly, what could have been a teeming multitude became instead a quiet congregation, able, with the aid of a superb sound system, to hear every word even at the farthest distance from the platform. The thousands of military policemen had little to do: One man in a million created a momentary stir with a brief and apparently aimless outburst; a few dozen people experienced minor medical problems, not one of which was serious. Few cities of a million inhabitants could match that record on any given afternoon.
During his twelve weeks in London in 1954 and again during the sixteen weeks in New York in 1957, Billy Graham had spoken to aggregate audiences of more than two million people. Now, in five days in Korea, he had addressed, in person, crowds totaling more than three million. Another million and a half attended the six associate crusades in other major cities. Inquirer cards from all the meetings exceeded 100,000. Billy Kim’s church increased almost immediately by 30 percent in a spurt of growth, and its pastor, turned into a national figure by the crusade, gained a permanent spot in the front rank of Asian church leaders. The effect on Korean churchpeople, as astonished as outsiders by what they had seen and wrought, was also immediate and dramatic. Kim speculates that Graham came to Korea in what Scripture calls “the fullness of time,” a time when momentum had reached a takeoff stage. “If he had come in ’63 or ’83,” he reflected, “I doubt we could have pulled off a ’73-style crusade. No question, ’73 was a critical time.” Dr. Han agreed that “with the Billy Graham crusade, the Korean church came of age.” Denominations and missionary agencies that had fought or ignored each other began to perceive each other as brethren who could accomplish more by working side by side. The already high growth rate nearly tripled over the next two years as Presbyterians established seven hundred new churches, while Baptists and charismatic churches totted up proportionately similar gains. In 1977 a group of Korean evangelists secured Yoido Plaza for a crusade of their own with no help from Americans; according to Kim, they matched Billy Graham’s million every night of the crusade. Finally, the Korean Church began to see itself as a sender, not just a receiver, of missionaries, as men trained in churches and denominational seminaries and at such ecumenical institutions as the Asian Center for Theological Studies and Mission (whose library was endowed by a generous gift from BGEA) began themselves to take the gospel to foreign lands. By the mid-1980s, South Korea was producing more foreign missionaries than any nation in the world save America and possibly India.
No one could foresee the details of these extraordinary developments following in the wake of the 1973 crusade, but only the most obtuse could fail to recognize they were witnessing a wondrous thing. Secular observers would inevitably point to timing, to organization, to publicity, to the efforts of an eager minority to secure a place in a rapidly advancing society. But as a helicopter lifted him from Yoido Plaza and skimmed over the mile-long sea of handkerchiefs and white programs waving beneath in adoring gratitude, Billy Graham blinked with wonder and pronounced the only benediction he could fathom: “This is the work of God. There is no other explanation.”