Graham’s visit to the Siberian Pentecostals and his address at the peace conference made modest news in America, and the Moscow trip might easily have slipped into the historical record with little notice had it not been for the evangelist’s encounters with the press. Ed Plowman, a veteran journalist who handled Graham’s press relations on the tour, could not remember a week in which Billy spent more time with the press, and it seemed to him, from the first confrontation at the airport to the last press conference, that the primary goal of some reporters was to goad their quarry into making a headline-grabbing anti-Soviet statement. For his part, Graham did his best to stay on a tightrope between violating his conscience and irritating his hosts. His performance was wobbly at times, but an intrinsically difficult trick was made even harder by reporters who were shaking the wire.
At a press conference just before Graham left Moscow, the Charlotte reporter who had handed him the letters from the Pentecostals on his arrival asked him for his conclusions about religious freedom in the Soviet Union. His answer, as captured on Plowman’s tape recorder, involved hedging and omissions but cast a moderately favorable light. Noting that he had been in Russia only six days, nearly all of that in a small area of Moscow and all heavily scheduled, he said he could not possibly make any valid personal evaluation of the state of religious freedom throughout the vast Soviet Union. “There are differences,” he acknowledged, “between religion as it’s practiced here and, let’s say, in the United States, but that doesn’t mean there is no religious freedom.” He observed that “not one single person has ever suggested what I put in the address I gave to the congress or the sermons I preached here,” and no one had tried to stop him from presenting the gospel to everyone he had called upon during his visit. “So I have experienced total liberty in what I wanted to say.” He also mentioned that most nations place some limits on the practice of religion: In the United States, for example, “a public school teacher cannot lead her pupils in Bible study and prayer.”
Was he saying, the reporter pressed, that the purported lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union is a myth? “Not necessarily,” Graham replied. “I’m just telling you that I don’t know all about it. . . . I haven’t had a chance [to see everything].” Had he stopped there, he might have gotten off lightly, but he continued. “Saturday night, I went to three Orthodox churches. They were jammed to capacity on a Saturday night. You’d never get that in Charlotte, North Carolina [Laughter]. On Sunday morning the same was true of the churches I went to, and it seemed to me that the churches that are open, of which there are thousands, seem to have liberty of worship services.” This indicated that at least “a measure of freedom” existed in the Soviet Union, “perhaps more than many Americans think.” Also, life in Russia was not as grim as the popular impression had it. “The meals I’ve had are among the finest I’ve ever eaten. In the United States, you have to be a millionaire to have caviar, but I’ve had caviar with almost every meal I’ve eaten.” Later, while walking with an AP reporter through a tunnel in the Moscow airport on the way to his plane, he repeated the assertion that “thousands of churches are open,” and followed up with a factually accurate but easily distortable excursus on church polity. These churches, he said in stunning understatement, “may have different relationships [with the state] than, say, they have in Canada or Great Britain. And in Great Britain you have a state church and in other countries you have state churches. Here the church is not a state church. It is a ‘free’ church in the sense that it is not directly headed, as the church in England is headed, by the Queen.”
These statements, which reached the United States before Graham reached London, created a furor in America. Problematic enough on their own, they were more often than not twisted just enough to make them sound incredibly naive. It was frequently reported Graham had said that there was no religious repression in the Soviet Union, that religion was more fervent in Moscow than in Charlotte, and freer from state control than in England. He was also roundly chastised for having preached on Romans, chapter 13, implying that Christians should not resist religious intolerance by the authorities. Did Billy Graham not realize that the “liberty” he “personally experienced” was no more generally available to Soviet citizens than were the caviar he ate or the Chaika limousine that shuttled him around the city while other delegates to the conference rode in buses? Did he not count the Siberian Pentecostals he had visited or the 147 imprisoned religious workers as tangible evidence of religious repression? Had no one pointed out that the churches were filled not only because there were so few of them but also because it was the anniversary of V-E Day, when Soviets celebrate what they regard as a virtually unaided Russian victory over Hitler’s army? And was he truly so credulous as to believe that by complimenting his hosts in public he would be in a stronger position to press the case for religious freedom in private? Christianity Today quoted an unnamed but leading newsman who charged that “mouthing the gospel to Soviet leadership and privately urging them to act contrary to their basic convictions was an utter waste of time. Of course, he could preach his gospel and tell them in private to relax their restrictions against religion. But do you think Graham will convert those Communists or move them to lower their tyrannic grip? Of course not. Graham was a fool to think so. He was duped by them to fit into their propaganda and their Marxist program for nothing in return.” Even the New York Times, which Ed Plowman admitted had been “a towering exception” to what he regarded as rampantly inaccurate and biased reporting, observed that “heaven only knows what Mr. Graham wanted to accomplish with his misguided denials of Soviet repression.” And at Wheaton College, approximately fifty peaceful protesters milled and marched outside the Billy Graham Center, carrying signs that proclaimed BILLY GRAHAM HAS BEEN DUPED BY THE SOVIETS and GRAHAM EATS CAVIAR AS RUSSIAN CHRISTIANS SUFFER IN JAILS.
Graham was astonished at the reaction. Interviewed from London by satellite on This Week with David Brinkley, he complained with good reason that the press had distorted his statements in Moscow. He attended the peace conference, he said, “totally because I wanted to preach the gospel of Christ in atheistic Russia.” Of course, he was aware that his visit and his statements might be used for propaganda purposes, but “I believe my propaganda of the gospel of Christ is far stronger than any other propaganda in the world.” Confronting him in the interview were United Methodist minister Edmund Robb, who charged that whatever his intentions, Graham had been manipulated to lend credibility to a rigged conference, and Soviet dissident Mark Azbel, who stated point-blank that “people in Russia . . . think that you’ve betrayed their hopes. They think that you are not knowledgeable enough to bring the message about the situation with religion in Russia.” When Graham freely admitted he was not an expert on the situation, Azbel shot back, “Then keep out of the discussion.”
Immediately upon his arrival in New York a few days later, Graham held a press conference and gave interviews in which he tried to explain himself once again, with scarcely better results. He expressed deep regret at his failure to cite the plight of the Siberian Pentecostals and the 147 imprisoned religious workers as evidence of formal religious repression. He pointed out that his sermon at the Baptist church had been on John chapter 5, and conceded that the reference to the thirteenth chapter of Romans had been a mistake, lamely contending that when he called on citizens to obey authority, he had meant “the authority of Christ,” and that “it never occurred to me until after I preached the sermon that somebody might take it as applying to that situation there. (He had tried to make that same point on the Brinkley show, visibly befuddling both Sam Donaldson and George Will.) He patiently explained that he had used free church in the technical sense of “lacking state support,” and would “never in a million years” have suggested that churches had greater freedom in the Soviet Union than in Britain. And he repeatedly denied that he had pulled his punches in the hope of gaining permission to hold a full-scale crusade in the Soviet Union but counted it significant that he had met more “top Soviet officials” than he had ever dreamed possible and had told each one how he had been saved and what the Bible says every man must do to be saved. It was in these meetings, he insisted, that he had said the things the press and his detractors wanted him to say in public: “There’s a diplomatic language in public, but behind the scenes, you get tough.” He also asserted that at least part of the reason for the outcry over his visit was “an irrational fear” many Americans felt toward the Soviet Union, a fear that made it impossible for them to believe that he could establish cordial and sincere relationships with Soviet leaders. “They are not all alike any more than we’re all alike,” he said, and such outmoded stereotypes constitute a barrier to peace.
Not all of Graham’s problems, however, stemmed from misquotation or misconstruction by American reporters, and not every use of his words by the Soviets was innocent of deceit. A BGEA press release of May 19, 1982, quoted him as saying, “In the Soviet Union there are an estimated 20,000 places of worship of various religions open and each year hundreds of permits are granted for new churches.” That statement, apparently based on information furnished Graham by his hosts, was inaccurate. A 1987 statement by the chairman of the Soviet State Council for Religious Affairs revealed that the actual number of religious organizations operating in the Soviet Union in 1981 was 15,687 and that the number of registrations had dropped by approximately 7,000 during the previous two decades and continued to drop until 1986. Moreover, long after Graham had tried to explain his statement to Western reporters, Soviet commentators were proclaiming them as gospel truth. On an August 1982 Radio Moscow broadcast, the program’s host responded to an inquiry concerning religious freedom by noting that his own words, or those by any representative of Radio Moscow, might be distrusted. For that reason, he said, “I will instead quote the testimony of unimpeachable witnesses. The latest of these has been the American evangelist, Dr. Billy Graham, whom no one in his right mind would suspect of sympathizing with the Soviet system. At the conclusion of his visit to the Soviet Union earlier this summer, Billy Graham said he had found more religious freedom in the Soviet Union than in Britain, with its established Church of England.”
Graham’s explanations and apologias neither convinced nor silenced his critics. A gang of seventeen members of the radical Jewish Defense League ransacked the New York offices of the World Council of Churches, demanding that the WCC renounce Graham’s visit. Dan Rather asserted that Soviet bloc immigrants and Graham’s Evangelical friends alike believed that the evangelist, “to put it bluntly, was had—deceived and used.” And the author of a letter to Christianity Today claimed that “one of the world’s best informed commentators on Soviet religious life,” following a visit to Russia shortly after Graham’s remarks were publicized, “did not find a single believer who was not numbed and shocked by Graham’s apparent lack of sensitivity to the persecuted.” Clicking off a list of Soviet abuses during a CBS News commentary, former Baptist minister and old friend Bill Moyers said, “Religious freedom is tolerated, as long as you don’t exercise it. Billy Graham did not miss this, so much as he ignored it, partly from Southern courtesy, partly for tactical reasons, partly as the price of celebrity. He’s a popular and pleasant fellow who doesn’t like offending his hosts, whether in Washington or Moscow. But it’s never easy to sup with power and get up from the table spotless. That’s why the prophets of old preferred the wilderness. When they came forth, it was not to speak softly with kings and governors, but to call them to judgment.”
Once again, as he had done when challenged to be bolder on civil rights and Vietnam, Graham took refuge in his role as evangelist. He acknowledged he could understand how some could view him as a self-aggrandizing opportunist—“It looks that way to the outsider and probably looks a little bit that way to me”—but insisted that “wanting to preach in Russia is not my ego; it’s my calling.” He had been shocked and shaken by the reaction to his visit and comments, he said, but now he had “a feeling of serenity” about the whole episode. “I have the greatest sense of peace that I was in the will of the Lord. . . . There might have been one or two little things I would have changed, like that verse of Scripture . . . but I believe the whole thing was of God.”
Much as Graham and his colleagues hoped, his behavior at the Moscow conference convinced Soviet authorities that he was no apparent threat to public order or political stability. Before 1982 was out, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Czechoslovakia, two countries with which Haraszti had been negotiating for several years, allowed Graham to make carefully controlled but satisfying visits. The GDR was the tougher of the two to crack. During the five years Haraszti and Sandor Palotay had negotiated with Imre Miklos over the invitation to Hungary, the governments of East Germany and Romania were the only two Communist regimes to disapprove of the 1977 visit. The reasons behind East German reticence were political—and quite understandable. At least partly because many church and Communist party leaders had come to know and respect one another while imprisoned by Hitler as enemies of the Third Reich, believers in East Germany enjoyed a fair amount of freedom—Christian books and periodicals were available in religious bookstores, religious programs were aired regularly over state-run radio and television networks, the state-supported Lutheran Church operated six university-level seminaries, the government paid the operating expenses of the Church’s numerous social agencies, and more than fifty full-time Lutheran evangelists were allowed to proclaim the gospel as long as they adhered to certain tolerable restrictions. That accommodation, however, had been strained as large numbers of young people began to show interest in religion. A monthly service in Karl Marxstadt, for example, regularly drew between 5,000 and 10,000 young people, some of whom admitted that attending church was a way of making a statement against the government when few other such expressions would be tolerated. To counteract this trend, the state had begun to bar young people from universities and good jobs for no apparent reason other than their status as active Christians. In addition, many East Germans longed for reunification with West Germany. If Billy Graham visited the GDR and rallied young people to the church or further stirred up already-restive dissidents, the results could be unfortunate.
To allay fears that he would push for reunification, Graham acceded to the urgings of East German officials and canceled plans for a preaching tour of West Germany. The Moscow visit finally toppled the last barriers to state approval for a trip to the GDR, but another premature leak of the news, this time by a staff member in BGEA’s Berlin office, almost undid nearly four years of backstage negotations. When Graham finally visited six East German cities in October 1982, he met with enthusiastic response from young people but notable restraint on the part of church and state leaders. He recalled a meeting with Lutheran pastors of the Synod of Saxony as extremely uncomfortable. “When I walked in,” he said, “I did not see a warm eye in the place. I shook hands with several people, and they gave me a very cold look. When I stood up, I told them that I’m a fellow believer. I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart. So do you. We profess the same faith. But you all looked at me with such hostility when I came in. I could see it in your eyes. I didn’t see the warmth a Christian should be having toward a fellow Christian.’” He acknowledged that this sort of challenge was unusual for him. “I had never done that in my whole life, to any group of people. But when I finished, they gave me a nice ovation, and when I went out, I shook hands with many of them and their eyes were just smiling.”
Graham’s appointments with state leaders were similarly cool. At a meeting with party leader Erich Honecker’s first deputy and other top officials, he listened to a series of predictable statements about the peace-seeking ideals of the Soviet bloc nations. When his turn came, he got right to the point. “Your country doesn’t trust my country,” he said, “and my country doesn’t trust your country. And that makes it pretty difficult to live with each other.” He then spoke of the atomic bomb and subsequent nuclear weapons. Men had built them, dropped them, and now stood ready to use them again. The problem, it seemed, was something wrong with the hearts of men. With that as his “sermon starter,” he proceeded to tell them how Jesus Christ could renew the heart of any man who seeks him. Ed Plowman recalled that “they were ill at ease, but fascinated. They couldn’t say much. He hit them right where they lived. He felt good about it.”
From East Germany, Graham went directly to Czechoslovakia for a rather tense four-day visit. Clergymen in all the Soviet bloc countries had to make some accommodation to the state in order to operate with any measure of freedom. In Czechoslovakia state control of the clergy was so strict, and sometimes capricious, that ministers operated in constant anxiety over the possibility that a misstep, or even an internal church squabble that displeased state authorities, would cost them their license and their ministry. As a result, Graham found churchmen more wary of his visit than were government officials. The government, however, had its own agenda and clearly hoped to use Graham’s visit to bolster its image. Admission to Graham’s several appearances was by ticket only, and tickets were given only to those who the government felt certain would not be whipped into some kind of antigovernment uprising. “They tried to keep this silent,” Haraszti recalled. “They wanted the propaganda advantage of [making it appear they had a] free society, while keeping control of a closed society.”
In one blatant effort, they arranged for him to visit a war memorial in Bratislava and suggested he deliver a speech praising the Russian soldiers who had died in the liberation of Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II. He had already learned that in official Soviet history America’s role in defeating Germany had been virtually elided. He agreed to speak at the memorial but gave clear notice he would pay tribute not just to Soviet soldiers but to Russians and Americans alike. “Oh, they did not like it! They took strong exception,” Haraszti recalled. “But we gave them two alternatives: Either Billy Graham does not visit the war memorial or he does visit and speaks according to history, not according to your history. He visited the memorial. I had to be there all the time, to check the history, to be sure that he would not be led astray.”
Graham continued his practice of speaking to government officials about the need for greater religious freedom and the reduction of tension between Church and State. He also gained an unprecedented bit of national exposure for religion when a television interview by one of the country’s best-known news commentators aired uncut in prime time over the state-run network. Once again Graham made a positive impression on government officials. Several years after the visit, Reinhold Kerstan, a Baptist World Alliance executive who had accompanied Graham on this tour, ran into visa problems while traveling through Czechoslovakia on his way to Austria. Unable to make headway through normal channels, he called the head of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, identified himself as a member of Graham’s 1982 party, and asked for help. Within forty-five minutes, Kerstan was on his way, with the assurance that “it was a delight to do something for the friend of my friend, Dr. Billy Graham.”
Graham’s plane had barely soared out of the Moscow airport at the end of his 1982 visit when Alexander Haraszti began preparing the ground for a return visit. His first task was to make amends to Orthodox leaders who resented Graham’s attention to government authorities. They had hoped his visit would strengthen the Church’s hand in dealing with the State; by spending so much time with state officials, and particularly by visiting Arbatov before attending an official church function, Graham seemed to have indicated he held the state in higher regard. “We were ready,” one clergyman told him, “not to ever see Billy Graham in the future.” Haraszti carefully explained that the Graham team had been uncertain about just who was in charge. When Arbatov sent for him, he had assumed it was with the knowledge and approval of church leaders. When he spoke to other high officials, he had done so not to upstage the church but to represent its interests in a way that church leaders might not be free to do. That seemed to satisfy the Orthodox clergy, as did Haraszti’s explanation that Graham’s remark that he would like to conduct a “crusade” in the Soviet Union meant simply that he wished to have a chance to preach the gospel, not that he wanted to conquer either the Orthodox Church or the Soviet people. Over the next two years, a dozen more trips, most involving Haraszti, led at last to the extended preaching tour Graham had been seeking so long.
During twelve days in September 1984, Graham spoke more than fifty times in four cities: Moscow and Leningrad, the Estonian city of Tallinn, just across the bay from Finland, and Novosibirsk, deep in the heart of Siberia. The itinerary was tightly controlled, and all speaking engagements were in churches and other religious settings rather than open to the public, but Graham was able to speak to thousands of Christians face-to-face, something no Westerner had ever been allowed to do. In Leningrad he addressed nearly six hundred students and faculty at the Russian Orthodox Theological Academy, telling them how to communicate the gospel effectively. He had prepared a formal lecture, but seminary officials told him, “Oh, no. We’ll get this printed and hand it out. We want you to tell us how to preach.” So, he recalled, “I just got up and told them how I got started, what methods I use in study, what kind of sermons I prepare, how I deliver them, how I give an invitation to receive Christ, and all that. And then I answered questions. It’s the same thing I try to do at every university I visit.” He told the seminarians that wherever he went, he found four omnipresent problems: emptiness, loneliness, guilt, and fear of death. All four problems have the same solution—-the gospel of Jesus Christ, simply and authoritatively proclaimed. “In some societies,” he admitted, “you cannot go outside and preach as in others,” but in every society Christians could manifest such “fruits of the Spirit” as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness, and self-control. “People will see you,” he assured them, “and after awhile they will say, ‘What makes you different?’” And that question would provide the opportunity to bear witness to saving faith. Graham’s address was videotaped for use in homiletics classes at the seminary, and one professor grandly declared that Graham’s visit “could change the style of preaching in the Orthodox Church.” Graham also spoke at Leningrad’s patriarchal cathedral, where Metropolitan Antonii shattered precedent by interrupting the three-hour liturgy to introduce him to the congregation of 6,000 as “a great preacher and a great peacemaker” and to allow him to deliver a full-length sermon on “The Glory of the Cross.” He followed this triumph with an emotional service at the city’s 3,000-member Baptist church, packed to the rafters with eager worshipers, many of whom held microphones to capture every word on their tape recorders.
In Tallinn, Graham spoke at the Orthodox cathedral and two large Baptist churches. At one of the Baptist churches, the 4,500 people who managed to squeeze into the sanctuary were treated to a highlight in the evangelist’s life, when he and son Franklin, newly ordained to the ministry, participated together in a service for the first time. The setting, though auspicious, could not have seemed entirely foreign; at the end of the service, two choirs, with full orchestral accompaniment, sang a song that had somehow made its way from the American South a full century earlier: “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There.” In the academic city of Novosibirsk, five time zones to the east, Graham visited the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where he surprised a group of scientists by asserting that his anthropology professor at Wheaton, a Russian, had taught him that a Siberian had traveled to the New World long before Columbus made the trip. At the city’s flourishing Baptist church—one of fifty-four in western Siberia—several thousand people who could not get into the church listened to him over loudspeakers set up in a fenced-in area around the church. The evangelist’s request that the congregation pray for the upcoming meeting between President Reagan and Foreign Minister Gromyko surprised the worshipers and caused his advisers to wince; the meeting, revealed to Graham by Reagan, had not yet been announced by either government.
In Moscow, Graham preached at the cathedrals overseen by Patriarch Pimen and Metropolitan Filaret. Remembering the frustrating problems of his first visit, he arranged this time for a special sound system that enabled the thousands of worshipers in both cathedrals to hear him clearly. He also returned to the Baptist church, once for a regular worship service and a second time to address more than 250 Baptist ministers who were gathered to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of Baptist mission work in Russia.
In every city, Graham visited with key government leaders, sharing his Christian faith on every occasion—without exception—and stressing the need for all people to work together to achieve lasting peace. In Moscow he renewed his acquaintance with ministers Kuroyedov and Fitsev, who had cleared the way for his visit, and with academician Arbatov. But the most significant visit of this trip was a meeting of nearly two hours with Boris Ponomarev. Chief of the International Affairs Department for the Central Committee of the Communist party and a member of the Politburo, Ponomarev was the most influential Soviet leader to receive Graham on either of his visits and the man Graham felt could do most to improve the situation for Soviet believers. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the moment when all the careful preparation and the quiet bearing up under criticism of his motives would be rewarded. Ponomarev began the conversation with a forty-five-minute monologue on Soviet foreign policy. “I am sure he was trying to get to Reagan through me,” Graham admitted. “When he finished, I asked him, ‘Now that you have told me what you wanted to say, can I tell you about America? About religion in America? Because you can never understand America until you understand its religious life. Would you like to know what I preach about, and why so many come to hear me preach?’”
Drawing on a statement he had prepared and which he left with Ponomarev at the end of their conversation, Graham explained that a major reason for his tour of the Soviet Union was to “make some contribution to the search for peace in our world.” He admitted, “I am not a politician, nor do I consider myself able to deal with the very complex details which are involved in arms control,” but as a follower and representative of the Prince of Peace, he felt compelled to call upon the leaders of powerful nations to have the vision and courage to renew their efforts to eliminate such weapons. He acknowledged the ideological and social differences between the United States and the USSR but expressed his conviction that “we must learn to coexist, and even be friends.” But before that could happen, he felt Soviet leaders would have to improve the situation with respect to religious believers, “a situation which has a direct and important bearing on relations between our two countries.” Graham readily admitted that religious believers had more freedom in 1984 than in earlier periods, as when Nikita Khrushchev closed thousands of churches and subjected believers to severe oppression during the 1960s. He commended the government for relaxing some of its restrictions on believers (as a case in point, he found nine of his own books in print in Russia) but urged that more be done. Pointing to the more than 100 million believers, he observed that trying to control the religious beliefs and practices of so many people created a complicated and unnecessary problem for the government. It also cast the government in an unfavorable light internationally, particularly in the United States, where over 90 percent of the population professes to believe in God and cannot feel much kinship for a society that attempts to establish atheism as its official philosophical position. “We in America,” he said, “have fought for decades against discrimination among our citizens because of race, religious creed, color, or national origin. It was a long time before these ideas germinated, but presently it is accepted and more and more practiced by the majority of our people. It also is fully backed by our laws.” To people with such a tradition, however imperfectly realized, Soviet restriction of religious freedom constitutes “a deep gulf” between the two nations. “To put it clearly,” he explained, “a major reason the American public does not support closer ties with the Soviet Union is because of what is perceived as religious discrimination and even oppression, especially of [Christians] and Jews. You will never reach a satisfactory understanding with the United States as long as you keep up this anti-Semitic and anti-Christian thing. Many Americans are concerned over the very low number of Jews who have been permitted to migrate from the Soviet Union in the last year or two, and other issues affecting people of Jewish background, such as rabbinical training and language teaching in Hebrew. It is difficult for detente to be successful as long as these problems remain.”
Graham recalled the barrage of criticism he had received in 1982, when he observed that religious freedom in the Soviet Union was greater than many Americans realized. The media would be lying in wait for him when he returned home this time. People would pay attention to how he answered. “I would like to be able to say in good conscience that in the Soviet Union there is a trend toward granting more and more freedom of religion, and toward lifting regulations and administrative measures which discriminate against believers.” He specifically recommended allowing young people to practice religion openly without fear of being barred from universities or desirable occupations, removing all restrictions from the publication of Bibles and other types of religious literature, allowing people to build new church buildings and alter old ones as needed, and permitting churches to operate more seminaries and other institutions for theological training. A man with a keen intuitive understanding of the value of symbols, Graham assured Ponomarev that these and other steps would do much to overcome the negative image Westerners have about Soviet life, “a negative image which again I stress is a major barrier in friendly U.S.-Soviet relations.”
The old statesman told Graham, “We will discuss this among ourselves.” Four years later, as Graham and former Ambassador Dobrynin entered the building housing the offices of the Central Committee, they ran into Ponomarev. “He was so warm and friendly,” the evangelist recalled. “He said, ‘I will never forget the things that you said. We have deeply appreciated it and have discussed it many times.’”
Both the Orthodox Church and the Soviet government should also have appreciated the account of Graham’s trip that aired on prime-time television in the United States and Canada. The hour-long documentary gave a rather detailed and sympathetic description of Orthodox religion and painted a positive picture of life in the Soviet Union. It also paid tribute to the importance of Moscow as a world city, lauded the richness of its cultural life, and reflecting Graham’s appreciation for cleanliness and order, praised the immaculateness of its subway system and made note of the fact that the trains run on time.
The next Communist country to allow Graham to preach was perhaps the most repressive of all: Romania. Alex Haraszti had been working to obtain an invitation since 1978. The Ceaus¸escu government, badly in need of gestures to mask its true character, agreed to permit a visit as early as 1983, but the Orthodox patriarch resisted for two more years, fearing a Graham tour would boost the fortunes of the large Hungarian Catholic minority and the smaller but vigorous Protestant sects, particularly Baptists and Pentecostals. Despite, or more likely, in direct response to, strict government controls on religion, Romania has been one of the world’s revival hot spots during the 1970s and 1980s, and when Graham finally got permission to enter the country in 1985, he was met by the largest crowds he had faced anywhere in Eastern Europe, even though Romanian media gave no advance notice of his visit. In Timisoara, an estimated 150,000 who had gathered on a large square around an Orthodox cathedral grew so frustrated at the government’s refusal to allow Graham to address them over loudspeakers that only a strong show of potential force by the state police averted a riot. At one point, as the Orthodox metropolitan led Graham and his party through a dense crowd, the sheer pressure of thousands of people struggling to get close to him caused the evangelist to list to his left at almost a forty-five-degree angle. “What a telling way to die,” he gasped, “dying by the crowds which did not hear the gospel.” Though he later admitted he had feared for his life, Dr. Haraszti did not count the appearance a failure. “These people,” he said, “will speak about what they did not hear.”
In Sibiu police averted a repeat of the scene in Timisoara by cordoning Graham off so that no crowds were allowed to form anywhere close to him, but throngs estimated as high as 40,000 heard him in Voronet, Arad, and Oradea. In Bucharest, where he preached at several sites, the government reneged on a promise to allow overflow crowds to hear him by loudspeakers, but at one location, a Baptist minister successfully bluffed a Securitate officer into leaving the loudspeakers in place, warning him that the crowd would kill him if he tried to take them down. Overall, according to Haraszti, approximately 150,000 people heard Graham in Romania; another 150,000 to 250,000 saw but did not hear him because of the lack of loudspeakers. Without question, these were the largest religious gatherings in Romanian history.
As in his first visit to the Soviet Union, Graham baffled and upset many Romanian Christians by expressing his “gratitude to the leadership of their country, which gives full and genuine freedom to all religious denominations,” a description they found quite at variance with the true situation, even with respect to his visit.
Interestingly, government officials made little effort to mask their cynicism. Every sermon was introduced with long, self-serving paeans to the Ceaus¸escu regime, and host churches not only were required to provide expensive gifts to Securitate officials traveling with Graham but were charged exorbitant sums to cover travel and accommodations for the evangelist’s party (expenses BGEA had already covered) and for accompanying Romanian officials, apparently including the hundreds of Securitate personnel whose major role was to frustrate efforts of church people to see and hear the evangelist preach. Still, even one Romanian Baptist who reported these disappointments, which he shared, acknowledged that Graham’s visit had been “a blessing” and “the greatest public miracle I have experienced” under Communist rule.
Graham followed the Romanian trip with yet another visit, in 1985, to Hungary, whose government demonstrated its cordiality by extending privileges he had received in no other Communist country. In Pecs a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral not only heard Graham speak from the cathedral steps but were able to see his face on a twelve-by-eight-meter Diamond Vision screen brought in from Great Britain. This was the first outdoor public religious meeting since World War II. In Budapest he chalked up another postwar first when he was permitted to speak in a state-owned sports arena that normally seated 12,500 people. When authorities saw that the crowd was a model of deportment, they allowed over 2,000 more to enter, to sit on steps and stand in walkways. At both services and in four other cities where John Akers and Franklin Graham preached, Bibles and copies of Peace with God and The Holy Spirit were given away or sold at reduced prices at open bookstalls.
After taking note of Graham’s two appearances, Cardinal Lékai, Catholic primate of Hungary, told the evangelist in the presence of U.S. ambassador Nicholas Salgo, “There are three people who are great manipulators of crowds in the present world: President Reagan, a former actor; Pope John Paul II, a former actor; and Billy Graham.” Haraszti noted with a wry smile that the cardinal “did not add any qualifications after Dr. Graham’s name.” These men, the cardinal noted, could influence crowds both large and small. They know how to hold attention, how to get people to do what they want them to do, even how to manipulate them. They know what people want to hear and do not want to hear, what causes negative sentiments and what causes positive sentiments. “To be perfectly honest, Dr. Graham,” he said, “and please don’t be offended, but I call you one of the greatest actors on the human scene. Without all the resources that the President has, or the built-in influential factors that the pope has, you have built yourself up and gone further than either one.” Graham, recalled Haraszti, did not respond. “He was very friendly, like always, but he was not taken with it. He has thought of it many times, of course.”
Graham felt he achieved a measure of success in the iron curtain countries. He understood that the Communist governments had their own agendas, and that preaching the Christian gospel was not one of them. “People ask us all the time,” Walter Smyth observed,” ‘Don’t you realize they are using you?’ Of course, they are using us. But we are using them as well, to get the gospel out to their people. And we have an element on our side with which they are not familiar, and that’s the Holy Spirit, who continues his work after we are gone. We feel it is worth whatever advantage it is to them to gain prestige out of Billy Graham’s visit or to prove that there is greater religious freedom than many Westerners think.” Often echoing this “our-propaganda-is-greater-than-theirs” line, Graham insisted only that he not be asked to criticize the American government or its foreign policy, and that no attempt be made to influence what he would say, either in the pulpit or at any other public gathering. If granted these freedoms, he felt he had little to fear from efforts of his hosts to turn his visits to their advantage. While he may have overestimated his own ability to resist manipulation, he was not so naive as to imagine manipulation would not be tried, and he accepted as a given that his every move was under careful surveillance. “I always go with the assumption that we are being recorded,” he said, “in bedrooms, at tables, even in automobiles. But I have felt that in Korea and the Philippines, and in some Western countries, too.” Rather than view this as oppressive, he chose to use it as an opportunity for evangelism. “In several countries,” he recalled with a chuckle, “Ruth would read the Bible, and then I would read the Bible, and when she prayed, she would pray real loud for the people who were listening to our conversation. And we explained the gospel to each other over and over, so that whoever recorded that would have the gospel message. We have done that everywhere.”
After more than a decade of experience, Graham and his associates are convinced they have accomplished real evangelism in Eastern Europe. In most places it was not feasible for inquirers to respond to the invitation as in a Western crusade, but Billy regularly asked those who wished to make a decision for Christ to stand or raise their hands, and uncounted thousands complied. As in American crusades, many were doubtless simply renewing their Christian commitment. Others, quite likely, were making firm a resolution toward which they had been moving for some time. Still others may have been taken by surprise by their own positive response to what the evangelist had to say. Ed Plowman told of a government official in Moscow who confided to him that “when Billy Graham asked people to raise their hands, it touched my heart. And in my heart, I raised my hand.” Graham and his men also felt their visits have improved the situation for Eastern European believers. In the spring of 1989, John Akers observed, “We found that political leaders in that part of the world had very little sensitivity to the American religious scene or to the sensitivity American Christians felt about the persecution of their fellow Christians in other parts of the world. I think the Jewish people have done a much better job than Christians have of bringing pressure to bear, being noisy about the treatment of Jews in other parts of the world, specifically in Eastern Europe. We have tried to get the Eastern European governments to understand that people in this part of the world feel strongly about how churches are treated.” A primary concern has been to elevate the standing of Evangelical churches and to improve their relations with Orthodox and Catholic bodies. Haraszti noted that Baptists were prominently involved in every Socialist country the evangelist visited. By appearing in Orthodox and Catholic cathedrals, flanked always by a Baptist minister who served as his interpreter, Graham gave “credibility, visibility, and respectability to Baptists, and also to Pentecostals and other small churches.” But concern was not limited to Evangelicals. One quite self-conscious tactic the Graham team used was to win concessions for themselves that could then be passed on to native Christians. Repeatedly, Alex Haraszti urged local religious leaders to press the team’s case for greater freedom by asking the minister of religious affairs, “If Billy Graham, an American, can appear on our television and preach in stadiums with loudspeakers and Diamond Vision screens, why can’t our bishop or patriarch do the same? Why can’t Protestants have a mass meeting? If he can sell religious books, why can’t we?” “I gave them this argument,” Haraszti said, “and they are using it.” Graham undergirded this approach by his consistent exhortation to Christians to be good workers and loyal citizens, and thus to reduce their governments’ perception of them as real or potential enemies. “We are bringing new images of believers and churches,” Haraszti noted. “They are seeing us as an honest Church, a nonpowerful Church, a loyal Church.” He was not implying, however, that the Church simply bend itself to the will of the State. Drawing on an image Jesus had used, he asserted that the churches would also wield a transforming influence. “We penetrate these societies and change them like leaven.”
As part of this leavening process, Graham has been quick to take advantage of any opportunity. After the devastating earthquake in Soviet Armenia in 1988, BGEA donated $50,000 in relief money, channeling $30,000 through the Orthodox Church and $20,000 through the All-Union Evangelical Council. “One reason we did that,” Akers acknowledged, “was because the churches are now being permitted in small ways to do some social work. And quite frankly, a gift like this is a way to help that process continue. We are concerned about the earthquake victims, of course. It’s not just a gimmick, by any means, but it was an opportunity for us to hit the wedge and open that crack a bit more—a way to strengthen the position of the churches. We are also exploring the possibility of assisting in the printing of some religious literature. We have informal permission to print perhaps 200,000 copies of Billy’s books in the Soviet Union. There is virtually no religious literature of any kind in the churches, so that would be a real breakthrough. Here, our book would be just one of 15,000 or 16,000 titles. Over there, it may be one of only fifteen or sixteen, so it’s enormously significant.
“No one can estimate,” Akers continued, “how much [Graham’s visits] have done to bring about the changes we have seen in the last year or two, particularly in the Soviet Union, but it is interesting that virtually every point Mr. Graham made [in his 1984 meeting with Ponomarev] has become a reality, point by point, little by little. That’s not to say that everything is just rosy, but it is to say that a number of points [on which] there has been substantial progress are precisely the points that Mr. Graham did raise. I am not trying to claim we are the catalyst, and we will probably never know exactly what our role has been, but it is true that Billy is alone among Western churchmen at having had a unique kind of access to Eastern European leadership.”
Again without claiming many specific victories, Graham’s associates clearly feel that, criticisms of his early visits notwithstanding, he has served his country well as an unofficial ambassador. “There is a lot of artificial, government-nurtured anti-Americanism in these countries,” Haraszti pointed out. “And here a great and famous American comes, and he behaves humbly and shakes hands and deals with people on all levels. People were able to get acquainted with a nonugly American who was equally at home in government limousines and simple family homes. He was a magnificent goodwill ambassador.”
Graham enjoyed White House support throughout the Reagan years, and clearly expected similar encouragement from old friends George Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker. “I have known Jim Baker for several years,” he explained, “and Susan [his wife] is a really committed Christian. She is all-out for Christ. I can’t evaluate what his position would be about any particular visit I might make, but I know that if he found it within the scope of policies he approved, he would be very warm to me. He believes in what we are doing.” When Gorbachev visited the United States in 1988, Graham was the lone Protestant clergyman invited to the White House for the full round of celebrations. At one gathering, the two men sat directly across from each other. “I have read that he has cold eyes,” the evangelist recalled. “I never saw those cold eyes. His eyes were always warm or they were dancing. He has a tremendous sense of charisma about him.” Graham clearly doubted that the Soviet leader was a committed atheist, pointing out that “when he got off the plane, if you remember, he said, ‘May God help us.’ And then in his talk to that group at the embassy, an hour and a half where I was sitting right in front of him, he used the word spiritual three times.”
In July 1991 Billy Graham and his associates conducted a five-day School of Evangelism in Moscow. More than 4,900 Protestant pastors, evangelists, and other church workers from throughout the Soviet Union attended the school. The event was held in a state-owned sports arena, and participants were housed at Moscow State University at BGEA’s expense. While he was in Moscow, Graham had long conversations with Boris Yeltsin, newly inaugurated president of the Russian Republic, and with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. The visit with Gorbachev was given prominent coverage on a top-rated Soviet TV news show aired nationwide. Declaring that “it is harvest time” in the USSR, Graham revealed that he was considering an invitation to return to Moscow in 1992 to conduct a crusade in Lenin Stadium.